Building Back a Greener Bangladesh : Country Environmental Analysis 2023 (English)

Over the past two decades, Bangladesh made substantial economic progress as one of the world's fastest-growing economies, having reached lower-middle-income (LMI) country status in 2015 and being set to move off of the United Nations' Least Developed Country Index in 2026. However, the COVID-19 pandemic, followed by a sharp rise in global commodity prices and monetary policy tightening in advanced economies, decelerated the Bangladesh's economic growth and increased the poverty rate for the first time in decades. Bangladesh's development pathway has occurred at the expense of public goods, with negative externalities that affect the health, productivity, and welfare of the Bangladeshi people, particularly the poor and the most vulnerable groups. The 2023 Country Environmental Analysis (CEA) aims to support the Government of Bangladesh (GoB) in informing policies and investments for improving environmental health and pollution management, a critical step towards a green growth pathway. The CEA report focuses on (a) identifying the environmental priorities of the country and assessing how they affect health and productivity; (b) identifying interventions to tackle those priorities; (c) assessing the strengths and shortcomings in the country's environmental governance framework to address the environmental priorities and implement the proposed interventions; and (d) based on that analysis, making recommendations to strengthen governance and agencies' institutional capacity for environmental management.