Across climate-stressed cities and regions, governments increasingly use tree planting and waterway restoration as visible, countable signs of ecological repair. India’s Ek Ped Maa Ke Naam campaign, which encourages people to plant a tree in honor of their mothers, turned planting into a mass political spectacle. In Bangladesh, prime minister Tarique Rahman’s government has announced programs to plant 250 million trees over five years and restore 20,000 kilometers (12,500 miles) of canals. These programs revive the political imagery of canal digging and tree planting associated with Rahman’s father, former president Ziaur Rahman.
Ziaur Rahman launched these campaigns after taking power amid the political upheaval that followed the 1974 famine and the coups of 1975. His military government presented canal digging, tree planting, and other rural public works as routes to greater food production, rural employment, and national self-reliance. They also served a political purpose: mobilizing villagers, extending the state’s reach into the countryside, and allowing a new regime to demonstrate its capacity to organize people and landscapes.
Contemporary urbanization in Bangladesh, such as in Dhaka, presents a very different challenge. Decades of real-estate-led expansion have converted wetlands, encroached on canals, reduced vegetation, and intensified heat, air pollution, and flooding. Between 1989 and 2020, Dhaka lost about 56% of its vegetation, while healthy vegetation declined by more than 88% (Nawar et al. 2022). The River and Delta Research Centre (RDRC) estimates that the city lost roughly 120 kilometers (75 miles) of canals between 1940 and 2023, and identifies 15 encroached canals whose recovery could significantly reduce waterlogging (RDRC 2024). Ecological repair has to navigate fragmented land ownership, competing government agencies, scarce water, and municipal institutions with limited authority and capacity. These constraints are compounded by partisan turnover: incoming administrations often seek control over projects, contracts, patronage, and public credit rather than maintaining the initiatives of their predecessors.
Having studied Dhaka’s greening programs and organized around urban environmental issues, we took on municipal roles during the 2025 interim administration, following the 2024 overthrow of Bangladesh’s authoritarian government. Mohammad Azaz was appointed administrator (the equivalent of mayor) of Dhaka North City Corporation (DNCC), northern Dhaka’s municipal government. Efadul Huq coordinated its Local Experts Advisory Committee. Azaz could direct administrative priorities; Huq’s role was advisory.
Our backgrounds shaped DNCC’s approach to greening in 2025. We continued established practices, including routine tree planting and partnerships with private companies through both conventional corporate social responsibility (CSR) and more tightly regulated sponsorship agreements. At the same time, we introduced several new initiatives. [1]1 We also adopted DNCC’s first green policy to guide site selection, species choice, maintenance, survival monitoring, and community participation. Together, these efforts sought to move urban greening beyond one-time planting campaigns toward biodiversity protection and long-term care.
Some initiatives were implemented, while others remained pilots or approved plans. Working through their land negotiations, procurement requirements, community partnerships, and maintenance needs showed us why tree-planting programs so often become what we had come to see as “cotton-candy initiatives”: highly visible at inauguration, but quick to dissolve once political attention recedes. Three problems repeatedly shaped the outcomes. Fragmented government authority produced artificial land scarcity; municipal rules obstructed community co‑production; and planting systems rewarded visible outputs more readily than long-term survival. We examine these problems next.
The first problem is land or, more precisely, authority over land. Dhaka has few sites that are both ecologically suitable for planting and under municipal control. We encountered this problem repeatedly. Civil-society organizations involved in tree planting often argued that Dhaka had no space left and that new planting should be redirected to coastal areas or elsewhere in the country. Yet potential sites did exist: parks, road medians, canal and riverbanks, and parts of planned expansion areas such as Purbachal and Uttara. The obstacle was jurisdiction. Many of these lands were controlled not by DNCC but by the Rajdhani Unnayan Kartripakkha (RAJUK), the capital development authority, or by agencies such as the Public Works Department and the Roads and Highways Department. When we sought permission or collaboration, these agencies were reluctant to cede control over their land, projects, and the resources and networks attached to them. Land scarcity, in this sense, was not a lack of actual land—it wasn’t a spatial problem; land scarcity was artificially created through inter-agency non‑cooperation.
The second problem is capacity. The city corporations are blamed when trees die, canals clog, or public spaces deteriorate. Yet each city corporation is a stick figure of government: expected to act with power and authority while lacking the muscle (staff, budget, land control, police support, utility access, and legal tools) the work requires. DNCC has roughly 11 personnel members responsible for coordinating greening work under DNCC’s Climate Change and Environmental Circle, and Dhaka South City Corporation has a similar number. Together, the two municipal governments serve approximately 10.3 million residents (a conservative estimate based on official 2022 census figures) across approximately 306 square kilometers (118 square miles) of dense urban territory.
This limited capacity is compounded by procurement rules that operate on bureaucratic rather than ecological timelines. In our experience, the tendering process required under Bangladesh’s Public Procurement Rules (PPR) took 45 to 60 working days, long enough to miss the annual planting season. Even after contracts were awarded, the city corporations lacked sufficient staff to verify whether vendors maintained the trees, replaced losses, or met survival targets.
