Better infrastructure, not another authority, can unlock our carbon economy

Every time Bangladesh’s carbon opportunity comes up for discussion, the conversation usually centres on the same proposal of creating a new authority. While it is an understandable instinct to gravitate towards institutions to solve fragmentation, the fact is, Bangladesh’s carbon economy does not suffer from a shortage of institutions; what it lacks is a means for these institutions to communicate with one another.

For instance, take the forest inventories, which tend to follow a particular format, while the satellite land-cover data follows a different format, and laboratory soil samples are recorded on paper at a district office. A donor-funded pilot project builds its own spreadsheet system, uses it for three years, and then the project ends, and the system disappears with it. None of this is because Bangladesh lacks capable institutions; it is because there is no shared digital layer that connects the institutions that already exist. Adding a new authority on top of this does not fix that. It adds a seventh voice to a conversation that already has six, without giving any of them a common language to speak in. What Bangladesh needs instead is infrastructure—the same kind of shared, invisible backbone that already lets the country’s banks clear payments overnight or its land registries increasingly talk to each other.

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The first thing that can help here is data collection, in which field surveys, satellite feeds, drone imagery, and laboratory results are fed into a single intake system, instead of forcing every project to build its own from scratch. The second is standard common definitions, units, and metadata, so that a hectare measured by the Forest Department and a hectare measured by a private project developer finally means the same thing. The third is digital measurement, reporting, and verification workflows built once according to internationally recognised methodologies, and reused across every ecosystem rather than reinvented project by project. The fourth is climate intelligence, where, with the help of GIS, satellite analytics, and AI tools, raw data is turned into an actual picture of what is happening to a mangrove belt or a forest reserve over time. The fifth is interoperability, the secure layer that finally lets all stakeholders see the same evidence, without any one of them owning it exclusively. None of these layers requires a new legal authority, nor do they ask any ministry to give up its mandate. What it requires is much more achievable: an agreement that going forward, environmental data collected under a government-recognised project gets recorded once, to a common standard, in a system every relevant institution can see into.

Interestingly, the stakes are not confined to the environmental sector either. The garment sector earned $39.35 billion in exports last year and employs millions of workers. A considerable number of Bangladeshi factories carry LEED certification, the world’s most widely used green building rating system. Almost none of that data reaches a government-facing system that a buyer or investor abroad can actually check. Analysts tracking voluntary carbon markets have found substantial price differences between intermediary and end-user transactions. A new national authority concentrates power and invites exactly the kind of turf disputes that have stalled similar efforts elsewhere. A shared digital infrastructure does the opposite: it distributes visibility across institutions that already have legitimacy, while giving verifiers and investors a single, auditable source of truth against which they can check the information provided by any of them. It closes the loopholes created by fragmentation without asking anyone to surrender authority to do it.

A pilot version of this system already exists as a working prototype, developed by Carbon2Capital and incubated at East Delta University’s Startup & Innovation Foundry. It uses approved methods of Verra, a nonprofit organisation that develops standards for carbon credits and other environmental projects, for tidal wetland restoration, afforestation, and sustainable land management, and keeps a full audit trail from every reported figure back to the sensor reading or field survey that produced it. A blockchain system automatically divides the money from carbon-credit sales among local communities, the project developer, and monitoring costs, helping reduce excessive mark-ups. But one problem remains: recording a payment for a coastal household on a digital ledger does not mean the household can actually use that money. In rural Bangladesh, mobile financial services, rather than crypto wallets, will likely be needed to make that money accessible.

Bangladesh has already made the relevant commitment on paper. Its Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) 3.0 pledges an Article 6 registry of the Paris Agreement that establishes the authority and rules for countries to voluntarily cooperate in meeting their NDC. What is missing here is not the intent, but the infrastructure that would make that registry meaningful to buyers sitting outside the country. Meanwhile, countries like Indonesia have already built the digital layer we are describing here, not by inventing new regulators, but by connecting the ones they already had.

Bangladesh’s mangroves, wetlands, and forests are not waiting for a new agency to be legislated into existence. They are waiting for someone to connect the data that already exists about them. The choice in front of Bangladesh is not between doing nothing and building a new authority. It is between building infrastructure now and losing valuable time as fragmented data systems continue to hold back carbon-market development.

Kazi Ahmmed Inkiyad is founder and CEO of Polyjute Ltd and CarbonZero Asia.

Views expressed in this article are the author's own. 

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