As Bangladesh is rapidly being urbanized, more and more forests are getting fragmented, resulting in the construction of more roads, which means more wildlife are being killed in collisions with vehicles. To address these wildlife deaths, the Forest Department’s Tangail Divisional Office has recently facilitated a low-cost solution. At a total cost of 625,000 takas (around $5,000), ropeway bridges have been installed in northern Bangladesh at five locations along an 8-kilometer (5-mile) stretch of the Mymensingh-Tangail Highway N401, which slices through the reserved forest of Madhupur National Park, where heavy-duty vehicles regularly collide with wildlife, especially primates. “These ropeways are expected to protect rhesus macaques, capped langurs, Indian civets and small carnivores like fishing cats from roadkill,” Tangail divisional forest officer Abu Naser Mohsin Hossain told Mongabay. According to a 2018 study, the 8,436-hectare (20,845-acre) Madhupur National Park, the largest deciduous forest of Bangladesh, supports 151 wildlife species belonging to 23 orders and 62 families. According to available data that the Forest Department has from local sources, rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta) are most frequently killed in road accidents during the day. However, none of the roadkill in Madhupur can be documented, because the forest dependent Indigenous community here consumes the carcasses soon after an accident, said Md. Mossarrof Hosain, a deputy ranger at the Madhupur National Park. Naser said that the nylon-rope bridges are expected to provide safe aerial corridors for arboreal animals, both nocturnal and diurnal. Each is 30 meters (100 feet) long and almost 1-meter (3-feet) wide and…This article was originally published on Mongabay

A handful of animal lovers, mostly representing the youth community, spread across Bangladesh, have become crucial arsenals of the Forest Department’s wildlife crime control efforts. Despite not being assigned by the state, like the responsibilities a crime control force shoulders, the animal lovers help the Forest Department trace stressed wildlife in traps, cages or enclosures of poachers and smugglers. Primarily, they share intel information about any potential wildlife crime. Often, they join the wildlife inspectors of the department, act as undercover buyers, reach the crime scene, and help arrest the criminals. All things they do are under life threats — voluntarily. The Forest Department’s Wildlife Crime Control Unit (WCCU), established in 2012, conducted more than 3,000 raids against wildlife criminals between July 2012 and March 2026. Almost all raids were planned with volunteers’ tip-offs. Chief conservator of forests, Md Amir Hosain Chowdhury, told Mongabay: “Volunteers are our crucial partners [in wildlife conservation].” The government of Bangladesh has also recognized the collaboration between the WCCU and the volunteers. The WCCU and wildlife photographer and conservationist Faisal Bin Azad, better known as Adnan Azad, were honored with the National Wildlife Conservation Awards 2026 on July 9. Azad is one of the pioneers in non-government campaigns for nature conservation and was one of the original volunteers with WCCU. Local volunteers and Forest Department officers pose for photographs with an administration officia after two pooches were detained while possessing a macaque illegally. Image by Siddiqur Rahman Rabbi. The Forest Department on Nov. 6, 2025,…This article was originally published on Mongabay

The distance between farmer Sudhin Chandra Das’s home and his 150-decimal (0.6-hectare, or 1.5-acre) paddy field in Bangladesh’s northeastern region of Sylhet is more than half a kilometer (0.3 miles). During the boro rice harvesting season, usually mid-April, when thunderstorms are common, he cannot afford to stay at home, he said: He has to go to the vast open field to harvest the ripe crop, even though there is no shelter when lightnings strike. “It’s scary. I don’t know how to protect myself, and I fear I could be killed by a strike at any moment,” Sudhin told Mongabay. Sudhin lives in the Shalla subdistrict, Sunamganj district, in the Sylhet region, one of South Asia’s most lightning-prone zones. According to lightning data for the decade of 2016-25, Bangladesh’s northeastern zone witnesses 64 to 96 fatal lightning events per square kilometer (about 0.4 square miles) annually. Sudhin said he considers himself fortunate to be alive. But he recalled news reports on people in Sunamganj being killed by lightning strikes this year and in previous years. On April 18 this year, at least 13 people, including five in Sunamganj, died by lightning strikes across Bangladesh. An average of 300 people die from lightning strikes every year in the country, with the highest number of fatalities reported in the northeastern districts. According to Meherunnesa, a coordinator at the Disaster Forum, a Dhaka-based national disaster preparedness network, Bangladesh witnessed the deaths of at least 218 people by lightning strikes between January and mid-June this…This article was originally published on Mongabay

The existence of the “polluter pays” principle (PPP) in Bangladesh, at least on paper, dates back to 1992, ever since the country endorsed the Rio Declaration. However, Bangladesh has made little progress in implementing the principle so far. A statement by the incumbent minister for environment, forest and climate change, Abdul Awal Mintoo, saying that regulatory authorities recovered less than half of the total compensation imposed on polluters over the past 16 years, exposed the structural loopholes in environmental governance behind failures in implementing the principle. The minister pointed out that polluters can delay the compensation recovery by applying their right to appeal against the regulatory authorities’ orders. that Mongabay spoke to said that loopholes in the judicial system, weak evidence and economic analysis on pollution, and polluters’ influence must be addressed if the country really wants to implement the PPP. Environmentalist and Dhaka University’s zoology professor Mohammad Firoj Jaman told Mongabay, “Delays in implementation of laws against polluters aggravate environmental pollution, and the hope of reaping the benefits of environmental justice falls flat.” Shanties stand along the bank of Buriganga River in Hazaribagh, Dhaka district, Bangladesh. The area is known for tanneries, the waste from which fill the surrounding land and water. Image by Abir Abdullah/Asian Development Bank via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0). Compensation recovery undermines the PPP The PPP binds polluters to bear the costs of managing and remedying the harm they have done to the environment. The concept of PPP was first mentioned in the recommendations of…This article was originally published on Mongabay