BEN ENVIRONMENT NEWSLETTER, Year 18, No. 10 (October, 2021)

The tradeoff between economic development and environmental degradation is a major challenge for emerging economies. Bangladesh faces the same dilemma. This issue of the BEN Newsletter highlights an online panel and a public discussion where environmental experts and activists debated major development projects on the river Teesta and on the Detailed Area Plan (DAP) for Dhaka, the capital city of Bangladesh. This newsletter also includes a write-up on the emission of CO2 as well as less discussed gases, and a detailed report on air pollution in the context of Bangladesh. It also covers the sustained protests organized by BAPA and other environmental organizations against the lease of reserved forest in the southeastern coastal city of Cox’s Bazar. Additionally, one of our contributors put together a news item on the upcoming COP26. Local and global concerns on environmental and climate issues are coming together with increasing collaboration among state and non-state actors and stakeholders. Our hope is that the diversity of this collection can help disseminate scientific information for a general audience to enrich discussions, help ground scientific findings with realities on the ground, and highlight the importance of supplementing awareness and advocacy with active protests on the ground when the powerful usurp the public good, ignoring the laws of the land.