At a seminar in Dhaka on August 29, civil society organisations (CSO) led by the Center for Participatory Research and Development took stock of something most of the country has largely forgotten it agreed to: the 12 UN human rights recommendations on climate change, accepted by Bangladesh in November 2023. The recommendations covered cyclone warning systems, a rights-based climate-displacement policy, protection for older persons and persons with disabilities, and improved data on climate-sensitive diseases. Since then, Bangladesh has changed governments twice. The question the seminar asked was whether anyone currently in power still remembers that pledge.
The clearest place to look for how seriously Dhaka took these commitments isn’t the CSO submissions or the seminar discussion. It’s the government’s own formal reply to the UN: the addendum Bangladesh submitted as part of the Universal Periodic Review (UPR), a UN process in which each country’s human rights record is reviewed by other UN member states and recommendations are made for improvement. The addendum records Bangladesh’s position on every recommendation it received. Of the 301 recommendations made during Bangladesh’s review, the government accepted 211 and took note of 90. Here, taking note means the government acknowledged the recommendations but did not commit to accepting or implementing them.
Read closely, the document reveals where sustained political attention actually went. On politically sensitive issues—including the Cyber Security Act, enforced disappearances, marital rape, child marriage, the status of the Rohingya, the rights of Dalits—the government wrote detailed paragraphs explaining its position. In contrast, the 12 climate recommendations received no comparable explanation. To be fair, the majority of the 211 accepted recommendations also received no distinct government commentary, so this isn’t evidence that climate change was singled out to be silent on. However, it does indicate that climate rights did not generate enough political attention for the government to meaningfully engage with them.
Speaking at the August 29 seminar, Nurun Nahar, additional secretary at the Ministry of Environment, Forest, and Climate Change, told the audience that climate change is increasingly driving human rights violations in Bangladesh, with climate-vulnerable and frontline communities bearing the greatest burden. Md Ziaul Haque, former additional director general of the Department of Environment, went further, said that the government’s concern about climate-induced rights violations needs to be matched by a significant strengthening of institutional capacity. Two officials with direct knowledge of how the machinery works pointed to the same gap where recognition suffers due to lack of infrastructure.
Unfortunately, the record from the previous review cycle offers little reassurance. A mid-term assessment of UPR-3, Bangladesh’s 2018 review, found that of the 83 accepted recommendations independent monitors could assess, 30 were only partially implemented and 53 saw no progress. This is the track record that progress on the current 12 climate commitments should be judged against. There’s little reason to assume that the ongoing UPR cycle, ending in 2027, will be any different. Therefore, the single highest-value step available now isn’t a new institution, but ownership. A public statement from the sitting environment minister that these commitments remain part of government policy, not an unclaimed inheritance from an administration that no longer exists, would do more to anchor implementation than any new committee or unit.
Beyond that, the more realistic path is integration rather than invention. Bangladesh already runs a National Adaptation Plan, and a Third Nationally Determined Contribution that explicitly invokes climate justice and a just transition. Both already have institutional homes inside the same ministry. Folding the 12 commitments into the existing reporting cycles of these two instruments is far more achievable than building parallel machinery, particularly given that foreign aid disbursement, which underwrites much of Bangladesh’s climate-adaptation financing, fell more than 13 percent year-on-year as of July 2026.
A government building new institutions in a tightening fiscal environment is choosing a harder path than it needs to. Not all 12 recommendations equally difficult. For instance, cyclone warning systems and climate-sensitive disease surveillance are technical, fundable, and largely apolitical. A comprehensive, rights-based policy for people displaced by climate change would involve difficult questions about land ownership, urban planning, and who should legally qualify as displaced. Such a policy would take years to develop and implement, even under a government that is committed to doing so. The government should, therefore, distinguish between commitments that can be implemented quickly and reforms that require years of work. Failing to make this distinction so far has undermined implementation, and risks doing so again.
Ashish Barua is a fundraising professional and climate justice activist working in Canada’s health sector.
Views expressed in this article are the author's own.
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