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Bangladesh can expand renewable energy without sacrificing agricultural land.
A recent study by Change Initiative highlights the country’s substantial untapped solar potential. Rooftop solar in Dhaka alone could generate nearly 11,000 MW. Nationwide, a Zero-Arable-Land approach combining rooftop and floating solar with suitable spaces across industries, small enterprises and BSCIC estates could deliver approximately 22,000 MW of clean electricity.
The opportunity is already above us and around us. What Bangladesh needs now is effective policy, accessible finance and timely implementation.
-@Zhkhaneco @dw_bengali
#RooftopSolar #RenewableEnergy #Bangladesh #ChangeInitiative
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Full video link: facebook.com/reel/1610898519…
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Solar Power Must Be Bangladesh’s Highest Energy Priority
Bangladesh must place the rapid expansion of solar power at the centre of its strategy to meet growing electricity demand while safeguarding economic stability, said M Zakir Hossain Khan Co-Founder and Chief Executive of Change Initiative, in remarks to Jatiya Arthaniti.
While a new Floating Storage and Regasification Unit (FSRU) at Matarbari may be necessary to strengthen near-term energy security, it must not create additional financial liabilities for the government or the public. Before proceeding, authorities should transparently examine the cost overruns, alleged corruption and unsustainable debt associated with past publicly financed projects.
Reliable energy is essential to keep the economy moving. However, excessively costly electricity cannot be sustained indefinitely through large public subsidies particularly when the government has limited fiscal space to absorb new financial pressure.
Bangladesh therefore needs a solar-first energy strategy, rigorous scrutiny of major infrastructure investments and stronger protection of public finances. Energy security must be achieved without locking the country into costly fuel imports and long-term debt burdens.
#SolarPower #RenewableEnergy #EnergySecurity #EnergyTransition #FiscalResponsibility #Bangladesh #ChangeInitiative
@Zhkhaneco
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Full article link: jatiyoarthoniti.com/2026/09/…
Bangladesh targets 20% renewable electricity 10,000 MW by 2030: 5,500 MW rooftop and 4,500 MW ground-mounted solar. OPEX finance, approvals, grid readiness & storage are essential to protect farmland and cut fossil-fuel dependence.
@Zhkhaneco
#Bangladesh #RenewableEnergy #EnergySovereignty
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Bangladesh’s climate finance system suffers from fragmented institutions, poor coordination, insufficient international financing, weak monitoring, and serious integrity risks. The environment ministry, Economic Relations Division, finance and planning authorities, sector ministries, Bangladesh Climate Change Trust and development partners are all involved, alongside carbon market actors. There has been no sufficiently strong body to coordinate their work.
The NCCF must address three challenges: mobilising finance, improving coordination and ensuring integrity. Its mandate covers national strategy and policy, policy reform, international financing, monitoring, carbon markets and the resolution of disputes between ministries.
Bangladesh needs one place where climate finance ambition, authority, accountability and delivery finally meet.
@Zhkhaneco
#ClimateFinanceJustice #FinanceTheFrontlines #NCCFBangladesh #ClimateAccountability #CommunityLedAdaptation #LossAndDamageFinance #ChangeInitiative
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Full article link: theclimatewatch.com/climate-…
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“The first and most fundamental policy shift must be to stop treating khas land and natural water bodies as marketable privileges of the state. These are shared natural assets, held by the state in trust for people and Nature. Legal ownership cannot give the state a moral licence to transfer user rights simply to the highest bidder. The state must act as a trustee-protecting the legitimate rights of genuine fishers, landless people and local communities while safeguarding the ecological integrity of the water body itself. A just governance system must recognise that the rights and survival of people are inseparable from the rights and survival of Nature.”
-@Zhkhaneco
#NaturalRightsLedGovernance #RightsOfNature #NatureIsNotForSale #KhasLand #WaterJustice #CommunityRights #EcologicalIntegrity #MZakirHossainKhan #ChangeInitiative
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Full article link: en.sarabangla.net/opinion/po…
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“A forest project cannot be considered a success just because money was properly accounted for. The true audit is in the field: where are the trees, how many survived, who received the money, and is nature better off?”
