POLITICS OF CLIMATE CHANGE | The Daily Star

  • Environmental challenges that can't be ignored

    It is now well over a year since nearly 700,000 Rohingyas were forced out of Myanmar and Bangladesh opened its borders to them and gave them shelter in the Cox's Bazar region.

  • Climate change, a global security threat

    In the last week of January, the United Nations Security Council in New York held a special session on climate change as a global security threat.

  • Aligning climate plans for a greater impact

    Bangladesh has a long tradition of national development planning under the aegis of the General Economics Division (GED) of the Planning Commission, through the seven Five Year Plans prepared since we became an independent country.

  • Bangladesh starts its journey towards climate resilience

    At the beginning of January 2019 Bangladesh started to take the required steps to become a climate resilient country by 2030 by achieving transformational adaptation to climate change impacts.

  • Changing the climate narrative

    As we start the new year of 2019, we have 11 years to 2030 which is an important year to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the climate change goals of mitigation as well as adaptation under the Paris Agreement.

  • 2018: A tipping point for climate change

    As 2018 comes to an end, it can be said that the year has proved to be a major tipping point for the issue of climate change globally as well as in Bangladesh.

  • COP24: Successes and failures

    After a time extension of an extra day, the Rulebook for the Paris Agreement was adopted at COP24 in Katowice, Poland on December 15. It is a significant achievement as it will enable all countries to implement all the different elements of the Paris Agreement in a manner that can be measured, reported and verified in a uniform manner.

  • Why we need a policy framework for displaced people

    In more than 50 countries around the world, some 40.3 million individuals have been uprooted from their homes and displaced in their own countries as a result of conflict or human rights violations. Natural disasters, meanwhile, have caused the displacement of millions more.

  • COP24 gets political after first week

    The first week of the two-week 24th Conference of Parties (COP24) under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate

  • Understanding the art of negotiation at COP24

    Under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) all the countries meet each year at the annual Conference of Parties (COP) held in December—moving from continent to continent each year to review progress and agree on any new decisions.

  • Making climate budgeting transparent

    Bangladesh is among the world's most at-risk countries in relation to climate change and the Government of Bangladesh has recognised climate change as one of the most serious threats to poverty reduction and development, and as such has made a number of ambitious commitments to tackle it.

  • Why we must plan for urbanisation now — and fast

    The third annual conference on urban resilience was just held in Dhaka with well over 300 participants from home and abroad, including government officials, mayors, NGOs, researchers, the private sector and the media.

  • Making the Rule Book for implementing the Paris Agreement

    In December 2015 in Paris, at the 21st annual Conference of Parties (COP21) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), 174 countries, including the United States of America under then President Obama, agreed to the Paris Agreement on Climate Change

  • Measuring the global goal on climate change adaptation

    In the Paris Agreement on climate change, which was agreed on in December 2015 at the 21st Conference of Parties (COP21) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)

  • Challenges for the new Global Commission for Adaptation

    Last week in the Hague, the Netherlands a new Global Commission for Adaptation to Climate Change was launched with the former Secretary General of the United Nations Ban Ki-moon, Bill Gates, and Kristalina Georgieva, head of the World Bank as the three heads.

  • It's worse than we thought

    The United Nation's scientific body on climate change, namely the Intergovern-mental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has just released a special report which is a scientific as well as political report of great significance and could be a game-changer in galvanising enhanced action to tackle climate change.

  • Achieving complete renewable energy reliance

    Ten years ago, under the leadership of then President Nasheed of the Maldives, the leaders of the most vulnerable developing countries came together to form the Climate Vulnerable Forum (CVF).

  • How long-term planning can work

    Bangladesh has a strong tradition of medium term planning through the periodic Five Year Plans, of which we are now in the 7th Plan. At the same time, the country has a large number of professional planners both within the Planning Commission as well as embedded within the Planning Department of every ministry who help develop the sectoral plans for each ministry.

  • Thinking outside the box

    The issue of loss and damage from climate change has been a politically sensitive topic in the negotiations under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) as developed countries see it as opening the way for claiming compensation from them based on their liability.

  • Tackling poverty and climate change at the same time

    Over the coming decades, at the global level as well as in Bangladesh we will be faced with two major challenges: tackling poverty and climate change. Although at first glance the two issues may not seem to be linked, I will argue that we cannot tackle either without also tackling the other at the same time. This is equally true for both the global and the national level, especially for poor countries like Bangladesh.

  • We have crossed the tipping point on climate change

    Until now, scientists working on climate change have been talking about the scenarios, forecasts and even predictions of adverse impacts due to human induced climate change that would occur in the future if we failed to prevent it from happening.

  • Tackling climate change in the Barind Tract

    In almost every global assessment of which countries are most vulnerable to climate change impacts, Bangladesh comes out as either first or at least in the top five, depending on the criteria used in the assessment.

  • A note on the environmental aspects of Rohingya camps

    It has been nearly a year since the latest influx of the Rohingya people after they were forcibly driven out of Myanmar and into Bangladesh. Since last August, over 700,000 refugees, mostly women and children, have been housed, fed, clothed and provided with medical attention by a combination of Bangladesh's military and civilian authorities and NGOs as well as the UN and other international agencies, of whom there are over a hundred working day and night in the Rohingya camps.

  • Limiting global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees

    In the run-up to the negotiations under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in its 21st Conference of Parties (COP21) in December 2015, one of the most politically contentious issues was whether the limit of the long-term global temperature rise should be kept at 2 degrees centigrade or changed to 1.5 degrees.

  • What we can learn from the Green Climate Fund crisis

    The Green Climate Fund (GCF) was created under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) to channel up to USD 100 billion a year from 2020 onwards from the developed countries to the developing countries to help them tackle climate change through both mitigation and adaptation projects.

  • Answering the Talanoa Dialogue questions

    At the 23rd Conference of Parties (COP23) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), held last December under the presidency of the prime minister of Fiji, a new feature called the Talanoa Dialogue was introduced.

  • Is 100 percent renewable energy feasible?

    Midway through the two-week-long 22nd Conference of Parties (COP22) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) held in November 2016 in Marrakech, Morocco, the presidential election results in the USA were announced. The result, Trump winning the election, was like a bombshell in the COP.

  • A year after Trump's withdrawal from the Paris Agreement

    A year has passed since President Trump announced that the United States would formally withdraw from the Paris Agreement on Climate Change. What has happened since has been a mixture of good and bad—but on the whole, more good than bad.

  • Designing adaptation projects for the Green Climate Fund

    The Green Climate Fund (GCF) was set up under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) to channel much of the USD 100 billion a year starting from 2020 onwards that the developed countries have promised to provide to developing countries to tackle climate change through both mitigation and adaptation projects and activities.

  • Green Climate Fund: Still a work in progress

    The Green Climate Fund (GCF) was created under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) to channel USD 100 billion a year starting from 2020 onwards, which the developed countries have pledged to provide to developing countries to tackle climate change through both mitigation as well as adaptation activities. The Secretariat of the GCF is located in Korea and the GCF Board has equal representation from developed and developing countries.

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