POLITICS OF CLIMATE CHANGE | The Daily Star

  • Bangladeshi youth can carve a new path for the Global Youth Adaptation Network

    Last week, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and former UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon jointly launched the new South Asian Regional office of the Global Centre on Adaptation (GCA).

  • Bangladesh takes another step towards tackling global climate change

    During July last year, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina hosted the Global Commission on Adaptation meeting in Dhaka attended by the co-chairs of the Commission, former Secretary General of the United Nations Ban Ki-moon and Kristalina Georgiva, head of the International Monetary Fund.

  • We need a paradigm shift to deal with loss and damage from climate change

    In the international negotiations on climate change impacts under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the issue of loss and damage has always been a politically sensitive topic—it brings up issues of liability and compensation, which many developed countries regard as taboo topics.

  • Four lessons from Covid-19 pandemic for tackling climate change

    The global Covid-19 pandemic is now just over half a year old and arguably still in its early stages.

  • A ten year journey to achieve resilience to climate change

    In January 2021, the International Centre for Climate Change and Development at the Independent University, Bangladesh will be holding the 7th annual Gobeshona conference with an overall theme of starting a ten year journey to promote locally led adaptation towards resilience in Bangladesh, as well as in other vulnerable developing countries, including the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) and the Climate Vulnerable Forum (CVF) countries.

  • Worsening floods linked to human induced climate change

    As Bangladesh is inundated by severe floods not long after being hit by super cyclone Amphan, we are seeing the adverse impacts of human induced climate change in reality.

  • We must listen to the voices from the frontlines of the pandemic

    One of the distinguishing features of the global Covid-19 pandemic has been to expose who the frontline workers around the world are and who the frontline victims of the pandemic are, both from the public health perspective and as a result of the impact of lockdown measures.

  • Climate Change: Turning Bangladesh into the learning capital of the world

    The adverse impacts of human induced climate change are already occurring around the world, including in Bangladesh.

  • Collaborative research can be integral to climate action

    The government of the United Kingdom has had a very cordial relationship with Bangladesh since our independence and the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) has been a significant bilateral development partner for many years.

  • Loss and damage from natural disasters made worse by climate change

    As Bangladesh assumes the leadership of the Climate Vulnerable Forum (CVF) for the next two years, including at the next Conference of Parties (COP26) to be held in Glasgow, Scotland in November 2021, there is an opportunity for Bangladesh to push for the issue of loss and damage from climate change to be made a central topic for discussion at COP26. This is quite a politically sensitive issue that goes well beyond mitigation and adaptation, which have been the main focus of climate change conferences until now.

  • Dealing with the triple emergency

    In the last few weeks, the world has been having to deal with the double emergency of the pandemic as well as climate change, while Bangladesh and West Bengal had to deal with a triple emergency, with super cyclone Amphan hitting us quite badly.

  • Bangladesh has an opportunity to be a world leader in climate change

    The current Covid-19 pandemic emergency is combining with the climate change emergency as we speak, and as we tackle the first, we also need to tackle the second at the same time.

  • Holding the next global climate change talks

    I had written in a previous column about the fact that the next Conference of Parties (COP26) under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which was to have been held in November 2020 in Glasgow, Scotland with the United Kingdom as COP26 President, had to be postponed to 2021 due to the global Covid-19 pandemic.

  • A renewed focus on social capital

    One of the key revelations of the Covid-19 pandemic is that things that we held to be true in the past are now seen to have been myths, and as we transition from the old order into a new (and hopefully better) order going forward, we can build a better world by fixing much of what was wrong with the old world.

  • The double whammy of Covid-19 and climate change

    One of the biggest lessons coming out of the Covid-19 pandemic is that we are living in an interlinked world where no country can cut itself off for very long and no country can tackle the problem by itself. This lesson is even more true as we battle the double whammy of Covid-19 and the climate change.

  • Will Covid-19 change how we hold climate change talks?

    As nearly the entire globe remains in lockdown and international travel is almost at a standstill, international meetings are being cancelled and often replaced by conference calls on Zoom and other online meeting platforms.

  • The old normal is ending

    The Covid-19 pandemic is still having severe impacts on many countries and it is not at all clear how long it will take to play out globally.

  • Covid-19 and climate change

    The Covid-19 pandemic is still making its way around the world and it will be some time before it is over. Nevertheless, even at this early stage, there are some lessons that can be drawn on regarding how best to be prepared to deal with the much bigger problem of climate change impacts which will be coming soon after.

  • The transformational force behind climate movements

    The Climate Change Emergency has been declared first by the youth, led by Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg and her Fridays for Future movement of school children striking every Friday to urge leaders to treat climate change as a truly global emergency.

  • Protecting the environment should be everyone’s concern

    The Bangladesh parliament, led by the parliamentary standing committee on environment, recently declared a planetary emergency in Bangladesh. This is ground breaking in that most other parliaments around the world have declared a climate change emergency, but none have also added a biodiversity emergency as the Bangladesh parliament has. So ours is a twin track emergency, not just a single track.

  • Can Bangladesh become a knowledge economy?

    Over the next decade, there are going to be four mega global trends that all countries in the world will have to deal with.

  • Our missed opportunities

    According to the Global Risks Report 2020 from the World Economic Forum (WEF), biodiversity loss is now the third most serious risk our world is facing in terms of impact.

  • COP25 mistakes must not be repeated in Glasgow

    The 25th annual Conference of Parties (COP25) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was held in November 2019 in Madrid, Spain under the presidency of Chile, since the political conditions in Santiago, Chile were not conducive to holding the conference there. Unfortunately, COP25 went into overtime by two days and nights and even then, it was not possible to reach an agreement on some key topics. It was universally deemed to be a failure.

  • Preparing for the next cold wave

    Winter morn-ings in Bangladesh are usually associated with charming sights and sounds—dew drops on fallen brown leaves, shimmering colours formed by sun rays on spider webs, marigolds, dahlias and mustard flowers, and the singing of thousands of migratory birds in the haors, beels and lakes.

  • Capturing the demographic dividend while tackling climate change

    Bangladesh, quite rightly, has aspirations to meet the global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as well as the Climate Change goals by 2030, and then to graduate into being a middle income country by 2041.

  • Why do the most vulnerable communities receive so little of the climate change funds?

    All over the world, in poor and the richer countries, the communities that are the most vulnerable to the adverse impacts of climate change are generally the poorest ones.

  • Promoting South-South cooperation to tackle climate change

    As Bangla-desh prepares to graduate from the Least Developed Countries (LDC) category in the next few years, we need to plan our relationship with other LDCs in the context of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

  • Time for a new direction as Bangladesh moves to take the helm

    The Climate Vulnerable Forum (CVF) currently consists of 48 vulnerable developing countries from all the different groups of ...

  • What lies ahead for climate change

    As we enter the new year of 2020, we are in fact making a very significant transition when it comes to the issue of climate change.

  • Highlights from 2019 and the path ahead

    As this is my last column for 2019, I am going to share some of its highlights and also my verdict on the year as well as some reflections on the next year and the next decade.

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