Bangladesh's climate plans have a labour blind spot

Bangladesh's climate story is, by now, familiar on the international stage: a low-lying delta nation facing existential exposure to sea-level rise, cyclones, and flooding, fighting for adaptation finance and a fair hearing at COP. 

What gets almost no attention is a quieter, domestic consequence for workers: climate change is steadily pushing more of Bangladesh's workforce into jobs where organising a union was never a realistic option - and interviews with labour officials, union leaders, and policy experts suggest it's going largely unexamined.  

The mechanism is simple enough to state in one sentence: climate displacement is feeding Bangladesh's informal economy, and the informal economy is exactly where labour organising is weakest. A large share of the population lives in high-climate-exposed areas.

 As rising seas, flooding, and cyclones displace people from agriculture and coastal livelihoods, those workers don't disappear - they move to cities and take up the low-wage, informal urban work that dominates Dhaka and Chattogram's economy. And informal work is, almost definitionally, work without an employer a union can bargain against, without a workplace stable enough to organise, without the legal protections that formal-sector unions - however weak - at least nominally offer.

This isn't a marginal effect. Bangladesh's informal sector already accounts for roughly 84% of the workforce – around 58 million people - against a unionised workforce that, by the most generous measure, is around 10% of employees. Every climate-displaced worker who lands in that informal majority is one more person structurally outside the collective bargaining framework, permanently. 

Some projections suggest climate variability could cost Bangladesh roughly a third of its agricultural GDP by 2050, and over 13 million people could become internal climate migrants in the same period. Each of those displaced workers becomes a push factor into precisely the labour market segment where nobody has organising rights. 

The second half of the problem is that this is happening with labour almost absent from the room where it's being decided. Bangladesh's national climate commitments appear to have been prepared without meaningful input from labour organisations, and coordination between the country's labour and environmental policy machinery remains weak. 

The result is that workers in the most climate-vulnerable industries, i.e., agriculture, coastal fisheries, and construction, have no institutional channel to raise their employment concerns as "just transition" policy gets written. Unions have been technically engaged in climate issues since 1997. Engagement has not been translated into a seat at the table.

There are tentative signs of change. In early 2026, the National Alliance for Just Transition Bangladesh - a coalition of unions, civil society groups, and development partners - was operationalised to increase labour's influence over the country's climate plans. 

But on current evidence, the more plausible near-term outcome is that the workforce most exposed to climate disruption will remain the least represented in decisions about how that disruption is managed. Pushing for a seat at the table is not the same as being given one. That is not a hypothetical risk. It is the mechanism already running.  

This matters beyond Bangladesh's borders, too. As the country moves towards graduation from Least Developed Country status, its export industries face tighter labour-standard scrutiny from the EU and other major trading partners - scrutiny that increasingly treats "just transition" as a labour rights question, not only an emissions question. 

A climate transition negotiated without organised labour at the table is not just a domestic governance gap; it's a credibility gap Bangladesh will have to answer for internationally, at exactly the moment its trade preferences depend on demonstrating the opposite.

The fix is not exotic. It starts with giving labour actual seats - not after-the-fact consultation - in every national climate and just-transition planning process, backed by a standing coordination mechanism between labour and environmental policymaking that Bangladesh has yet to build. 

It means treating union federations, however imperfect, as legitimate stakeholders in adaptation and transition planning for climate-exposed sectors, not an afterthought invited once the framework is already drafted.

Bangladesh has worked hard to be seen internationally as a serious, credible voice on climate change through ratifying ILO conventions, courting adaptation finance, pushing its case at COP. 

It has not yet answered a harder question at home: as climate change pushes millions of workers into informal jobs with no path to organise, who decides how they are absorbed in the economy - and on what terms? Right now, the answer is: not the workers, and not their unions. Until that changes, Bangladesh's climate transition will remain just in name only.

Zubayer Hossen is a Programme Director at SANEM. Email: zubayerhossen14@gmail.com 

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