Climate change impacts on the recordkeeping practices of community organizations in Bangladesh: toward an adaptive recordkeeping framework

This study examines how community organizations in Bangladesh, a country among the most climate-vulnerable globally, are adapting their recordkeeping practices in response to escalating impacts of climate change. While community organizations play a critical role in supporting grassroots climate action, limited research has explored how climate change affects their internal operations, particularly recordkeeping. Most existing literature focuses on formal institutions in the Global North, overlooking the unique challenges faced by low-resource organizations in the Global South. Using qualitative thematic analysis, based on data from focus groups with 16 community organizations and interviews with 23 stakeholders across four disaster-prone regions in Bangladesh, the study investigates climate-related disruptions and emerging adaptive recordkeeping practices. Findings reveal that events like floods and cyclones lead to record losses, infrastructure damage, and administrative discontinuity. In response, organizations are adopting informal but practical strategies such as decentralized storage, partial digitization, and community-based support networks. The study proposes an Adaptive Recordkeeping Framework tailored to the needs of grassroots community organizations in low-resource, high-risk environments. While rooted in the Bangladeshi context, the findings have broader relevance for other climate-exposed regions around the globe where community organizations face similar recordkeeping challenges amidst increasing climate risks.