Bangladesh needs climate-ready cities, not just another masterplan

For residents of Bangladesh's major cities, the monsoon has always been part of life. But increasingly, a spell of heavy rain does not simply mean carrying an umbrella or waiting out a shower. It can mean wading through knee-deep water to reach work, sitting for hours in gridlocked traffic, closing businesses, navigating flooded homes and, in hilly urban and peri-urban areas, fearing that the saturated earth itself may give way.

This July offered a sobering glimpse of that reality. On 12 July, Dhaka received 76 millimetres of rainfall in only six hours, inundating neighbourhoods from Panthapath and Dhanmondi to Mohammadpur, Kalshi and Bashundhara. A few days earlier, Chattogram recorded exceptionally heavy rainfall; on 9 July, one weather station recorded 336 millimetres within 24 hours. 

Waterlogging became so severe that train services on the Chattogram–Cox's Bazar route had to be suspended after sections of track went under water. Heavy rainfall also triggered deadly landslides across the southeast: by 9 July, authorities reported 30 deaths from floods and landslides across five districts of Chattogram division, 19 of them in Cox's Bazar. 

It is tempting to describe these as monsoon disasters. But that explanation is increasingly inadequate. The rain is the hazard. What turns it into an urban crisis is how we have built and continue to govern-our cities.

Climate change is no longer an impending threat for Bangladesh. It is already altering the conditions under which our cities must function, while rapid urbanisation is simultaneously increasing the number of people, buildings and economic activities exposed to those risks. According to the World Bank, Bangladesh's urban population is projected to reach around 60% of the national population by 2050. Cities designed around yesterday's climate and yesterday's population cannot safely accommodate either tomorrow's.

When rain exposes the city beneath it

Dhaka's waterlogging is often discussed as a drainage problem. Certainly, drainage matters. But drains are only one part of an urban hydrological system.

A functioning city needs somewhere for rainwater to go. Wetlands store it. Open soil absorbs it. Canals carry it. Retention areas hold excess water. Drains move it. When wetlands are filled, canals encroached upon, open land covered with concrete and natural drainage routes interrupted by construction, progressively larger volumes of water are forced through an increasingly constrained system.

This is precisely what has happened in Dhaka. Recent assessments point to unplanned urbanisation, disappearing wetlands and canals, inadequate drainage capacity and poor maintenance as underlying causes of recurring waterlogging. The two city corporations spent more than Tk 262 crore between 2021 and 2024 constructing over 334 kilometres of drains and box culverts, yet severe waterlogging persists. Earlier this year, they identified 141 waterlogging hotspots across the capital. 

The lesson is uncomfortable but important: we cannot engineer our way out of bad urban planning one drain at a time.

Chattogram demonstrates the same problem in a different landscape. During July's flooding, railway officials pointed to blocked drainage channels and structures obstructing natural water flow, while city officials reported that encroachment had reduced the capacity of canals beside the affected railway. Then an extraordinary volume of rainfall arrived, overwhelming what remained. 

Cox's Bazar adds another dimension. Here, intense rainfall interacts with hills, slope cutting, dense settlements, environmental degradation and rapidly changing land use. Waterlogging, flash flooding and landslides are therefore not separate climate problems. They are different manifestations of the same failure to align urban development with ecological systems and changing risk.

And climate-resilient urban planning cannot stop at floodwater. Stagnant water increases public-health risks, including mosquito-borne disease. Extreme heat interacts with dense construction and disappearing vegetation. Climate-induced migration places additional pressure on housing, transport, water and sanitation. A city may therefore face heat, flooding, disease and infrastructure stress simultaneously.

That is why resilience cannot be another sectoral project. 

No shortage of plans

Bangladesh has been internationally recognised for its climate planning, and many of the ideas we need are already on paper. The National Adaptation Plan 2023–2050 explicitly includes the development of climate action plans for major urban and peri-urban areas. The Bangladesh Delta Plan 2100 identifies urban areas as one of its geographic hotspots and uses adaptive pathways intended to allow interventions to change as climate and socioeconomic conditions evolve. 

Dhaka has the Detailed Area Plan 2022–2035. Meanwhile, major investments continue: a World Bank-supported urban development programme is targeting climate-resilient infrastructure and planning across secondary-city clusters, and another programme approved this year aims to restore rivers and canals and strengthen water and waste management across greater Dhaka. 

The problem is not that Bangladesh has never thought about urban resilience. The problem is fragmentation between planning and implementation, and between the institutions responsible for different pieces of the same city.

