Major UK-funded climate project in Bangladesh forced to close over aid cuts

A UK-funded climate project in Bangladesh is being forced to close two years early after foreign aid cuts, leaving thousands of vulnerable people without support and threatening to undo work that has already been carried out, The Independent has learnt.

The UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office ( FCDO ) is in the middle of a programme of cuts to the foreign aid budget , which is set to see the UK aid budget fall from 0.5 per cent to 0.3 per cent of Gross National Income. With a number of developing countries seeing their UK aid relationships all-but eliminated , the cuts have been labelled a “ moral catastrophe ”, with many observers particularly dismayed at the decision to cut UK aid for climate projects .

One organisation impacted is British development charity Practical Action. Since 2023, the charity has been managing part of a major development project in Bangladesh , which is aiming to transform the lives of tens of thousands of people through interventions including solar power systems , climate-resilient agriculture and aquaculture feedstocks and technologies, and weather information systems that can provide early warnings for extreme rainfall and cyclones .

Situated in Bangladesh’s Sundarbans – the world’s largest tidal mangrove forest, much of which is UNESCO World Heritage Site – Practical Action’s project launched in 2023, and was expected to run until 2028.

In April 2026, however, the charity was told it would have to end its project in June of this year, according to Tamanna Rahma, climate resilience lead for Practical Action Bangladesh. That deadline was later extended to September, after intense lobbying from the charity, she says.

Practical Action was supposed to have received £2.2m by 2026, but ended up receiving “far less than this”, says Rahma. The project was supposed to reach 57,000 people by the end of this year, but will in the end only reach 37,000 people.

“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 says. “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 cut to Practical Action’s project forms a fraction of overall cuts to the UK-Bangladesh bilateral aid programme, which, it was revealed in July , is set to fall in value from £66.7 million to £31m between 2025/6 and 2026/7.

The early exit has also been damaging due to the fact that the target communities need as much support as possible to adapt to the climate crisis, Rahma adds.

“Every year we are seeing more severe storms and cyclones, while the sea is rising and soil is becoming salinated,” she says.