The money Bangladesh has for adapting to climate change falls far short of what it needs. Under the National Adaptation Plan (NAP 2023-2050), carrying out 113 measures will take about 23,000 crore dollars ($230 billion), roughly Tk 28.52 lakh crore, by 2050. That is about $8.5 billion a year, of which $6 billion is expected from international funds and development partners.
The Finance Division's climate budget report for 2026-27 puts climate-related allocations across 25 ministries and divisions at Tk 51,746 crore, 5.52 percent of the Tk 9.38 lakh crore national budget. The Bangladesh Climate Change Trust Fund, which the government runs with its own money, receives only Tk 100 crore. The national budget has grown more than eightfold since the fund was set up a decade and a half ago, but its allocation has not kept pace.
The plan names eight priority sectors, among them water, agriculture, fisheries, transport, urban areas, health and disaster management, and includes local early warning, climate-resilient farming, safe water and livelihoods. The case of Mita Rani Das, 52, a smallholder in Ashashuni, Satkhira, shows the gap: last year extreme heat killed about 30 percent of the fish in her small enclosure (gher), and heavy rain in July then flooded it and destroyed most of the rest. No weather warning reached her.
In Amlapara, a slum in Sirajganj town, a local NGO installed a solar-powered water pump with climate fund money two years ago, easing residents' water shortage. Local people and municipal officials say none of the town's roughly 30 other slums has such a system.
Cutting emissions also needs large sums. Under Bangladesh's NDC 3.0, meeting the 2035 target requires $116.18 billion, of which $25.95 billion is to be raised at home and $90.23 billion depends on international finance. The NAP and NDC figures cannot simply be added, since one covers adaptation and the other mitigation.
Environment and climate specialist Haseeb Md Irfanullah told Prothom Alo there was no clear indication of where money for the big targets would come from, and called the Tk 100 crore for the trust fund disappointing. A 2025 review by the Centre for Policy Dialogue (CPD) found that implementation of the climate-related development budget had stayed at about 85 percent for several years. CPD executive director Fahmida Khatun said the question was whether money reaches the most vulnerable areas and whether farmers and fishers are at the centre of projects.
For farmers and fishers the stakes are direct: timely weather warnings, salt- and heat-tolerant cropping and protection for fish enclosures all depend on this money. The report was written by Partha Shankar Saha of Prothom Alo.
Photo: The Satkhira range of the Sundarbans, A junaid alam khan / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Source: Prothom Alo
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