Many of the investments made in Bangladesh, especially in the manufacturing sector, have contributed to impressive growth in GDP over the last decade, but have presented the threat of locking in the country into an unsustainable development path. In Bangladesh, even though some policy alignments are evident towards achieving sustainable development goals, there are opportunities for creating an enabling environment for financial institutions, both formal and nonformal, to play a catalytic role for promoting green growth in the present and foreseeable future.
The present study reports on the different sources of green finance available in Bangladesh through grant, debt, and equity mechanisms; provides an insight into the green finance landscape in the country in general; presents the challenges financial institutions face in internalising green finance, and outlines the potential for greening growth of Bangladesh through identifying opportunities for accessing green finance from internal and external sources.
The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, adopted by the United Nations member states in 2015, requires “each government (to set) its own national targets guided by the global level of ambition” set out by the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This formulation leaves question marks over exactly what is the global level of ambition, and how individual countries should set national targets that are consistent with it. One way that the Planetary Boundaries framework can facilitate this process is by defining safe limits for human disturbance of a number of earth system processes – which are easily translated into global levels of ambition. These global ambitions and allocations can then be downscaled to the national level. Furthermore, the downscaled Planetary Boundaries, in combination with consumption-based environmental accounting, can help to operationalize SDG 12 on Sustainable Consumption and Production, in particular, by serving as benchmarks for a country’s total – internal and external – environmental performance.
Wastewater is a valuable resource that we need to harness. That is the key message in a new publication from UN Environment, the Global Programme of Action and the Global Wastewater Initiative.
The issue of what to do with wastewater, that is water that has been adversely affected by human activities such as farming, industrial production and domestic use, has long challenged development experts, companies, environmentalists, policymakers and urban planners alike. And although improvements have been made, it is still true that globally, about 80 per cent of wastewater is being discharged untreated. This has negative consequences for nature and humans alike. Untreated wastewater degrades the marine environment, and can contribute to the creation of so-called dead zones. Areas of the ocean that are so depleted of oxygen that they are void of marine life. At the same time, poor wastewater management and improper sanitation represent a significant factor in the spread of infectious disease.
