With sufficient international support Bangladesh will be able to implement its 1.5°C domestic emissions pathway requiring emissions levels of 106-145 MtCO₂e/yr or 14-37% below 2012 levels by 2030 excluding LULUCF.
Bangladeshʼs total GHG emissions
excl. LULUCF MtCO₂e/yr
Displayed values
Reference year
Net zero GHG excl. LULUCF*
2068
Reference year
2012
1.5°C emissions level
−30%
NDC (conditional)
+149%
NDC (unconditional)
+197%
Ambition gap
−179%
1.5°C compatible pathways
Middle of the 1.5°C compatible range
Current policy projections
1.5°C emissions range
Historical emissions
2030 NDC
In its updated 2021 NDC, Bangladesh has put forward a stronger pledge of an unconditional emissions reduction of 6.73% below business as usual (BAU) level and a conditional target of 15.12% below BAU, both now covering all sectors of the economy as opposed to the previous NDC. However, both pledges will lead to an increase of emissions of 126% and 89% above 2012 levels respectively by 2030 when excluding LULUCF.
19IEA. World Energy Balances 2019 (OECD and Selected Emerging Economies). (2019).
20 Huda, A. S. N., Mekhilef, S. & Ahsan, A. Biomass energy in Bangladesh: Current status and prospects. Renew. Sustain. Energy Rev. 30, 504–517 (2014).
21 Khan, M. S. et al. Prospect Of Biofuel In Bangladesh: Bioethanol And Biodiesel Production At Local Condition. in oint Conference International Conference on Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology & International Conference on Ecology and Ecosystems (2017).
27 Salam, R. A. et al. An Overview on Energy and Development of Energy Integration in Major South Asian Countries: The Building Sector. Energies 2020, Vol. 13, Page 5776 13, 5776 (2020).
32 While global cost-effective pathways assessed by the IPCC Special Report 1.5°C provide useful guidance for an upper-limit of emissions trajectories for countries, they underestimate the feasible space for developed countries to reach net zero earlier. The current generation of models tend to depend strongly on land-use sinks outside of currently developed countries and include fossil fuel use well beyond the time at which these could be phased out, compared to what is understood from bottom-up approaches. The scientific teams which provide these global pathways constantly improve the technologies represented in their models – and novel CDR technologies are now being included in new studies focused on deep mitigation scenarios meeting the Paris Agreement. A wide assessment database of these new scenarios is not yet available; thus, we rely on available scenarios which focus particularly on BECCS as a net-negative emission technology. Accordingly, we do not yet consider land-sector emissions (LULUCF) and other CDR approaches.
33 Global cost-effective pathways assessed by the IPCC Special Report 1.5°C tend to include fossil fuel use well beyond the time at which these could be phased out, compared to what is understood from bottom-up approaches, and often rely on rather conservative assumptions in the development of renewable energy technologies. This tends to result in greater reliance on technological CDR than if a faster transition to renewables were achieved. The scenarios available at the time of this analysis focus particularly on BECCS as a net-negative emission technology, and our downscaling methods do not yet take national BECCS potentials into account.
34 At the regional level, models suggest coal-fired power to be phased out in South Asian countries by 2040.31
Long-term strategy
As of April 2022, Bangladesh has not submitted a long-term decarbonisation strategy to the UNFCCC.
2050 Ambition
Long-term 1.5°C compatible pathways show that Bangladesh could achieve GHG emissions reductions of about 31-78% below 2017 by 2050, or 34-105 MtCO₂e/yr excluding LULUCF.32
Remaining emissions
Remaining emissions, mostly coming from agriculture and waste could then be balanced through the deployment of carbon dioxide removal approaches such as from the land sector.33
Negative emissions
The country will need to implement stringent policies to reduce its LULUCF emissions which were a source of emissions in 2012 to further contribute to negative emissions.1,2
In 2021, Bangladesh scrapped 90% of its planned coal expansion because of the rising costs of coal imports and increased price per generation unit, including cancelling plans to build ten coal-fired power plants.3,4 However, Bangladesh is substituting its previous expansion coal plans with gas instead of renewable energy.
1.5°C compatible pathways show that the power sector would need to fully decarbonise by around 2040. This would be driven by a phase out of natural gas by 2040 and an increased share of renewable energy – from 1% in 2019 to 19-26% by 2030 and 77-98% by 2040. This stands in contrast with the country’s plans to increase renewables based power generation to only 40% by 2041.5
The building sector in Bangladesh consumes 55% of total energy, with residential sector accounting for 40% of electricity consumption. 1.5°C compatible pathways show high electrification of the building sector reaching 90-100% of total energy mix by 2050.
Biomass is an important energy source in buildings, particularly for cooking, where 50% of energy demand was met with biomass in 2019. All scenarios see a rapid decline in biomass demand dropping to 3-22% by 2050.
While the transport sector of Bangladesh is at present completely reliant on fossil fuels, mostly oil and gas, 1.5°C compatible pathways show a high share of electricity in the transport sector, 75-100% by 2050.
Industrial sector in Bangladesh consumes 33% of the total final energy consumption, with the sector accounting for 44% of electricity consumption in 2019. 1.5°C compatible pathways show that the share of electricity consumption increases to 79-98% by 2050 and direct CO₂ decline rapidly reaching levels of 2-6 MtCO₂/yr by 2050.