-M Zakir Hossain Khan
#SustainableForests #ForestGovernance #ClimateFinance #EnvironmentalAccountability #BangladeshForests #SUFALProject #WorldBank #AntiCorruption #ForestAccountability #NatureConservation #ClimateGovernance #Transparency #Biodiversity #CoxsBazar #FieldVerification #MRV #ChangeInitiative
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Change Initiative welcomes the Government of Bangladesh's formation of the High-level National Committee on Climate Finance (NCCF), chaired by the Prime Minister. It addresses a long-standing need for a high-level platform to ensure effective integration, meaningful accountability and transformative outcomes of the climate-finance landscape.
The Committee's mandate is broad, defining national priorities for climate finance and carbon credits, advising on Article 6 of the Paris Agreement, guiding engagement with climate funds, and monitoring programmes. This gives it real potential to strengthen oversight, restore confidence and improve access to international climate and biodiversity finance.
"The formation of the NCCF is a welcome and long-awaited step. Its transformative potential will depend on whether it can make sure the coordination into time-bound action, profound accountability, integrated blended finance and verifiable outcomes. Bangladesh should institutionalise youth-led, community-led real-time MRV through a startup model and bring climate, nature, biodiversity and environment investment under one integrated national architecture, as climate cannot be treated in isolation from the nature system."
— M Zakir Hossain Khan
To translate mandate into results, Change Initiative recommends five priorities:
1. A time-bound action plan with clear responsibilities, measurable milestones and transparent reporting, success judged by outcomes, not meetings.
2. Thematic working groups on adaptation, mitigation, loss and damage, carbon markets, biodiversity and accountability, co-opting credible experts, youth and vulnerable communities.
3. A real-time MRV system built on youth-led community stewardship and geotagged, independently verifiable evidence.
4. An integrated national investment strategy uniting climate, nature, biodiversity and environmental protection.
5. Institutional lessons drawn from the global practices e.g. Philippine Climate Change Commission, adapted to Bangladesh's context.
With a time-bound strategy, credible expertise and community-based monitoring, the NCCF can drive real transformation.
#ClimateFinance #ClimateGovernance #NCCF #Bangladesh #ClimateAccountability #NatureFinance #Article6 #CommunityMRV
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Bangladesh cannot achieve energy sovereignty simply by installing more solar panels. It must reform how renewable electricity is produced, traded, stored and financed.
Operationalizing the Prosumer Act can transform passive consumers into active energy producers allowing surplus solar electricity to be sold directly to neighbouring consumer units, easing grid constraints and creating a decentralised clean-energy market.
The economic case is compelling:
-42–48% higher revenue for Prosumers (Producer+Consumer, a same entity perform both)
-53% lower emergency backup costs due to installation of shared battery storage
- 7–12 additional years of contractual certainty through bilateral power purchase agreements
The prosumer model is more than a new electricity-pricing mechanism. It is a structural reform that can democratise the energy market, reduce dependence on costly diesel backup, mobilise private capital and make distributed renewable-energy projects commercially bankable.
Bangladesh must move from isolated solar installations to an integrated prosumer ecosystem where citizens and businesses can produce, store, share and trade clean energy. This is how renewable-energy ambition can be translated into investment, resilience and genuine energy sovereignty.
#EnergySovereignty #ProsumerModel #RenewableEnergy #SolarEnergy #DistributedEnergy #EnergyTransition #Bangladesh
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📢 CALL FOR PARTICIPANTS
2nd South Asia Stakeholders’ Consultation on Growing Disaster Loss and Damage Risks : Regional Expectations from the Climate Investment Funds (CIF)
Across South Asia, the ground is shifting beneath us. Retreating glaciers, erratic monsoons, freshwater scarcity, contaminated water systems and changing river flows are intensifying risks across national borders. Climate-induced loss and damage continues to grow affecting most severely the communities that contributed least to the crisis.
Change Initiative, a Civil Society Observer to the Climate Investment Funds, and the Centre for Peace and Development Initiatives (CPDI), Pakistan, an independent CIF Observer, invite civil society organizations, community representatives, youth networks, researchers, policy practitioners and climate-relevant businesses to join this regional consultation.
The consultation will provide a platform for South Asia to speak collectively about escalating disaster, water and environmental risks and define what a just, nature-accountable and adequately financed response should look like.
