Climate hits homes, but not books

Hearth and home is swamped with saline seawater and the last resort for emergent protection is the camp. The shelter is in a shambles, too, which local officials blame on lack of dedicated funds.

Frontiersmen have tales to tell--but who is to hear and show a solution that lies with the state budgeting under highly centralized system of governance driven by the concept of trickle-down effect remains a moot question unanswered to this day.

In one instance of firsthand experience, by the time this writer reached the cyclone shelter in Southkhali, the concrete floor was still wet. A faint smell of saline water lingered in the air - a leftover trace of the last tidal surge. Villagers, mostly women and children, had returned to their homes. Some men remained, drying blankets and mosquito nets under the sun's feeble warmth.

Outside, the Union Parishad (UP) building stood in quiet contrast - plain, half-empty, unguarded. Inside found is Tuhin Mitra, Secretary of Southkhali UP in Shyamnagar upazila of Satkhira district, sipping tea beside a rusted file cabinet. The purpose of the spot visit is to talk about climate-change budgeting. Before the first question asked, Tuhin was already ahead of the questioner.

"Tell me, where do we write climate in the budget format? Show me one column that says 'climate change'," he says, pulling out a printed UP-budget form.

The document's yellowish edges flutter beneath the ceiling fan, pages worn thin by bureaucracy.

This wasn't a rhetorical question. Union Parishads - the remotest grassroots tier of local government in Bangladesh - don't have a designated budget heading for climate-change adaptation or mitigation. And yet, Bangladesh ranks among the most climate-vulnerable countries in the world. Southkhali, like much of coastal Bangladesh, knows this truth intimately, in salt-tainted soil and washed-away roads.

According to the 2020 edition of Germanwatch's Climate Risk Index, Bangladesh ranked seventh among countries most affected by extreme weather events between 1999 and 2018. Its vulnerability is a mix of geographical and socioeconomic factors - flat deltaic terrain, high population density, pervasive poverty, and a dependence on climate-sensitive sectors like agriculture. The threats are multiple and chronic: sea-level rise, salinity intrusion, droughts, floods, cyclones, food insecurity.

In 2018, the government even renamed the Ministry of Environment and Forests to the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC) - a symbolic nod to the centrality of climate action. Dozens of action plans and projects have since been launched. But at the lowest tier of governance, where responses should be most agile and tailored, the very format of the budget remains untouched by climate considerations.

Tuhin Mitra's concern was echoed in every union this correspondent visited. In Rayenda Union of Bagerhat's Sarankhola upazila, Nurul Alam, the UP secretary, gestured to the courtyard outside his office, where an old banyan tree cast shifting shadows across a group of villagers seeking help with land records.

"Climate change is not a separate head," says Nurul. "We have things like 'disaster response' or 'repair and maintenance', but those are catch-all terms. If we raise a road or build a plinth for a cyclone shelter, we can't tag it as a climate-resilient project. So, in our books, it's just another brick-and-sand project."

He picks up a hand-written register. "Here's a road that was washed away thrice. Each time we built it over again. But there's no column to explain why. No one knows it's due to repeated tidal surges, not poor construction."

Further travel east leads to Morrelganj and then to Khontakata Union. KM Mizanur Rahman, Secretary of No 2 Khontakata, has just wrapped up the annual development-planning process.

"Our annual budget is around Tk 2.5 million," he explains. "Of that, maybe, around 10 per cent goes to repairing damaged roads or installing tube- wells. But climate impacts don't come in isolation. When saline water contaminates drinking sources or roads get submerged, we deal with the consequences - not the cause."

He pauses, brow furrowed. "We don't get any climate-specific allocation from higher levels. But even if we did, there's nowhere to put it in the current budget format. It's like trying to cook a fish curry without listing fish as an ingredient."

His analogy struck home. Despite Bangladesh's deep engagement with climate finance - from the national Climate Change Trust Fund to international sources like the Green Climate Fund - little of this finance trickles down to the UP level. Climate budgeting, if it happens, is an upper-tier affair. For union councils, it's all improvisation.

In Gourambha Union, Md Nannu Sheikh sat in a bare-bones office with plastic chairs and a calendar three months behind. Outside, goats grazed in dry fields. The pond nearby looked swollen - a strange sight for a rainless week.

"Last year, we got Tk 300,000 under the Local Governance Support Project (LGSP)," says Nannu. "We used it to raise the embankment near Dakshinpara. But we couldn't report that it was a climate-related need. So, on paper, it looks like beautification or infrastructure work."

He leans forward. "The people here don't ask what fund the money came from. They ask if their crops will survive, if their tube-well will work. But we - UP secretaries - we are bound by formats."

The format he refers to is the standardized UP budget template issued by the government. It includes dozens of expenditure heads - education, health, agriculture, WASH - but not climate change. Even the word "resilience" is absent.

