Children play on waste products at a tannery at Hazaribagh along the polluted Buriganga river in Dhaka yesterday. Bangladesh’s prime minister Sheikh Hasina has warned tannery owners at Hazaribag of serious consequences if they failed to relocate their tanneries, during a World Environment Day observance program, local media reported.

AFP/Dhaka

Bangladesh imposed a radical new “green tax” yesterday to force polluting factories to pay extra levies as it looks to clean up the country’s increasingly dirty rivers and air.

The environmental tax was announced as part of a $32bn budget for the 2014-15 fiscal year.

Industrial effluent and waste from urban sewage “is severely contaminating our rivers and taking heavy toll on the aquatic environment and its surroundings”, Finance Minister A M A Muhith said as he announced the budget in parliament.

“I propose to impose a 1% Environment Protection Surcharge or Green Tax on an ad-valorem basis on all kinds of products manufactured in Bangladesh by the industries which pollute the environment,” Muhith said.

A revenue official told AFP the tax would be imposed on a company’s turnover if it is found to have polluted “air, soil and water”. Muhith also announced tax exemptions for the country’s 6,000 brick factories if they build environmentally friendly kilns.

The budget is the first since prime minister Sheikh Hasina’s centre-left government was re-elected in January polls marred by widespread fraud and a boycott by opposition parties.

Bangladesh is one of the world’s most polluted nations and Muhith said the green tax would “get rid of this situation” and encourage industries “to set up effluent treatment plants”.

Factories currently face one-off fines if they are found in breach of pollution standards, but bosses often bribe inspectors to turn a blind eye.

The new tax would mostly affect the powerful textile and leather processing industries that often pour untreated effluent straight into the country’s rivers.

There are around 200 hide-processing factories based in the Hazaribagh district of Dhaka, listed as the world’s sixth most polluted place by a environment group, but none of them have effluent treatment plants.

Despite the trend of land accretion in the Bay of Bengal, Bangladesh is at risk from a rise in sea level triggered by global warming, according to a number of experts in Dhaka.

According to different climate studies, the sea level in the Bay of Bengal has been rising gradually in conjunction with the global rise.

The 5th Assessment Report of Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) suggested that Bangladesh’s sea level rises at the rate of 1.5mm annually, while the global trend is 2mm.

The report was based on sea level data between 1970 and 2010. It said if the current trend continues, the country will see an annual 5mm sea level rise by 2100, while the global rise will be 6mm.

However, the IPCC 4th Assessment Report showed that the global rise during 1961 to 1993 was 1.8mm per year while the rate was almost double at 3.1mm per year between 1993 and 2003.

The report said of the 3.1mm sea level rise, factors like carbon emission contributed to 2.8mm of the rise.

Experts said Bangladesh’s coastal belt, mostly adjacent to the Bay of Bengal, are highly vulnerable to scarcity of fresh water because of salt water intrusion from the sea.

A large portion of coastal arable land had already been contaminated by extreme salinity due to sea level rise, said Dr Ahsan Uddin Ahmed, executive director of Center for Global Changes.

He added that the inhabitants of coastal districts had been hit by potable water scarcity. A number of studies suggest that climate change leads to frequent natural disasters like cyclones, depressions in the bay and floods.

Regarding land accretion in the Bay of Bengal, Maminul Haque Sarker, deputy executive director of the Center for Environmental and Geographical Information Services, said with the rise in sea level, the main impact on the estuary would clearly be governed by the reduced flow of water and sediment input from upstream sources - the Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers.

He observed that the major part of the tidal plain in Bangladesh wouldn’t receive any sediment and will suffer drainage problems and the formation of new land in the Meghna estuary will continue at a lower rate depending on the rate of sea level rise.

Maminul Haque Sarker said the construction of cross dams towards the end of 1950s and in the early 1960s led to land accretion of several hundred kilometres, but now the sediment input to the estuary has been reduced and the rate of land acquisition has slowed down.