A World Bank project kicking off in July plans to introduce a system in some big industrial entities to continuously monitor their emissions.
The entities from where the system will be established are to be selected by the Department of Environment.
The monitoring system involves the installation of a sensor at chimneys or smokestacks, WB鈥檚 senior environmental specialist Eun Joo Allison Yi explained to journalists during a meeting at the bank office in Dhaka on Sunday morning.
The sensor will be connected to the monitoring station set up at the DoE, which can detect the moment the sensor stops feeding information to the system or malfunction.
Initially, the five-year project, which is likely to be continued, will try to strengthen the DoE, by establishing a laboratory there, among other initiatives, installing the sensors at some industries, creating public awareness and providing training.
鈥楧epartment of Environment will select the top polluters to be brought under the monitoring,鈥� said Eun Joo Allison Yi, pointing out the huge potential of emission monitoring in creating new jobs.
She said that Korea Environment Corporation, the equivalent of the DoE, was entirely dedicated to monitoring emissions in air, water and soil through the employment of about 3,000 people.
Under the monitoring system, a model was developed in Korea determining thresholds under which different types of industries pay, depending on the scale of their emissions. The emission scale ranges from over 2 tonnes per year to 80 tonnes per year.
Some of the newly-built gas-based power plants have the sensor installed but the DoE lacks the capacity to get information from them, Eun Joo Allison Yi said in her keynote presentation.
The budget of the project, however, was not revealed at the meeting. The price of installing the sensor was stated to be affordable.聽聽
The World Bank in a report released in 2023 identified Bangladesh鈥檚 exposure to environmental health risk factors at critically high levels.
Four major environmental health risks were associated with over 2,72,000 premature deaths and 5.2 billion days lived with illness in 2019, which has an annual cost equivalent to 17.6 per cent of the GDP in 2019, the WB report revealed.
The highest impacts are due to ambient air pollution and household air pollution, responsible for nearly 55 per cent of the deaths, the report said.
In 2023, the annual average of PM2.5 the greater Dhaka Area was 92 碌g/m3 over 18 times as high as the World Health Organisation鈥檚 recommended limit and above Bangladesh鈥檚 air quality standard of 35 碌g/m3. About half of Dhaka鈥檚 air pollution is attributed to emissions from power plants and households, according to the WB report.
Open burning of municipal waste accounted for 11 per cent of the greater Dhaka pollution while brick kilns were responsible for 12 per cent, road dust eight per cent and transport sector four per cent emissions.聽
The WB report estimated the economic cost of air pollution to be between Tk 1,291 and Tk 1,409 billion.聽
WB鈥檚 senior external affairs officer Mehrin Ahmed Mahbub also attended the meeting.
