A champion of climate justice, why can’t Bangladesh govern its own climate finance?

Infographic: TBS

Two hundred and eleven deaths from dengue. 70,104 recorded cases by 26 September 2026. Across the country, 5,066 dengue patients are undergoing treatment in different hospitals. More than 31,521 people have been diagnosed and hospitalised in September alone. 

Warmer temperatures, irregular rainfall and prolonged humidity are extending the conditions in which Aedes mosquitoes breed and transmit the virus. But climate change alone does not explain the whole crisis. Stagnant water in construction sites, clog urban drains, weaken mosquito surveillance, lack of preventive measures and unhealthy living quarters in cities exacerbate the crisis. 

There lies the paradox: while Bangladesh champions climate justice on the global stage, its own climate crisis is being exacerbated by a lack of governance.

The 2026 Environmental Performance Index, produced by researchers at Yale and Columbia universities, ranks Bangladesh 175th among 177 nations. The number captures collapsing air quality, depleted ecosystems and profound public-health risks. 

It paints the familiar picture of institutional weaknesses, policies that exist only on paper, regulators unable or unwilling to enforce them, and climate funds disappearing before it can protect the people already falling ill. 

And this is particularly humiliating for the fact that Bangladesh has spent years becoming a moral voice of the climate-vulnerable world. It contributes less than 0.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions, yet it remains one of the most climate-vulnerable nations on earth. Its people live with cyclones, salinity, river erosion, extreme heat and displacement created disproportionately by richer polluting economies. 

Yet, when it comes to protecting its own environment, only India and Laos perform worse. Bangladesh scored 23.46 out of 100, compared with a South Asian average of 31.81. Estonia topped the index globally with a score of 74.79, more than twice Bangladesh's score.

The ranking evaluates environmental performance through 47 indicators across environmental health, ecosystem vitality and climate change performance. Yet those outcomes expose what happens when policy passes through weak institutions, political patronage and ineffective enforcement.

What the index tells us 

Bangladesh also ranked 175th in 2024, but that edition covered 180 countries. It ranked sixth from the bottom that year, now it ranks third. However, to avoid drawing wrong conclusions, Yale explicitly warns against comparing headline scores across editions because indicators, weights and methods change. 

Bangladesh scored 28.1 in 2024 and 23.46 in 2026, apparently a decline of almost five points. But the 2024 index used 58 indicators in 11 categories; the latest uses 47 in 12. Under the 2026 methodology's comparable backcast, Bangladesh has improved 4.41 points over the decade. 

Yet, that clarification does not make 175th place less damning. In fact, it makes the diagnosis harder to dismiss that governance is lacking. 

Bangladesh ranks 164th in environmental health and 171st in air quality. Carbon-monoxide exposure ranks 174th. The country ranks last in ecosystem vitality. Its forest score is only 5.43; protected-area representation ranks 175th and protected-area connectivity 167th. It receives zero on the Biodiversity Habitat Index and on the ecosystem-level air-pollution measure. 

There are relative successes. Marine-habitat protection ranks sixth, while climate-change mitigation ranks 120th. Bangladesh has therefore not failed everywhere equally. Its collapse is most visible where environmental protection demands sustained regulation of powerful interests such as polluters, land grabbers, forest encroachers, politically connected contractors and agencies accustomed to escaping scrutiny. 

How climate finance is being lost

The clearest view into the systemic corruption comes from the Bangladesh Climate Change Trust Fund. In November 2025, Transparency International Bangladesh (TIB) found that 891 projects worth Tk3,896 crore were approved under the fund between 2010 and 2024. An estimated Tk2,110.6 crore, approximately 54% of the total fund, was lost through corruption and irregularities.

TIB Executive Director Dr Iftekharuzzaman believes the finding demonstrated more than leakage from a collection of projects.

International finance cannot replace domestic governance, and domestic governance cannot replace international climate justice. We need dual accountability, developed countries must honor climate-finance obligations, and Bangladesh must ensure every taka is transparently spent and produces measurable resilience. Climate justice requires finance; credibility requires integrity.

M Zakir Hossain Khan, Managing Director, Change Initiative

"This shows not only the depth and breadth of corruption in climate-finance governance, but also the extent of normalisation of this menace and the enormous lost opportunity to contribute to climate resilience and climate justice," he said.

He added, "Development projects have long been viewed as a source of illegitimate profit-making by a triangular syndicate of politico-bureaucratic power holders with vendors or project implementers. Climate finance has become a new and additional target of corruption." 

Between 2019 and 2023, the BCCT board approved 373 projects. Of them, 216, or 57.9%, involved solar streetlights in municipalities and other areas. Equipment costs were inflated by an estimated 47.1% to 57.1%, with suspected losses of Tk144 crore to Tk175 crore from these projects alone. The fund reproduced a familiar political logic of choosing what can be contracted, inflating what can be purchased and calling it resilience.

