The climate financing narrative of Bangladesh is driven by infrastructure development rather than investing in social infrastructures and knowledge such as in research and adaptive social protection mechanism for building climate resilience. The National Plan of Action (NAP), the guiding document for channeling investments for climate resilience, has been prepared without considering the local vulnerabilities and context variations. However, there are several commendable plans of action in strengthening nature-based solutions, but the financing for those have not been secured, and there is no legal or institutional liability toward fulfilling the commitments in the NAP. Hence climate financing and the plan’s action towards building climate resilience remains incoherent and ad-hoc sets of actions that are not setting a pathway towards long-term resilience to climate change.
CaST envisions a decentralized financing model where the flow of financing reciprocates the loss and damages that the community has undergone. There are three levels of investments that are required, one is to build the social capital and local resilience capacity to tackle the disasters, the second is to invest in rural and small-scale locally designed infrastructures that are resilient to climate shocks and the third, a decision-making model where the flow of financing is disbursed according to the local needs and are assessed through independent accountability mechanism. The financing mix should also include community contributions and contributions from Zakat and other charities so that there is a robust and predictable flow of financing in building resilience against climate-induced disasters.
The world is bracing for climate change impacts but very few countries are due to face as much brunt as Bangladesh which already has to deal with multiple economic stresses coupled with frequent and intensified tropical storms. These impacts threaten the agricultural and fishery sector of the country where the most marginalized social groups are dependent.
All is not grim though as Bangladesh can take low cost approaches to climate change mitigation and adaptation which would be aligned to local needs. A century old method which is the use of floating beds for agriculture has been revived by the farmers in some districts for cultivation in waterlogged areas. This testimony is evident about the use of local knowledge to prepare the country for future warming. Furthermore, local level decision making and community innovation will cascade upwards towards national policy approach.
Our approach is that our knowledge on the linkage between climate change and its vulnerability will be used to build sustainable livelihoods for the local people. This can come in the form of adaptation measures such as climate smart agriculture since the agricultural sector is most vulnerable to climate change. In terms of mitigation, our interventions will work with people to make them aware about the importance of reducing greenhouse gasses such as in cattle farming and cement production which is in widespread use to build infrastructure like houses which can instead be constructed through local means.
Bangladesh has a history of abundant and diverse food production systems. However, with the advent of modern agricultural systems, the natural abundance and biodiversity are replaced by monoculture and environmentally unsustainable food production systems. The current agriculture system contributes to 86% of freshwater withdrawal, seepage of nitrogen, and other effluents in the water bodies. Moreover, rivers and wetlands have been rapidly filled up and polluted by industrialization and urbanization, significantly affecting forestry, fish stocks, and soil health. The intensification of livestock and poultry has generated low-cost protein sources but at the cost of rapid deforestation, methane emissions and loss of genetic variety of local livestock.
The transition to a sustainable food system will require shifts in production systems to change in consumption patterns. Bangladesh’s agriculture system has transformed sustainable rain-fed agriculture to ground water-based irrigation. The dependency on commercial seeds has resulted in the extinction of local varieties of crops, fruits and vegetables. The local varieties of crops, fruits and vegetables were more resilient to diseases. and required insignificant inputs due to its adaptation to the local ecosystem. However, these local varieties of crops need to be grown in a polyculture and consumption patterns need to change to adapt tastes and preference of the consumer to consume one type of crops to a variety of crops, vegetables and fruits that are naturally available in different seasons. The natural forces should shape the course of the market system rather than the other way round. Today, the market prices dictate the choice of crops by farmers, which leads to massive deforestation and monoculture practices, as the market prices depend on the business actors that want to suck every penny out of their investments.
Our Approach
We have a holistic understanding of our food systems and take an ecosystem-based approach to assessing the food system problems. Our proposed solutions are driven by community-based innovation that seeks to protect the natural biodiversity yet ensure the nutrition and food security of the targeted population. We also seek to incubate community innovation in food systems that can be commercially scaled in the local vicinity to generate inclusive income for the farmers.
Bangladesh has achieved zero open defecation and several other milestones in reducing the incidence of water-borne diseases. Despite our initial gains in reducing open defecation, we have not been successful in closing the full sanitation loop. Piped water supply reaches about one-third of the population in urban areas, and the absence of a sewerage system in most of the major cities of Bangladesh has led to open drainage of faecal sludge into the environment. Cities that do have sewerage systems, such as Dhaka only manages to serve 18% of its population. And the population that are living in the coastal areas have their sanitation facilities destroyed through climate change impacts such as tropical storms and tidal surges. Additionally, saline intrusion in the drinking water supplies of the coastal communities puts approximately 20 million of them at risk of hypertension.
Replicating the approaches developed countries have taken will not help in solving the sanitation problems of Bangladesh. Therefore, sanitation should not be limited to sewerage and wastewater treatment only but have a range of solutions appropriate to the different realities of different places. The focus of an inclusive sanitation approach makes this a reality by ensuring that everyone has access to safely managed sanitation in the form of onsite or sewered measures and centralized or decentralized approaches. Another aspect of inclusive sanitation is to prioritize service provision over the building of infrastructure.
Our Approach
We believe in the experimental approach in designing locally appropriate WASH and sanitation solutions. For example, Bangladesh started to adopt Faecal Sludge management (FSM) in municipalities which had shown positive results, but for rural areas, local innovation needs to be designed to turn the faecal sludge to economic resources. CaST has a proprietary business incubation model for harnessing local innovation in FSM. These models can help city corporations to identify what method would be best in their area to scale up the use of FSM among residents.