Participants are invited to share:
🔹 Experiences of transboundary disasters and shared river-basin vulnerabilities
🔹 Evidence of freshwater scarcity, contamination, and glacial and hydrological change
🔹 Ground-level loss and damage, unmet needs, financing gaps and accountability concerns
🔹 Challenges related to CIF access, engagement, implementation and stakeholder participation
🔹 Lessons and good practices from CIF-supported climate and renewable-energy initiatives
🔹 Priority reforms for stronger governance, transparency, inclusion and country ownership
🔹 Community stories, field evidence and updates on climate-finance activities across the region
Your insights will inform observer messages presented to the **CIF Trust Fund Committee**, helping ensure that South Asia’s realities, priorities and knowledge systems influence global climate-finance decisions.
📍 Focus countries:Afghanistan | Bangladesh | Bhutan | India | Maldives | Nepal | Pakistan | Sri Lanka
🗓️ Date: 14 September 2026
⏰ Time: 13:00–14:30 UTC
💻 Format: Webinar
Participation may be attributed or anonymized. Selected insights will be synthesized and presented through CIF governance forums.
🔗 Register through the Google Form:
forms.gle/goDdMnkdGsTUHt2q8
For queries or assistance:
📧 communication@changei.earth
Let South Asia speak with one voice for climate justice, water sovereignty and an accountable response to escalating loss and damage.
#SouthAsia #LossAndDamage #ClimateFinance #WaterSovereignty #ClimateInvestmentFunds
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On 26 August 2026, a glacier and rock-slope failure in Langtang National Park sent a debris avalanche and flash flood nearly 100 kilometres down the Lhende/Bhote Koshi-Trishuli system, damaging or destroying settlements, hydropower assets and a principal Nepal-China overland trade corridor. The flood exposed a critical gap in the LDC graduation framework: development progress can coexist with severe pressure on the natural, physical and institutional capital needed to sustain it.
This Position Paper estimates preliminary damage and economic losses at US$1.38-2.70 billion, while distinguishing this from Nepal’s US$4-5 billion reconstruction requirement. It argues that conventional assessments still understate losses in natural wealth, ecosystem services, human productivity and long-term adaptation needs.
To address this gap, Change Initiative proposes a Net Capital Sustainability Test (NCST) as a complementary assessment of whether a graduating country’s underlying capital base is accumulating, stable or depleting. The paper also recommends using Nepal’s transition period as a resilience-investment window, strengthening high-mountain risk governance, disaster-risk financing and the treatment of cryospheric hazards within the LDC graduation architecture.
Figures are as of 30 August 2026.
hashtag#NepalFloods hashtag#Langtang hashtag#HimalayanResilience hashtag#CryosphereRisk hashtag#LDCGraduation hashtag#NetCapitalSustainability hashtag#NCST hashtag#ClimateResilience hashtag#DisasterRiskFinance hashtag#ClimateFinanceJustice hashtag#NaturePositiveDevelopment hashtag#ResilientGraduation hashtag#ChangeInitiative
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Full Position Paper Download Link: changei.earth/post/the-augus…
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The catastrophic glacier collapse on the Nepal -Tibet border on 26 August 2026 is not an isolated natural calamity but a diagnostic warning of systemic governance failure. With seven of nine planetary boundaries now breached, conventional post-disaster frameworks are obsolete. For downstream Bangladesh - where more than 90 per cent of its river-basin water originates beyond its political borders - these compound hazards expose a critical deficit in transboundary risk governance and a lack of accountability for cascading cross-border risks.
What happened, and why does it matter? Satellite and seismic analysis showed a glacier collapsing from around 5,200 metres, generating a cascading flow of ice, rock and debris - not the simple glacial lake outburst flood first assumed. The Planetary Health Check 2025 and ICIMOD projections of 30 - 80 per cent Himalayan glacier loss by 2100 confirm this is one manifestation of a wider ecological breakdown.
#NepalTibetGlacierCollapse #HimalayanClimateCrisis #TransboundaryRiskGovernance #TransboundaryWaterJustice #ClimateJustice #PlanetaryBoundaries #RightsOfNature #NaturalRightsLedGovernance #NRLG #BangladeshClimateRisk #EcologicalAccountability #ChangeInitiative
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Full paper link: changei.earth/post/nepal-s-g…
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