In the development discourse, one of the most overused terms is probably "mainstreaming." Over the past 25 years, Bangladesh has invested billions of dollars in mainstreaming community-based approaches, gender equity and climate change adaptation, for example, through thousands of development projects. However, while health is a human right, has it been mainstreamed in our climate change policies and actions?

Till now, the Bangladesh Climate Change Strategy and Action Plan (BCCSAP, 2009) has been our most treasured climate change policy instrument. It has 44 programmes grouped under six themes. The first theme is "Food Security, Social Protection and Health," which includes "Adaptation in health sector" as one of its nine programmes. This health programme has three basic purposes: i) to conduct research and monitoring of climate change impacts on disease patterns (of malaria, dengue, diarrhoea and heatstroke); ii) to estimate the social and economic costs of such diseases; and iii) to formulate measures to adapt to climate change impacts. However, the BCCSAP programmes were essentially research-focused.

Thirteen years on, Bangladesh achieved another milestone by formulating the National Adaptation Plan (2023-2050), popularly known as the NAP. Many of us may think that, given the climate change impacts on the health sector, the NAP may have emphasised health significantly. But health issues have barely been touched on in some of the six goals of NAP. Under Goal 3, climate-resilient healthcare and water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) facilities will be developed to improve human well-being and liveability in urban areas, while Goal 6 expects technological innovations in health and WASH to fight climate change. While the plan has also identified 113 interventions costing a total of $230 billion by 2050, only three interventions are directly linked to health. Speaking of finance, these three interventions would cost only 1.36 percent of the total NAP budget.