When Cyclone Remal struck coastal Bangladesh in May 2024, not all households were equally affected. Those who had spent years farming agroecologically - building diverse crops, sharing knowledge through farmer field schools and strengthening their community networks - experienced roughly half the damage of their neighbours. They also recovered faster, relied on savings rather than debt, and were more likely to emerge from the crisis better prepared than before.

The BRACE study (Building Resilience through Agroecology for Coastal Emergencies) conducted in cooperation with BOKU University compared 297 programme participants against 80 matched non-participants across three coastal villages in the Latachapli Union of Kalapara Sub-District, all struck by Cyclone Remal in May 2024. Both groups lived on similarly small plots of land, in the same villages, facing the same storm. Programme participants tended to come from more educationally disadvantaged backgrounds - making the resilience differences that follow all the more striking.

For donors and practitioners working on climate resilience, the central finding is stark: the single strongest predictor of whether a household survived and recovered well was not where they lived, or how much land they owned, but whether they had participated in a sustained agroecological programme. Location explained almost nothing. Programme participation explained almost everything.