Mapping Multi-Dimensional Climate Priority in Bangladesh’s Garment Supply Network

Abstract

The ready-made garment (RMG) production system in Bangladesh faces climate-related pressures at factories and nearby transport infrastructure. This study presents a framework for defining individual production areas where climate-related pressures overlap and prioritisation remains consistent across different weightings. There were 2,579 unique coordinate groups employed in the analysis of 4,784 factory records that were not marked closed. The four final components were direct river-flood exposure, positive extreme-rainfall intensification, ambient heat burden, and climate-logistics vulnerability. Hazard-specific measures were derived from JRC/CEMS GloFAS, CHIRPS, ERA5-Land, and OpenStreetMap-based road data, and harmonised to the common 0–100 relative-priority scale. Five alternative weighting scenarios were tested for sensitivity against the primary score, which was an equal-weight arithmetic mean. Four-component assessment was available for 2,576 coordinate groups, and three groups consisting of 13 factories remained non-assessable. In the primary specification, 2,299 factories (48.06%) belonged to priority groups (High or Very High). Spearman correlation with alternative weighting rankings was between 0.952 and 0.997, and overlap with the top one-tenth (decile) was between 70.93% and 94.96%. The intersection of the six top-decile sets yielded 128 weighting-robust groups containing 179 factories, with 125 of these groups containing at least two components scoring 75 or above. Among these robust groups, 91.41% of groups and 92.74% of represented factories were located in Dhaka, Gazipur, or Narayanganj. The framework is not a prediction of losses or disruptions, but rather a transparent screening tool for adaptation prioritisation.