Climate change: Turning adversity into opportunity (Part 1)

Bangladesh has gained international reputation as one of the world's most vulnerable countries (by some accounts it is in fact the most vulnerable country) to the adverse impacts of human induced climate change. This undoubtedly presents the country's government and people with a very big problem going forward. However, there is a silver lining in this dark cloud that can allow us to turn adversity into opportunity if we can play our cards right.
There are two ways that this can be done. One is by focusing on the climate change problem and turning to climate resilient low carbon activities and the second is to make a significant paradigm shift in our overall development strategy towards a greener development pathway.
I will describe the first pathway in this article and come back to the second one (and the links between the two) in a subsequent article.

Addressing the climate change issue
This strategy in turn has two major components, one domestic and the other relating to international diplomacy. There are, of course, important synergies between the domestic and international strategies. The domestic strategy relates to developing climate resilient and low carbon actions and the international one has to do with projecting the countrys image abroad. I will describe both strategies below.

Climate resilient low carbon development
The domestic strategy is to focus on the climate change problem and develop climate resilient and low carbon activities, pilot them first and then scale them up over time. The government and non-government stakeholders in Bangladesh are well on the way to implementing this strategy. The government has already developed a far-reaching Climate Change Strategy and Action Plan and has started to implement it in earnest. The government has also set up two climate change funds, one with its own finance and the other with contributions from rich countries. Both the funds together have several hundred million US Dollars in them and are being deployed to implement the same Climate Change Strategy and Action Plan.
The successful utilisation of these funds by government ministries and departments as well as by non-government actors will pave the way for Bangladesh to attract much more substantial funding that will become available from the global community in future years.

Financing climate change actions
To give some idea of the amounts of global funding that are likely to be available to support climate change activities the rich countries pledged $30 billion over three years (2010 to 2012), ramping up to $100 billion a year from 2020 onwards. The latter amount would be almost equivalent to global development assistance to developing countries.
This global funding to support climate change actions in developing countries will be spread across mitigation (or low carbon development) and adaptation (or climate resilient development). While Bangladesh may not be able to capture much mitigation funding, (as the country's emissions of greenhouse gases is already quite low), it can capture a significant proportion of the adaptation funds.
However, the ability to attract significant levels of global funding will not depend on simply asserting Bangladesh's vulnerability and poverty, but rather by demonstrating the ability to use funds effectively and transparently. Thus, if we spend the first hundred million that has been pledged so far well, then we may be able to attract billions in future. This depends almost entirely on our own performance and demonstrated absorption capacity.
If the government and people of Bangladesh are able to do so then there is likely to be a shift to receiving substantial amounts of climate change funds (to which we can claim a right) to replace the development assistance we receive now (which is given at the whims of the rich countries). This would lead to a much more respectable relationship between Bangladesh and the rich world.

International strategy
The second strategy is an international one to change the image of Bangladesh from being perceived as one of the most vulnerable countries to being perceived as one of the most adaptive countries. This will require all of our diplomats in foreign missions abroad to be briefed on climate change issues (indeed the teaching of climate change diplomacy should become part of the training of all Foreign Service officers from now on). It should also be the main message of our prime minister, ministers and government officials when they speak at international climate change meetings.
This became apparent at a recent meeting of the Climate Vulnerable Forum held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, which was organised by the government of Bangladesh as the current chair of the CVF, where several speakers suggested that Bangladesh should propose at the next ministerial meeting of the CVF to be held in San Jose, Costa Rica in November 2012, that they should consider changing the name of the forum from Climate Vulnerable Forum to Climate Adaptive Forum. This would signify that although the reason for the countries to come together was originally their vulnerability to climate change, the reason for continuing the forum in future is to be proactively adaptive to climate change.

Conclusions
At the domestic level, if Bangladesh (both the government and non-government actors) are able to utilise the funds (both national as well as international) well over the next few years, then the amounts that can be expected from the global community will reach the same level as current levels of development assistance by 2020. The challenge, therefore, is to ensure that the activities being funded are reported and shared in a transparent manner and monitored effectively over the next few years.
At the international level the challenge is to change the image of the country from a negative one (vulnerable) to a positive one (adaptive) and shift the focus from the problem to the solution.

The writer is Senior Fellow at the International Institutes for Environment and Development in London and Director, International Centre for Climate Change and Development at the Independent University, Bangladesh.
E-mail: saleemul.huq@iied.org