In theory, some of this capacity gap could be addressed through co‑production, with residents and civic organizations sharing responsibility for ecological care with municipal staff. Youth groups, schools, neighborhood collectives, and environmental organizations could help plant, water, monitor, and protect trees. But participation cannot be treated as a free resource. Community stewards need tools, transport, soil, water, safety equipment, coordination, and sometimes compensation. When we tried to build such partnerships, we found that DNCC had almost no institutional experience recognizing community groups as partners in ecological stewardship.
To test this model, we held repeated meetings, developed memoranda of understanding (MOUs), and worked with 17 youth organizations, civil-society groups, neighborhood communities, and environmental movements. Their willingness to share responsibility for ecological care was real, but sustained participation required at least modest operating support. Existing public procurement rules offered no mechanism for funding voluntary community organizations. Many groups lacked trade licenses and therefore could not qualify as formal vendors; financing their work through corporate social responsibility arrangements introduced different problems of accountability and control. DNCC also had no formal category through which to recognize and resource community stewards, and many officials were reluctant to support this kind of institutional experimentation. The result was an impasse: participation became unpaid labor and unrecognized enthusiasm that fizzled out.
The third problem is maintenance. Road medians are a case in point. In Dhaka, saplings planted in medians face poor soil, water scarcity, extreme heat, pollution, vandalism, utility work, billboards, and rats. Signs, poles, wires, and other infrastructure are installed through or around planting areas, and trees are often cut when they obstruct visibility or new construction. Even DNCC’s zero-soil initiative was undermined by competing priorities. Revenue-generating billboards damaged planted areas, major infrastructure corridors such as Pragati Sharani remained unstable sites for long-term tree growth, and rats destroyed young trees before their roots could establish. Without tree-protection protocols and coordination across municipal departments and utility agencies, planted trees remained temporary decorations.
Soil and water create further maintenance burdens. Many planting sites in Dhaka contain compacted fill mixed with construction debris and waste, so successful planting requires rebuilding the soil rather than simply digging a hole. Water is an equally neglected cost. Contractors often have to purchase and transport it at commercial rates, while project budgets rarely cover the actual expense of dry-season care. Accessing municipal water can also require difficult coordination with the Dhaka Water Supply and Sewerage Authority (WASA), which DNCC does not control.
Contractors can establish planting sites, but contractor-led care has an end date. Most contracts cover planting and short-term maintenance rather than long-term survival. When the contract ends, care often ends with it. The procurement system treats trees as deliverables rather than living infrastructure dependent on soil, water, labor, and time. Simply counting saplings planted at inauguration is not enough. Contracts should instead tie payment to survival over at least five years, with periodic assessments of survival, canopy growth, ecological function, and maintenance.
Our experience taught us that private-sector corporate social responsibility can provide resources where municipal budgets are thin, but it can also turn public greening into advertising. In commercially valuable and heavily trafficked areas such as Bijoy Sharani, Gulshan, and Panthapath, prominent signage mattered more to sponsors than the trees themselves; too often, the signs outlast the planting. Yet our experience showed that corporate support can work when the city limits the commercial value of signage and sets clear requirements for species selection, maintenance, and survival. For instance, along the road from Jahangir Gate to Banani Graveyard, DNCC partnered with Shakti Foundation and MetLife Bangladesh under an arrangement that kept sponsor signs small and made tree care the primary obligation. The trees survived. The lesson is not to reject corporate sponsorship, but to regulate it so that branding remains secondary to ecological maintenance.
The fragility of these efforts became especially clear at Lautola-Bosila, a canal-edge neighborhood where DNCC worked with residents to connect tree planting, public space, and biodiversity stewardship. The collaboration depended, however, on the support of the interim municipal administration rather than on a durable municipal mechanism. When DNCC’s leadership changed in 2026, the city corporation predictably stopped working with the community. It showed how easily projects associated with one administration can be abandoned when incoming leaders establish their own partisan priorities, partnerships, and claims to public credit. Ecological care cannot survive if every political transition resets the work.
The lesson from Dhaka is not that ambitious planting campaigns should be abandoned. It is that planting targets without supporting institutions produce spectacle rather than climate resilience. Keeping trees alive requires a public authority capable of coordinating land across agencies, municipal staff and budgets adequate to the scale of the city, procurement systems that reward long-term survival, and formal support for community stewards. These arrangements must outlast contracts, inaugurations, and changes in political leadership. Trees and canals cannot be treated as symbolic objects of development. They are infrastructures sustained through living relations among land, water, labor, care, and governance.
Bibliography
- Nawar, N., Sorker, R., Chowdhury, F. J. and Rahman, M. M. 2022. “Present status and historical changes of urban green space in Dhaka city, Bangladesh: A remote sensing driven approach”, Environmental Challenges, vol. 6, January, no. 100425.
- Rivers and Delta Research Centre (RDRC). 2024. Situation Analysis of Dhaka’s Canals, Channels, and Lakes (2023–24), Dhaka.
- [Staff Correspondent]. 2022. “Over 10.2m people live in Dhaka city: BBS”, Prothom Alo. 27 July. Available online at the following URL: https://en.prothomalo.com/bangladesh/city/fzkq4hv4k7.
