Sundarbans climate project to close early amid UK aid cuts
A UK-funded climate resilience project in Bangladesh is being forced to close two years ahead of schedule following cuts to Britain’s foreign aid budget, leaving thousands of vulnerable people without planned support and threatening to undermine work already carried out, according to The Independent.
The UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) is implementing cuts to the foreign aid budget that will reduce the UK aid budget from 0.5 percent to 0.3 percent of Gross National Income.
The cuts have affected aid programmes in a number of developing countries, with observers describing them as a “moral catastrophe” and expressing particular concern over reductions in funding for climate projects, said the report.
Among those affected is British development charity Practical Action, which has managed part of a major development project in Bangladesh since 2023.
The project aims to improve the lives of tens of thousands of people through interventions including solar power systems, climate-resilient agriculture and aquaculture feedstocks and technologies, as well as weather information systems providing early warnings for extreme rainfall and cyclones.
The project is located in Bangladesh’s Sundarbans, the world’s largest tidal mangrove forest, much of which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It began in 2023 and was originally expected to continue until 2028.
However, in April 2026, Practical Action was told that it would have to end its project in June this year, according to Tamanna Rahma, climate resilience lead for Practical Action Bangladesh. Following lobbying by the charity, the deadline was later extended to September, she said.
Practical Action was expected to receive £2.2 million by 2026, but received “far less than this”, Rahma said.
The project was originally expected to reach 57,000 people by the end of this year, but will ultimately reach around 37,000 people, according to Rahma.
“This abrupt cut has threatened our reputation in the community, which we have carefully built up over the past two and a half years,” Rahma said. “It has also impacted the long-term stability of the interventions that we have made, and limited our ability to plan for an effective exit.”
The reduction in funding for Practical Action’s project forms part of wider cuts to the UK-Bangladesh bilateral aid programme, which is set to fall from £66.7 million to £31 million between 2025/26 and 2026/27, according to figures revealed in July and cited by The Independent.
Rahma said the early exit was particularly damaging because communities in the project area require continued support to adapt to the impacts of climate change.
“Every year we are seeing more severe storms and cyclones, while the sea is rising and soil is becoming salinated,” she said. “There is huge demand for financing such as this, yet the ability to make these kinds of tangible programmatic interventions is declining.”
The Sundarbans is situated on the Ganges Delta, where the Ganges, Brahmaputra and Meghna rivers converge before flowing into the Bay of Bengal.
The vast mangrove forest covers 10,277 square kilometres and is home to 42 mammal species, including endangered tigers and river dolphins, as well as nearly 300 species of birds.
Many residents also continue to suffer the after-effects of Cyclone Aila, which affected an estimated 100,000 people when it struck the Sundarbans in 2009, destroying local infrastructure and significantly changing the landscape in parts of the region.
The Sundarbans is also facing sea-level rise of roughly 3 centimetres a year, around twice the global average, according to the report. The rising sea level is displacing communities and damaging once-fertile soil.