As the world observes World Development Information Day today, the occasion serves not as a celebration but as a profound summons to action. Established by the UN in 1972, its mandate is stark: to ‘draw the attention of the world to development problems.’ This year, the day coincides with the 80th anniversary of the United Nations, themed ‘Building Our Future Together.’ Yet, as global reports in 2025 confirm, we are mired in a ‘global development emergency.’ With the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals dangerously off-track — only 35 per cent of targets are progressing — the global project for shared prosperity is in peril.
For a nation like Bangladesh, this emergency is not a future forecast; it is our lived reality. We are on the frontlines of the world’s ‘polycrisis,’ where the abstract data points of global reports translate into inundated coastlines, disappearing farmland and displaced families. Here, the ‘development problem’ has a singular, overarching name: climate change.
On this World Development Information Day, the challenge for Bangladesh is twofold. First, we must pioneer a domestic culture of information dissemination to build resilience and peace. Second, we must weaponize that information on the global stage, transforming our vulnerability into a vanguard for climate justice.
The 2025 global development reports highlight a staggering $4 trillion annual SDG financing gap and a ‘polycrisis’ of debt and geopolitical instability. For Bangladesh, these crises are amplified through the lens of climate.
Our ‘development problem’ is that a third of our nation could be flooded by sea-level rise, displacing over 30 million people. It is the salinization of our freshwater and agricultural lands. It is the increasing ferocity of cyclones that can wipe out years of development gains in a single night.
This is where the theme of climate change for peace-building becomes critical. The UN has long identified climate change as a ‘threat multiplier.’ In Bangladesh, this is not a theory.
When rising seas force a coastal farmer to abandon their ancestral land and move to an already overburdened urban slum, competition for jobs, water and housing intensifies. When river erosion devours a char (river island) community, it creates a new class of climate refugees. This resource scarcity and mass displacement are the dry tinder for social friction and instability.
Therefore, building peace in Bangladesh is inseparable from building climate resilience. And the indispensable tool for both is information.
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Bangladesh’s information dissemination culture
THE original 1972 mandate for this day focused on mobilising public opinion. In this, Bangladesh is already an unheralded global leader. We have saved millions of lives not just with concrete walls, but with information.
Our world-renowned Cyclone Preparedness Programme is a masterclass in information dissemination. It is a vast network of over 76,000 volunteers who, upon receiving a warning, fan out on bicycles and boats with megaphones and flags, translating complex meteorological data into one simple, life-saving instruction: ‘Evacuate.’
This is our information culture. But in 2025, this model must evolve. The ‘Digital Janus’ — the two-faced nature of modern information — presents both our greatest opportunity and our most profound risk.
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Government and advocacy’s role
THE prompt asks how our government and advocacy institutions can utilise free information. The answer lies in bridging the ‘last-mile’ digital divide. While 2.6 billion people are offline globally, for us, that gap is the difference between a farmer receiving a mobile alert about a flash flood and losing their entire harvest.
The government as architect: The a2i (Aspire to Innovate) programme has been pivotal in digitising government services. Now, this infrastructure must be fully leveraged for climate adaptation. The Bangladesh Meteorological Department is using advanced modelling; this data must be open-source and automatically fed into local government alert systems, reaching every citizen’s mobile phone. The Mujib Climate Prosperity Plan is our visionary blueprint to move from vulnerability to resilience and prosperity. Information openness is the key to its success, ensuring projects are targeted, effective and accountable.
Advocacy as translator: This is where our vibrant civil society and NGOs are crucial. Institutions play an irreplaceable role. They are the ‘information translators.’ They take complex climate data — on saline intrusion, for example — and partner with local communities to develop actionable plans: which saline-resistant crops to plant, how to set up rainwater harvesting, or when to shift from rice farming to aquaculture. They empower communities with knowledge, turning them from passive victims into active agents of their own resilience.
By pairing high-tech government infrastructure (like satellite data and AI-powered forecasting) with the high-touch, trust-based networks of our advocacy institutions and CPP volunteers, Bangladesh can create a hybrid dissemination model that is unparalleled in the world.
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Information as tool for global accountability
WORLD Development Information Day is not just about sharing information within our borders; it is about demanding it from the outside world. This brings us to the core of our struggle: climate finance and climate justice.
The 2025 global reports decry the ‘Great Finance Famine.’ This famine is most acute in the climate arena. The developed world’s broken promise to deliver $100 billion a year in climate finance is just the tip of the iceberg. The real problem is a profound lack of information openness.
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Opaque finance and debt trap
WHEN climate finance does arrive, what form does it take? Is it a grant, or is it a high-interest loan that plunges us deeper into the ‘debt trap’ the original article warned about?
This is the great hypocrisy of the current system. We, the most vulnerable, are being asked to pay for a crisis we did not create, often by taking on debt from the very nations whose historical emissions caused the problem. The information is opaque. The accounting is messy. The pledges are often double-counted with existing development aid. This is not aid; it is an injustice.
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Using information for justice and peace
BANGLADESH, as the chair of the Climate Vulnerable Forum and a leading voice for the Global South, must champion a new era of radical transparency.
Demand openness: Our government must use its diplomatic power to demand that all climate finance flows be made public, transparent and standardized. We must know whether the finance is a grant or a loan, and where every dollar is going.
Track the data: Our own government and advocacy institutions must become meticulous ‘information auditors.’ We must track our own climate expenditures and our ‘loss and damage’ costs with granular data. When a cyclone hits, the cost is not just ‘development loss’; it is a specific, quantifiable damage figure that we can and must present to the world.
Link justice to peace: Armed with this data, Bangladesh can lead the global campaign for ‘climate justice peace.’ The argument is clear:
Information proves the injustice (who is responsible vs who is paying).
Justice (in the form of grant-based loss and damage funds and adaptation finance) provides the means for resilience.
Resilience (building sea walls, securing freshwater, protecting livelihoods) prevents the displacement and resource conflict.
Therefore, climate justice is peace-building.
By refusing to be silent, and by backing our moral claims with irrefutable data, Bangladesh can force a global reckoning.
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Call to action from the delta
WORLD Development Information Day 2025 finds Bangladesh at a crossroads. The information is clear: the water is rising, the storms are strengthening, and the global response is criminally inadequate. But the information also shows us a path forward.
To the Global North: Your 80 years of multilateral leadership are being tested. ‘Building our future together’ requires you to pay your climate debt. Open your books. Deliver the finance — as grants, not loans. This is not charity; it is a matter of justice and global security.
To the government of Bangladesh: Continue to be a global champion for the vulnerable. Use the Mujib Climate Prosperity Plan as a model of transparency. Invest in the ‘last-mile’ digital connection to empower every citizen, from the char to the coastal village.
To our advocacy institutions and CSOs: You are the bridges. Be the translators of complex science and the auditors of global promises. Your work is the bedrock of our community-based adaptation and our global credibility.
To the people of Bangladesh: We are a nation of 170 million resilient innovators. Our local and indigenous knowledge is critical development information. We are not just subjects of this story; we are its authors.
On this day, the world looks at the ‘development problem’ on a global map. We live on that map’s most vulnerable edge. Let us, therefore, be the world’s most powerful voice. Let Bangladesh be the nation that showed the world how to turn information into resilience, resilience into prosperity, and vulnerability into a relentless, data-driven demand for justice.
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Manik Esahak Biswas is a social development worker.