From climate vulnerability to global innovation - how Bangladesh is designing tomorrow’s solutions
By Eshrat Waris, Director, Strategic Partnerships & Investments, British Asian Trust
When the world talks about Bangladesh and climate change, the story is usually the same: a low-lying country, floods, cyclones, and rising seas. Bangladesh consistently ranks among the countries most exposed to climate risk, including in the Notre Dame Global Adaptation Initiative index.
But this framing misses something important
Across Bangladesh, local businesses and social enterprises are building climate solutions that the rest of the world will increasingly need. They are not just adapting to climate change, but developing new ways to live, grow food and do business in an unpredictable climate.
Agriculture remains central to Bangladesh’s economy, employing around 40% of the workforce and contributing approximately 11-12% of GDP, according to the Asian Development Bank. When floods or droughts hit, the impact is immediate and widespread. That level of exposure is also driving a different kind of response: rapid, practical innovation.
Smarter weather intelligence for farmers and insurers
For years, Bangladeshi crop insurers and agribusinesses had to rely on foreign weather tools that were not built for local conditions. Forecasts were often wrong at district or village level. This meant slow or disputed insurance payouts and wasted seeds.
One Bangladeshi startup created Climate Pulse to fix this. It is a homegrown weather intelligence platform that brings together satellite data, historical weather records and long-range climate models, including scenarios up to 2100. It then turns all this into clear, local forecasts and risk maps.
This allows insurers to verify conditions at village level before paying claims and enables seed and fertiliser companies to plan for late monsoons or unexpected dry spells. The World Bank has highlighted how climate information services like this can be a powerful tool for resilience when they are designed around users’ needs.
Turning textile waste into a scalable packaging solution
Bangladesh is one of the world’s largest clothing exporters. In 2023, it was the second largest global apparel exporter, according to the World Trade Organizsation.This brings jobs, but also huge piles of textile waste.
Much of this ends up burned or dumped. At the same time, plastic pollution is a growing challenge, as highlighted in World Bank analysis of Bangladesh’s waste systems.
Ecovia addresses both issues at once. Using a patented process, it turns leftover fabric scraps into compostable packaging films.These materials can replace a range of single-use plastics while maintaining performance. They work with existing packaging machines and then break down naturally, instead of staying in the environment for centuries ‑ Ecovia, turning local waste into local climate friendly‑ packaging.
Biogas systems powering low-emission rural communities
In rural Bangladesh, many families keep cattle but see manure as a problem. They still pay for firewood or gas to cook and for chemical fertiliser to grow crops. Having identified this opportunity and its potential, ATEC installs biodigesters on farms that turn manure into two useful products: clean biogas for cooking and organic fertiliser for fields. A typical unit serving a household with four cattle can produce over 1,000 litres of gas and dozens of kilos of fertiliser a day.
Families save money on fuel and fertiliser, while women spend less time collecting wood and are less exposed to indoor smoke; The World Health Organisation has shown how smoke from traditional cooking fires is a major health risk. ATEC also earns carbon credits for the emissions it avoids and can share some of this value with farmers as cash. Its “green village” model shows what a low emission‑ rural community can look like in practice.
Enabling innovation to scale
Bangladesh’s emergence as a centre of climate innovation is being shaped not only by local ingenuity, but by how that innovation is supported and scaled. The British Asian Trust’s Climate Innovation Fund is designed to do exactly this: identify and back ventures with the potential to deliver both climate impact and long-term commercial viability.
With the Fund’s financial and technical support ventures such as those featured are poised to scale beyond Bangladesh, contributing to the wider need for locally grounded climate solutions across South Asia and beyond. The British Asian Trust is working with local entrepreneurs to create long-term resilience and drive economic growth. Bangladesh is often framed as a climate victim.
Together, these examples highlight a compelling duality - a nation on the front lines of climate risk and equally positioned at the cutting edge of climate solutions. With the right support and investment, including initiatives such as the British Asian Trust’s Climate Innovation Fund, these solutions have the potential to extend far beyond Bangladesh, shaping how climate resilience is built in vulnerable regions worldwide.