VoxDev: Does climate change have the potential to disrupt BRAC’s work?
Asif Saleh: Absolutely. We are already seeing widespread regression in areas where we have made progress in poverty alleviation, especially where climate impacts are most severe. Climate adaptation and poverty reduction must go hand in hand. People need better income opportunities, savings mechanisms, and resilience tools like insurance. Development work has to be climate-smart. It must be a nexus of three things: humanitarian support during and after disasters, traditional poverty-eradicating livelihood services, and the best of climate science to come and help people on the ground. All of these need to come together to create a comprehensive adaptation model for the most vulnerable communities.
Development issues are interconnected—health, poverty, water, sanitation, and climate. Unfortunately many of us who work in development often tend to look at things in silos. It’s either health, poverty, water and sanitation or climate. But when you go down to the household, all the issues are interconnected. We look at issues from that lens – in a problem-specific and holistic way. Solutions must be problem-centric, which may require addressing multiple fronts simultaneously.
VoxDev: What do you observe during your visits to climate-affected areas in Bangladesh?
Asif Saleh: The stories of the people living on the frontlines of climate change don’t really get the airtime they deserve, especially in global discourses. People think climate change is something that is happening, but maybe the worst is 20 or 30 years down the road, but it’s not linear like that.
Asif Saleh, right, speaks to an enterprising farmer who has successfully experimented with rice farming in salty soil in Mongla, southern Bangladesh. Climate change-induced salinity is now impacting 30% of arable land along the coast of Bangladesh – an area roughly the size of Estonia. © BRAC 2023
The sea is rising. It may not be taking over your land now, but salinity is slowly creeping inland, making coastal farmland non-arable. Couple that with the fact that in these places livelihoods are based on agriculture – the climate is now impacting livelihoods. It impacts access to safe water. There is a lack of understanding of how this has already impacted people on a massive scale.
People are not waiting for assistance – they are trying to cope, with indigenous solutions, in their own ways, but they can only go so far. It’s a continuous battle against shocks, crises, and disasters.
We urgently need more climate funding for the countries in the global south, and [for this] to get to communities on the ground. We hear all these numbers in trillions and billions, but the communities don’t get to see millions or even thousands.
VoxDev: Is solving climate issues community by community and household by household the right approach?
Asif Saleh: The climate crisis is such a huge issue that people sometimes get desensitised. We need a pivot – the entire development discourse is about to get disrupted because of the scale of this crisis. We have to think about which solutions are more effective, what’s the cost [of them], which ones are scalable – and [what] can be adapted across different contexts.
VoxDev: Can local communities themselves develop long-term solutions to combat climate change?
Asif Saleh: There are all these solutions on the ground, but we are not able to scale them because of the lack of finance. Whenever I go to Davos or COP [the United Nations Climate Change Conference], they’re so one-tracked, so focused on mitigation. That’s where the private capital is flowing to. Adaptation, which directly impacts people, is underfunded. This imbalance needs to be addressed.
Many climate solutions are designed from a global north perspective, which doesn’t always apply to contexts like Bangladesh, where informal economies dominate. We need to develop more context-specific knowledge and solutions.
VoxDev: How does BRAC approach climate adaptation?
Asif Saleh: Over the last few years, we tried to find adaptation solutions that solve real problems. For example, in coastal Bangladesh, the water crisis is a big challenge – so we tried to find alternative water sources, looked at livelihood challenges and came up with alternative agricultural methods, introduced crop insurance for natural disasters and much more. That’s how BRAC operates. Before we try to scale, we go with a hypothesis, then we learn on the ground by doing.
Now, we are taking a comprehensive approach, using four different tracks. One is about addressing a lack of critical services, such as access to drinking water, which leads to other health crises. The second pillar of our work is around livelihoods and agriculture. The third pillar is about risk reduction—how do you reduce the risk to people through better housing and insurance, among other things. The fourth pillar is to address the potential displacement of affected people. If the land is lost and people are displaced, how do you prepare the nearby cities to be more climate migrant-friendly? So, we are working with the mayors, the city planners, and others to do that.
Two women making their way to a flood shelter, on a makeshift raft, in Feni district, eastern Bangladesh, after being stranded in the middle of the worst flood the region has seen in three decades. The 2024 August floods impacted over 5.8 million people – killing 71 and costing Bangladesh approximately USD 1.2 billion in loss and damages. © BRAC 2024
VoxDev: How crucial is climate finance in addressing the problems you see?
Asif Saleh: Climate finance is critical, but there’s a huge gap between what’s needed and what’s allocated. There is a need for almost 387 billion dollars for adaptation, but so far only USD 24.6 billion is being allocated, according to the OECD. Then Oxfam did a study analysing some of these numbers, and it turns out the number might be as low as 11.5 billion. That means potentially only 3% of the total need of adaptation funds is being met. If you look at how much money is actually coming to locally-led organisations, that’s even less than 3% of the adaptation funding basket.
VoxDev: How do global climate discussions align with the realities of vulnerable communities?
Asif Saleh: There is often a disconnect. While private capital is focused on profitable areas like renewable energy, the urgent needs of vulnerable communities – such as adaptation financing – are overlooked. Mitigation is important, don’t get me wrong, but adaptation is about helping the most people who need support urgently. We need to inject that urgency and push that reality into global climate conversations.
This interview is an edited transcript of Adaptation on the frontline of climate change, an episode of VoxDevTalks run by VoxDev – a platform for economists, policymakers, practitioners, donors, the private sector and others interested in development to discuss key policy issues.