Dhaka: Bangladesh’s overall standard of governance in climate change adaptation (CCA) finance is satisfactory, says an assessment report.

However, there are ample scopes for improvement in the areas of transparency, accountability, integrity and participation in prioritizing, accessing, delivering and monitoring of the adaptation fund.

This was revealed during a validation workshop titled ‘Climate Change Adaptation (CCA) Finance in Bangladesh: Governance Standards Assessment’ held at Transparency International Bangladesh (TIB)’s head office in the city.

With support from Transparency International (TI) Secretariat, Berlin and the global CSO network Adaptation Watch, TIB conducted an online survey among 35 stakeholders comprising public, private, NGO and International agencies from January 15 to March 5, 2017 to assess Bangladesh’s prevailing state of governance in CCA Finance.

The survey focused on four core components of climate finance:  prioritise; access; deliver and monitor and looked into those four areas using five governance lenses: transparency, accountability, participation, coherence and integrity.

The results showed that Bangladesh’s overall standard of governance in CCA Finance was 3.09 out of 5.00 scale.

However, when all four CCA finance components were measured against governance indicators; transparency, accountability, integrity and participation were found to be major challenges in terms of prioritizing, accessing, the delivery and monitoring of CCA finance.

At the opening session, TIB Executive Director Dr. Iftekharuzzaman and Deputy ED of TIB Professor Dr. Sumaiya Khar, Ian Tellam of Adaptify, a partner of Adaptation Watch, Thoams Vink of TI-S and Zakir Hossain Khan, Senior Programme Manager, TIB’s Climate Finance Governance also spoke, said a press release.

During the interactive sessions, the participants agreed to strengthen mutual collaboration and cooperation for enhancing institutional abilities to further improve the governance standard to attract required adaptation funding for Bangladesh.

Officials from the relevant ministries, development partners, private sector, NGOs and academia attended the workshop.