SCENARIO BUILDING AND THE SDGS 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 …

What do young people from the countryside think about the past and present? In March, Oxfam Bangladesh organized focus group discussions with 46 rural young people in Bakerganj, Barisal, and Puthiya, Rajshahi, asking them about their lives and their futures. Almost all of them wanted to leave agriculture and the rural areas. One major reason cited was the stigma they …

Creating development pathways for alternative futures When Henry Kissinger infamously said in 1971 that Bangladesh would be a famine-prone “basket case,” he could not have predicted that less than 50 years later the country would have moved from the brink of starvation to being well on the way to middle-income status, and become a shining star for development success in …

What global warming may mean for the Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna Delta It may take centuries for us to discern the slow onset consequences of sea-level rise — impacts that will be felt long after our lifetimes. While rapidly reducing greenhouse gas emissions from the atmosphere will slow sea-level rise, by no means will it erase the already occurring impacts of climate change. …

Implementing the Paris Agreement The history of the UN climate process begins in 1992 when the global community adopted the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). This eventually led to the Kyoto Protocol of 1997, which required developed countries to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. However, in 2015, the Paris Agreement was adopted providing news dimensions for national and …

Lack of proper frameworks to address challenges of climate change and how to analyze them has been glaringly missing from the past capacity building initiatives by development partners across the globe, particularly after the Paris Agreement which established the Paris Committee on Capacity Building under Article 11. Under this scenario, the world’s wealthiest nations have been emitting more than their …

Are we prepared enough with the uneven progress made in bangkok climate talks? The resumed 48th sessions of the Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice (SBSTA 48-2) and Subsidiary Body for Implementation (SBI 48-2) as well as the Ad Hoc Working Group on the Paris Agreement (APA 1-6) took place from September 4-9, 2018, at the United Nations Conference …

Time to set up a global fund to pay for loss and damage from climate change 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 have seen it as opening the way for claiming compensation from them based …

A number of factors explain why women are more vulnerable to disasters The resumed 48th sessions of the Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice (SBSTA 48-2) and Subsidiary Body for Implementation (SBI 48-2) on the Paris Agreement (APA 1-6) has started at the United Nations Conference Centre (UNCC), Bangkok, Thailand. The negotiation is also going to discuss loss and …

New paradigms Currently, there are upwards of one million Rohingya refugees living in Cox’s Bazar. For all the talk of moving the Rohingya elsewhere, such as Bashan Char Island, or repatriating them to Myanmar, it is almost certain that they will remain where they are for an indefinite period of time. History has shown that the average age of a …