And this absence is more than semantic. "Without a budget head, there's no planning. And without planning, there's no data," says Tuhin Mitra in a follow-up phone call. "That's why national-level reports always say 'data not available at UP level'. How would it be available if we don't even have the space to record it?"

Across the 20 unions this writer roamed around in the climate-vulnerable belt, the frustration was the same. Secretaries often had to repurpose funds from other sectors or depend on donor-supported projects with limited lifespans and rigid guidelines.

One might ask why the smallest tier of government matters in climate finance. Shouldn't ministries handle the big-picture budgeting?

That logic, however, misses the mark. UPs are not abstract administrative units - they are the state's boots on the ground. When a cyclone hits, it's the UP that opens the shelter, distributes relief, mobilizes volunteers, manages local repair, and buries the dead if it comes to that. Yet, in climate-finance frameworks - both national and international - they are almost invisible.

"Every year, when the embankment collapses near Amtola Bazar, we take photos, submit letters to the Upazila Nirbahi Officer, and sometimes get Tk 50,000," laments Nurul Alam. "That's barely enough for sandbags. And yet, in national accounts, those sandbags don't exist as climate spending."

In Khontakata, Mizanur Rahman showed a training manual issued by the Local Government Division. "There was one session on climate issues," he says, "but no practical direction on how to integrate it into our work. We need a revised budget format, one that includes a climate- adaptation and-mitigation head. Without that, we'll keep reacting to disasters instead of preparing for them."

It's not a radical demand. Adding a budget line for climate action would help local governments plan, track spending, and justify resource needs. It would also generate data for national reporting and international accountability. Above all, it would recognize that for frontline communities, climate change is not a distant future or abstract policy - it is daily life.

Syeda Rizwana Hasan, Adviser with ministerial rank in the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, couldn't be reached through several calls and messages.

However, Joint Secretary (budget) of the ministry Fatima Tuz Zohora said while they don't create UP-specific budgets, their allocations often reach Union Parishads through various projects.

Md. Nura Alam, Deputy Secretary (Union Parishad-2) of the Ministry of Local Government, admits there is no specific climate budget for UPs. "But we allocate larger amounts to unions that are at higher risk of climate change," he says. Asked if this year's upcoming budget, due in June, would include a climate heading, he replied: "Maybe, not this year. Maybe, not next."

I actually don't know," he said with a faint smile.

He mentions a project called LoGIC - the Local Government Initiative on Climate Change - a multi-donor initiative involving the government, UNDP, UNCDF, EU, Sweden, and Denmark. LoGIC supports 500,000 vulnerable households in 94 unions across nine districts.

But for many UPs, LoGIC is a name they've heard but a support they've hardly received.

Muhammad Faruq-Uz-Zaman, Joint Secretary (Budget-1) of the Ministry of Finance, the ministry that formulates national budget, candidly admits he isn't aware of this specific issue. However, he agrees a climate- budget heading was necessary.

From the worst climate- change- affected Khulna, Imran Khan, Deputy Chief Executive of Helios Consultancy, offers a sobering assessment. "UP members, chairmen and secretaries have very little understanding of climate change and the losses and damages it causes." He notes that while many UPs have disaster-management sections, they lack allocations or direction for climate adaptation.

"The rising soil and water salinity has made traditional agriculture unsustainable in many coastal areas," he says, adding that despite having budget allocations for agriculture, UPs can't support farmers to switch to salt-tolerant crops.

He adds that stresses like waterlogging, sea-level rise, and soil degradation are triggering migration - often uninformed and unsupported.

"Families left behind - often female-headed after male migration - are becoming increasingly vulnerable. They could be included in social- safety-net programmes. But there's no planning for that either."

Khandaker Mainuddin, Senior Research Fellow at the Bangladesh Centre for Advanced Studies (BCAS), emphasizes that climate budgeting must be coordinated across ministries and departments.

"What I have seen for years the climate action in Bangladesh is piecemeal basis and disorganized, that is the reason there is no climate heading in UP budget format," he says about the missing budget focus.

Towrin Zaman Raya, Research Associate at the International Centre for Climate Change and Development (ICCCAD), agrees. "It's a gap - and it affects mitigation and adaptation efforts. It also hampers data collection and tracing real impact at the grassroots."

She says most climate initiatives are still project-based and top-down. "There's little coordination and even less awareness at the local level. And yet, that's where climate change strikes hardest."

As the roving correspondent left the coast behind, he carried the salty air with him - and the frustration of UP secretaries trying to build embankments with no budget, respond to crises with no category, and prepare for a future no format allows.

"You journalists always ask us, 'What's your biggest challenge'?" Tuhin Mitra had said. "Well, here's one: we know the climate is changing, we just don't know how to write it in our budget."