COP30 ended with adaptation finance targets delayed again, pushing the goal to “at least triple” funding from 2030 to 2035, far short of what developing nations urgently need. Yet recent cyclones and monsoon rains across South and Southeast Asia, which have killed more than 1,600 people and displaced millions, underline a stark reality: countries must prepare for climate impacts now.
Bangladesh, often described as ground zero for climate vulnerability, shows what this preparedness can look like even as international support falls short. Despite limited resources and shrinking global finance, it has built one of the world’s most effective early warning and disaster management systems, driven largely by its own institutions and communities.
This achievement is driven by its own choices, not by donors or external programmes. It reflects decades of investment in public capacity, local governance, and community-led action. The late climate scientist Saleemul Huq, a veteran climate negotiator and the Global South’s most persistent voice for climate justice and loss and damage, captured this ethos clearly: “We haven’t been sitting idle. We’re not waiting for the rest of the world to come to our rescue.”
This philosophy is embodied most clearly in Bangladesh’s cyclone-preparedness model. Today, the country relies on more than 76,000 trained volunteers, half of them women, who go door to door with the latest cyclone forecasts to guide families into shelters. This deeply local system has saved thousands of lives. From more than 300,000 deaths during Cyclone Bhola in 1970, fatalities have fallen to just 35 during Cyclone Sitrang in 2022. This progress is rooted in the Cyclone Preparedness Programme, one of the world’s most successful examples of community-driven disaster governance.
Bangladesh’s broader policy architecture reinforces this progress. The country was among the first LDCs to develop a National Adaptation Programme of Action in 2005. Alongside the Cyclone Preparedness Programme, Bangladesh has strengthened coastal embankments, known as polders, while climate-smart and traditional practices such as saline-tolerant agriculture and floating agriculture enhance food security and livelihoods in vulnerable coastal areas.
Finance matters, but governance determines outcomes
Bangladesh’s most remarkable achievement is its willingness to finance resilience with its own resources. In 2020–21, the government dedicated 7.5% of its entire national budget to adaptation and disaster risk reduction.
However, ambition cannot close the gap alone. The National Adaptation Plan (NAP) of Bangladesh estimates a total cost of US$ 230 billion for adaptation over 27 years (2023–2050), which works out to roughly US$ 8.5 billion per year. Current climate finance, combining both domestic and international sources, is estimated at less than US$ 3 billion per year, leaving a substantial gap between available resources and the country’s adaptation needs.
This shortfall is not simply a fiscal challenge. It reflects a structural failure of the global climate regime. Those least responsible for the crisis still struggle most to access the finance they have been promised. Bangladesh shows this injustice starkly. The country faces sea-level rise that could erase 17% of its territory and 30% of its agricultural land by 2050, pushing millions into cities already overwhelmed by climate-induced migration.
Even as Bangladesh has built effective early warning and cyclone-preparedness systems, these systems can only save lives, not shield people from the crushing socio-economic impacts of recurring disasters. Cyclone Amphan in 2020, for example, triggered mass evacuations that prevented large-scale fatalities, yet still left an estimated half a million people homeless. Cyclone Remal in May 2024 similarly killed 20 people, displaced 800,000, and destroyed 35,000 homes. This is precisely where global climate finance must step in: to help frontline communities rebuild homes, restore livelihoods, and recover from escalating loss and damage they did little to cause.
Yet Bangladesh demonstrates that, even in the face of international financial shortfalls, strong local institutions and community-led systems can save lives and strengthen resilience. Finance matters, but governance determines outcomes.
Bangladesh’s climate governance offers a blueprint for countries facing extreme weather, including Pakistan, which anticipates 22–26% above-normal monsoon rainfall in 2026 after a 2025 season that displaced 3.1 million people. Unlike Bangladesh, where polders, cyclone shelters, and floating agriculture are community-managed, Pakistan’s interventions rarely reach the most vulnerable. Bangladesh’s community-driven early warning system, with women volunteers playing a central role, turns alerts into lifesaving action. Pakistan’s fragmented resilience efforts, from early-warning gaps to weak local institutions, can be strengthened by adopting Bangladesh’s integrated model: devolved disaster governance, climate-smart agriculture, and upgraded river and coastal infrastructure. Finance matters, but governance determines outcomes.
Bangladesh has acted with foresight and vision, investing in resilience and safeguarding its people. And it has achieved results by saving lives. But intensifying climate threats mean that, despite its successes, Bangladesh still needs far greater global support. No early warning system, no matter how effective, can substitute for the adaptation finance required to protect homes, livelihoods, and land. In the legacy of the champion of climate justice and loss and damage, Saleemul Huq, Bangladesh should not be left to bear the cost of a crisis it did not create.