- held on 4thSept 2025
Energy Transition Platform South Asia conducted a webinar titled “Exploring Energy Transition Local Pathways: South Asian Islands, Coastal Communities & North East India” on 4th September 2025 highlighting the impact climate change has especially on vulnerable areas within Asia. Panellists were from Bangladesh, North East India, Sri Lanka and Maldives – all coastal regions, facing the impact of climate change and the urgent need of energy transition differently.
Panel Discussion:
Moderated by: Sohel Ahmed, Managing Director, Grameen Shakti, Bangladesh
- Abdul Arif, Program Associate, UNDP, Bangladesh hubs
- Lanvin Concessao, Program Manager, WRI, India
- Asoka Abeygunawardana, Former advisor to the Minister of Power and Energy, Sri Lanka
- Aminath Shazly, Senior Lecturer, Department of Environment and Natural Science, Faculty of Engineering, Science and Technology, The Maldives National University
Key Highlights:
Bangladesh:
- Bangladesh’s coastal community is vulnerable to natural disasters cyclones, storms, frequent floods among increasing sea level and salinity disrupting livelihoods of communities involved in pisciculture, among other things.
- Infrastructurally, grid is still not 100% connected to these remotest areas, the fragility increasing and leading to loss of power connection due to storms.
- UNDP has 2 ongoing projects in Bangladesh for coastal communities, specifically women, facing climate change impacts –
- Local Government Initiative on Climate Change (LoGIC)
– multi-donor collaborative initiative of Government of Bangladesh, UNDP, UNCDF, European Union (EU), Sweden and Denmark.
The project is providing the
Community Resilience Fund (CRF)
, aiming to help the most climate-vulnerable women build resilience to climate change by enabling them to take climate-adaptive livelihoods. Through this CRF support, the women apply community-based approaches to invest in climate-adaptive livelihoods like sunflower production, climate-tolerant rice, dal and watermelon cultivation, and more. This project was initially designed for 4 years and based on an independent assessment and success of initial results; the project was extended up to June 30, 2023, for 2 years and further for two years to June 2025. LoGIC will support the most vulnerable 500,000 households based in hard-to-reach areas in 94 unions of 29 Upazila in 9 districts of Bangladesh. - ‘Gender-responsive Coastal Adaptation (GCA) Project’ targets areas most vulnerable to climate change induced salinity impacts and the beneficiaries, especially women and adolescent girls that are solely responsible for household income who are disproportionately affected by the consequent loss of productivity, livelihoods and drinking water insecurity. The targeting is anchored in identifying Districts and Unions most exposed to observed and projected salinity impacts.
- Local Government Initiative on Climate Change (LoGIC)
North-East India:
- WRI India, through the Energy Access Explorer dashboard, via geotagging has been able to gauge susceptibility of relief camps, hospitals, schools in disaster hit areas in North-eastern coastal states of Assam, Nagaland, Mizoram, as well as vulnerable communities’ access to power during times of disruption, works with State Disaster Management Authorities and Local bodies to provide them with solar micro-grids or resilience infrastructure.
Sri Lanka:
- The South Asian Island country is a unique case which is almost totally electrified 40 years ago via community-based rooftop solar systems and the intermittence being filled by large hydro.
- With the coming of thermal power plants (TPPs) and the expensive corollary transmission and distribution (T&D) system, there is now need to transition the T&D to absorb house-hold solar while shut down TPPs as there is no need – with almost full electrification.
- Another issue is the competition between government pushed ground-mounted solar (to be absorbed by the grid) and rooftop solar (distributed RE – already almost everyone having it).
- There is a need for storage – battery and pumped-hydro – plants, feed-in tariff to absorb solar from households/communities.
- Shift is to be from separate producers and consumers to prosumers since everyone in the community is producing their own electricity and consuming it – the excess needs to be stored and that is the technology needed.
- From 3A shift to 3D – from analogue to distributed grid; from authoritarian electricity to decentralised electricity ; and from Alternate Current (AC) to Direct Current (DC).
- Also, since RE is prevalent, there is no need for LNG.
Maldives:
- Maldives is an archipelago in the Indian Ocean, the lowest lying country – 1 m or 1.5 m above sea level.
- It is highly dependent on fossil fuels (20% of its GDP).
- However, with rising sea levels due to fossil fuel accelerated global warming and climate crisis, its existence as an economy is almost entirely dependent on fossils.
- Each island in Maldives is scattered – 200 of which is nationally inhabited; 200 of which are resort/tourist spots. The strategy has to be one island one grid for ease of connectivity.
- Since solar is still expensive, the resort islands have piloted floating solar technology as of now.
- For solar/RE to be integrated within Maldives grid as a whole, there is an urgent need of innovative financing models, capacity building, community risk assessment, vulnerability risk assessment and local/island national planning.
- World Bank’s Accelerating Renewable Energy Integration and Sustainable Energy (ARISE) project builds on the efforts of the existing World Bank-funded Accelerating Sustainable Private Investments in Renewable Energy (ASPIRE) initiative to bring in private investments for increasing renewable energy capacity in the Maldives. The new project aims to expand solar power generation in locations in and out of the Greater Male’ region and strengthen the capacity of the power system for integration of electricity generated from solar power.