Bangladesh has recently formed a National Committee on Climate Finance during a crucial period, with COP31 on the horizon and a significant disparity between global climate-finance promises and actual requirements. Led by the prime minister, the committee’s main duties include establishing priorities, mobilizing resources, and engaging with international climate funds. However, the real challenge lies in more than just obtaining funds: can Bangladesh effectively articulate its needs, negotiate well, and ensure that finance reaches those most at risk from climate impacts?
This challenge comprises two intertwined paths. The primary one involves accessing climate finance: creating reliable evidence of climate effects and financial necessities, securing adequate global commitments, and tapping into international funding mechanisms. The secondary path focuses on disbursing the finance: transparently and fairly allocating resources based on real risks and needs.
The upcoming COP31, set for November 9-20, 2026, in Antalya, Türkiye, presents a critical opportunity. Its preliminary agendas cover long-term climate finance, guidelines for climate funds, and discussions related to Article 9.1 of the Paris Agreement concerning the financial responsibilities of developed nations. Ahead of COP31, Bangladesh could develop a unified negotiating stance by combining data on community-reported losses, geospatial vulnerability assessments, quantified adaptation needs, and financing shortfalls. Such evidence could bolster the collective demands of Least Developed Countries (LDCs) and other climate-vulnerable nations. Nonetheless, negotiating for finance and accessing it pose distinct challenges. International funds necessitate institutional preparedness, credible proposals, safeguards, and transparency.
Obtaining finance is just one side of the coin. Once resources arrive, the question arises: where should they be directed and to whom? Two communities experiencing similar floods may face different losses due to factors like poverty, livelihoods, infrastructure, and adaptability. Groups such as women, persons with disabilities, and landless households might encounter the same hazard differently.
However, finance doesn’t automatically align with this vulnerability landscape. An evaluation by Oxfam of the World Bank’s 2017-2023 climate-finance portfolio revealed potential discrepancies of $24.28-$41.32 billion between planned and actual expenditures, with limited data to accurately trace climate-specific spending. This doesn’t imply misuse but underscores a significant transparency gap. Climate justice demands evidence-based distribution and accountability, not just increased mobilization.
While satellites can monitor floods, erosion, and environmental shifts, they alone cannot ascertain climate justice. Satellite imagery might pinpoint a flooded village but cannot fully illustrate how repeated flooding drives families into debt, disrupts education, or ruins livelihoods. Community experiences capture these realities, while science helps establish broader patterns. Merging these diverse knowledge sources forms the basis of what I term the three senses approach: social-sensing, science-sensing, and common-sensing.
Social-sensing empowers climate-affected communities to generate evidence through citizen science, participatory monitoring, local wisdom, and accessible digital reporting. It captures lived experiences, losses, and needs often overlooked by conventional datasets. Science-sensing combines community observations, climate studies, satellite imagery, geographic analysis, and socioeconomic data to construct a more holistic view of climate impacts. It validates, contextualizes, and scales community evidence across various locations and time.
Common-sensing translates this amalgamated intelligence into negotiation, policy-making, and resource-allocation decisions. It guides countries in determining what financial support to seek, which funding avenues to pursue, and where resources should be channeled.
In essence, social-sensing reveals people’s experiences, while science-sensing elucidates where, why, and to what extent impacts occur. Common-sensing transforms evidence into actions.
Bangladesh’s emerging Loss & Damage Dashboard exemplifies the initial journey. By merging community-generated loss reports with geospatial data, climate insights, and satellite observations, it can transform individual experiences into structured evidence. If similar approaches were adopted across LDCs, evidence could be aggregated from households to communities, countries, and collective international claims, bolstering climate-finance negotiations.
In Bangladesh, Oxfam’s initiative to create a Climate Risk Index integrates hazard, exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity to identify areas and populations confronting disproportionate climate risks, aiding in a fairer allocation. Such tools serve as illustrations of the approach, not the approach itself: one showcases how evidence can elevate claims, while the other illustrates how evidence can guide finance back to vulnerable communities.
The process shouldn’t conclude with fund dispersal. Did the finance reach its intended recipients? Did vulnerability decrease? Were marginalized groups included? Answers yield new evidence, reinforcing future decisions and negotiations. Climate finance should operate as a continual cycle linking community experiences, scientific evidence, international claims, access, risk-informed allocation, and responsibility.
Bangladesh already possesses numerous building blocks for this strategy: community insights, climate research, Earth observation capabilities, digital tools, and extensive climate diplomacy experience. Its National Committee on Climate Finance presents an opportunity to connect these elements, pre-COP