The problem is not that Bangladesh has never thought about urban resilience. The problem is fragmentation between planning and implementation, and between the institutions responsible for different pieces of the same city.

RAJUK regulates development in greater Dhaka. City corporations manage critical municipal functions. LGED undertakes urban infrastructure investments. WASA remains central to water and sanitation. The ministries responsible for local government, housing and public works, environment and climate change, and disaster management all hold pieces of the resilience puzzle. Transport authorities, utilities and other agencies hold still more. Development partners then finance programmes that frequently have their own timelines, geographical boundaries and reporting frameworks.

Each institution may be performing its mandate. Yet climate change does not respect administrative mandates. A wetland filled through one planning decision becomes a drainage problem for another agency. A road built without considering water flow creates waterlogging somewhere else. Housing expansion into vulnerable areas becomes tomorrow's disaster-management challenge. A canal restoration project achieves little if encroachment resumes once the project ends.

Recent assessments of Dhaka's waterlogging have reached much the same conclusion: fragmented management and independently implemented drainage projects continue to undermine a citywide solution. 

We need to stop treating coordination as something that happens after projects have already been designed.

From reactive to anticipatory governance 

Urban climate leadership requires a different question. Instead of asking, "How do we remove the water after the next extreme rainfall?", city authorities should be asking, "What will this city need to withstand rainfall, heat and population pressures 10, 25 or 50 years from now?"

That does not necessarily require yet another 50-year master plan. Bangladesh already has long-term plans. What is needed is an urban climate resilience framework that makes those ambitions operational across institutions and across time.

Such a framework could require every major city to undertake regularly updated climate-risk assessments, not only of where hazards occur today, but where they are likely to occur under different future climate and urban-growth scenarios. Infrastructure investments and land-use approvals should then be screened against those risks.

Drainage capacity cannot continue to be calculated only against historical rainfall patterns. Roads, housing, transport corridors, hospitals, schools and utilities must be designed around the climate conditions they will encounter during their useful lives.

Equally important is protecting the infrastructure that we did not have to build: wetlands, canals, floodplains, trees, parks and permeable land. These should not be treated as vacant spaces waiting for development or as beautification projects. They are urban infrastructure. Green and blue spaces can absorb water, reduce heat, support biodiversity and improve public health at the same time. Research on Dhaka has similarly examined the role of parks, rooftop greenery and blue spaces in moderating urban warming. 

This also means thinking at the correct scale. Water does not stop at a city-corporation boundary. Neither does heat, air pollution, migration or transport demand. Climate resilience therefore requires planning across neighbourhood, city and metropolitan scales, with clearly assigned responsibility for problems that cross institutional jurisdictions.

And every long-term ambition needs shorter accountability cycles. A 2050 target means little if nobody can determine what should have happened by 2030. City resilience strategies should therefore contain measurable five-year milestones, publicly reported indicators and identifiable institutional responsibility. Budgets should demonstrate how climate risk has influenced investment decisions, not simply label conventional infrastructure as "climate resilient."

The next downpour should not surprise us 

Bangladesh has considerable experience responding to disasters. That experience has saved lives and rightly earned international recognition. But the next stage of climate leadership must be about preventing foreseeable hazards from repeatedly becoming urban emergencies.

This requires a shift from reactive governance to anticipatory governance.Anticipation does not mean predicting exactly how much rain will fall over Dhaka on a particular July morning in 2045. It means accepting that heavier rainfall, greater heat, continuing urbanisation and more climate-related movement of people are sufficiently foreseeable that today's planning decisions must account for them.

There is also an issue of justice here. Waterlogging does not inconvenience everyone equally. A person travelling in an air-conditioned vehicle experiences a flooded road differently from a street vendor whose day's income disappears, a garment worker walking through contaminated water, a child unable to reach school, or a family living beside an unstable hillside. Poor urban planning converts climate hazards into unequal losses.

The question facing Bangladesh is therefore no longer whether its cities will experience climate change. They already are. The question is whether we will continue spending every monsoon pumping water, clearing drains, repairing roads, relocating people and restoring damaged infrastructure, or begin changing the systems that repeatedly produce the same vulnerabilities.

76 millimetres of rain in six hours should strain a city. It should not paralyse one. We cannot control when the next cloudburst arrives. But we can decide what kind of city it falls on. 

Sketch: TBS

Lamia Mohsin is a development professional and researcher working on climate change, governance and public policy. Besides being an adjunct lecturer at the Department of Environment and Development Studies of UIU, she has also worked extensively with international organisations including UNDP Bangladesh.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and views of The Business Standard.