The Chittagong Hill Tracts in Bangladesh differ in many respects to the rest of the country. A mountainous area, it is geographically part of the Hindu Kush-Himalaya region. Demographic and environmental conditions have changed drastically in the last decades, mainly as a result of the dam built on the Karnafuli River (which inundated more than 20 000 hectares of cultivated land) and twenty years of armed conflict that ended in 1997. These changes, together with the scarcity of suitable land, have meant that the traditional slash and burn farming system locally known as jhum has become unsustainable. Combined with other factors, such as forest overexploitation, it is one cause of increased land degradation, resulting in diminishing yields and decreased biodiversity. In 2005, four institutes started the Chittagong Hill Tracts Improved Natural Resources Management project (CHARM). This project aims at building local capacities in natural resource management and planning, through the provision of improved information for decision making. It aims to contribute to the formulation of alternative strategies for sustainable management at both the field and policy levels.
