DFID’s climate change programme in Bangladesh
84% of the 162 million people living in Bangladesh survive on less than $2 a day. They are highly vulnerable to the impacts of the climate, particularly cyclones and floods.
Summary
This review on the Department of International Development’s (DFID’s) climate change programme in Bangladesh assesses whether a key part of UK assistance for climate change adaptation is effectively and efficiently responding to the needs of the people of Bangladesh. It focuses on the £75 million Department for International Development (DFID) Bangladesh Climate Change Programme, approved in September 2008. As a result of our findings this review has been marked green-amber, and we made five recommendations. A follow-up to this report was published in July 2013.
Bangladesh is similar in area to England and Wales with almost triple the population. 84% of the 162 million inhabitants survived on less than US$2 (around £1.30) a day at the time of writing. Bangladesh received £1 billion of UK assistance between 2011 and 2015. Most of this expenditure was designed to improve livelihoods, health and education.
Of this, the Department for International Development (DFID) allocated £123 million to funding Bangladesh’s response to climate change. Bangladesh is one of the most vulnerable countries in the world to climate shocks and is particularly at risk from sea level rise. DFID’s objective for this finance was that the ‘number of people with increased resilience to climate change and improved ability to respond to and recover from natural disasters’ directly attributable to UK funding would be ‘at least 15 million by 2015’.