A Multi-Temporal National Census of Brick Kilns in Bangladesh from 2000 to 2023

Abstract Brick kilns are a major source of air pollution, land degradation and occupational hazard across South Asia, yet no consistent, long-term record shows where they are and how they change. We present a manually digitized, multi-temporal census of brick kilns for all of Bangladesh at five epochs: 2000, 2010, 2016, 2020 and 2023. Kilns were identified by visual interpretation of very-high-resolution imagery in Google Earth, searched systematically on a 10 × 10 km grid, and recorded as points at the chimney base. After removal of duplicate and out-of-boundary records, the census contains 3,901, 5,512, 7,652, 8,385 and 9,333 kilns, respectively. One-to-one matching between epochs links the 34,783 records to 10,912 persistent kiln sites, each with a presence history, first and last year observed, and administrative codes. Independent digitization of the same kilns agrees to a median of 14 m. The dataset supports research on air quality, exposure, land use, labor and regulation, and provides a baseline for evaluating automated kiln detection.