Neighbourhood Retrofit Service

The ask

Offer a B2G and B2B neighbourhood resilience retrofitting service — street-tree planting, permeable surface upgrades, rooftop garden installations, and shade-structure placement — contracted to city corporations, real-estate developers, and ward-level community groups in Dhaka and secondary cities.

Why now

Dhaka ranks among the world's most heat-stressed and flood-vulnerable megacities; urban flooding caused over ৳5,000 crore in losses in 2022 alone. Dhaka North and South City Corporations have received World Bank and ADB climate-resilience loans with green-infrastructure mandates. Meanwhile, the garment and real-estate sectors face ESG and LEED pressure to demonstrate green commitments, creating corporate clients willing to pay for retrofitting services they don't know how to execute themselves.

Why Bangladesh

Dhaka's neighbourhoods are extraordinarily dense but have underutilised vertical and rooftop surfaces. Local labour for construction and landscaping is cheap and plentiful. The city's drainage system is chronically overwhelmed; permeable-surface pilots in Gulshan and Banani have demonstrated measurable flood-mitigation effects. Community buy-in is high in areas that have experienced repeated basement flooding.

As a business

Revenue is project-based: design + install contracts priced per square metre of green surface created (₳1,500–4,000/m²). Recurring maintenance contracts on completed installations provide predictable revenue after year one. City corporation contracts (tendered) are low-margin but high-volume and serve as referenceable case studies for private real-estate clients, who pay 30–50 % more. Carbon sequestration measurement reports sold to buyers of Dhaka urban-green credits are a speculative but near-term add-on.

Economics

Move the sliders to model your own neighbourhood retrofit business. Defaults are order-of-magnitude estimates — pressure-testing them is part of what a founder pitches us.

What ZEPH would back

A founder with urban planning, landscape architecture, or civil-engineering credentials and at least one completed pilot block to show. We want evidence of a city corporation relationship or a signed pilot with a real-estate developer — not a grant-funded demo. The business needs to function commercially before we invest in scaling it.

Impact

Urban trees and permeable surfaces in Dhaka can reduce local surface temperatures by 3–6°C and cut stormwater runoff by 20–40%, directly lowering the flood-damage costs that exceeded ৳5,000 crore in 2022. Each 500 m² of green surface installed sequesters roughly 0.5–1 tCO₂e/year through tree biomass and soil carbon while reducing building cooling loads and the associated grid electricity draw. At 6,000 m²/year (default slider × 12 months), the annual avoided emissions reach 6–12 tCO₂e — modest in isolation, but scalable as the city-corporation contract base grows. The business also creates 15–30 permanent landscaping and maintenance jobs in dense urban neighbourhoods where unskilled employment is structurally scarce.