Dr Iftekharuzzaman said, "The embarrassingly low ranking represents fault lines in the politico-governance-institutional eco-system sustained over long years of unaccountable abuse of power by people who treat any links with power as a license to profiteering out of public resources." 

"The index reality validates TIB findings that the sector has been plagued by bribery and illegal transactions in project approval; collusion in tendering, contractor selection and subcontracting; embezzlement of project funds during implementation; and even collusive corruption of monitoring and oversight officials," he said.

Taken together, he said, these reveal systemic noncompliance, partisan influence over institutional oversight and a lack of political capacity to enforce accountability "without fear or favour".

The moral champion with weak institutions 

Does domestic corruption invalidate Bangladesh's demand for international climate justice? No. Historical responsibility does not disappear because a vulnerable country governs badly.

M Zakir Hossain Khan, co-founder and managing director of Change Initiative and editor-in-chief of Nature Insights, made the distinction sharply. 

"It weakens our credibility, but it does not erase our right to climate finance."

Bangladesh needs roughly $10–12.5 billion annually, he said, while international flows have been around $86 million, or 0.7% of the requirement.

"We need dual accountability: developed countries must honour climate-finance obligations, and Bangladesh must ensure every taka is transparently spent and produces measurable resilience," Khan said. "Climate justice requires finance; credibility requires integrity."

Dr Ahmad Kamruzzaman Majumder, professor of environmental science at Stamford University Bangladesh, agreed that the justice claim survives, but warned that donors judge fiduciary records when deciding who can manage larger sums.

"Finding that over half the national climate fund was lost to insider corruption gives sceptics exactly the ammunition they need," he said. "The justice argument still stands, but the credibility needed to be handed a much bigger sum has taken a real hit."

He believes that there is a real external shortfall: Bangladesh receives only a small fraction of what it actually needs from international sources, and that is a structural gap that domestic reform alone cannot fix.

"But separately, the money already inside the country is being poorly handled: allocations to the national fund have been shrinking even as needs grow; projects are running years behind schedule; funds have sat exposed in an unstable bank; and the ministry meant to lead this work receives only a token share of the budget, while larger sums are loosely bundled elsewhere under the climate label," he noted.

What Bangladesh needs to fix  

The financing shortage is real. Coastal protection, resilient infrastructure, renewable power and grid modernisation cannot be delivered through better intentions alone. But years of delay in regulation and enforcement cannot always be invoiced to the developed world. Hence, the new government needs to ramp up its efforts. 

"International finance cannot replace domestic governance, and domestic governance cannot replace international climate justice," Zakir Khan said, "We need dual accountability, developed countries must honor climate-finance obligations, and Bangladesh must ensure every taka is transparently spent and produces measurable resilience. Climate justice requires finance; credibility requires integrity." 

He added, "Dependence on external climate finance is partly a domestic political decision that is being represented as an external challenge. But if a reform mainly requires a government decision, regulation, enforcement or coordination, then years of delay cannot be blamed on lack of money."

"Water governance, climate MRV, 30% reduction in plastic target and the circular economy program, carbon-market institutions and circular-economy reforms are largely questions of political will and institutional capacity. Bangladesh also has an extremely low tax-to-GDP ratio, so part of our dependence on external finance reflects weak domestic resource mobilisation." 

Dr Iftekharuzzaman said, "In the new political context it is incumbent upon the elected government that has come to power with the commitment to address the challenges of climate vulnerability by ensuring transparency and integrity to demonstrate the courage and capacity to transform the political, governance and institutional ecosystem so that the recurrence of similar practices of "winner takes all" do not continue to make the prospect of climate justice hostage to abuse of power and collusive corruption." 

He added, "In parallel, before it is too late the government should also invest the highest level of climate diplomatic skills to capitalise on the prevailing international goodwill to ensure that Bangladesh is not any longer deprived of its due share of the delivery of the pledged flow of compensation from the polluting countries." 

Professor Majumder described current fiscal and energy policy as mixed, leaning cautious rather than confident. Renewable ambitions coexist with fossil-fuel expansion, while power-sector debt discourages investment. The Climate Change Trust appears better funded, he said, but not fundamentally reformed.

Earlier SOAS–TIB research offers another practical mechanism. Climate projects should provide everyday dual-use benefits such as embankments functioning as roads and cyclone shelters as schools or community centres. When communities benefit daily, locally influential residents acquire a reason to monitor construction quality instead of discovering defects during the next disaster.

Dr Iftekharuzzaman argued that Bangladesh must invest in high-level climate diplomacy to secure its fair share of finance and technical support from polluting countries. External justice and internal integrity must advance together.