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. There are also a number of governments supporting the new Commission, including Bangladesh, and around twenty eminent …

The United Nation’s scientific body on climate change, namely the Intergovernmental 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. The report has a controversial history. The consensus on the long-term global temperature …

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). The countries in the CVF, which included Bangladesh as a founding member, were from Asia, Africa and Latin America and belonged to different negotiating groups in the United Nations Framework …

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 …

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. However, there have been several breakthroughs on the issue including the Warsaw International Mechanism …

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 …

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. However, in the last twelve months or so the same scientists have now been saying with a great deal of …

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. Thus, Bangladesh is now globally well known to be one of the most vulnerable countries to climate change. The government and people of Bangladesh …

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 …

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. Bangladesh, as part of the …