The 25th Conference of Parties (COP25) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) started on December 2 and was due to finish after about two weeks, on December 13 (Friday). However, it went into overtime for non-stop negotiations through Friday night and Saturday day and night, to finally finish two days late on Sunday afternoon. It is …

The 25th Conference of Parties (COP25) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) being held in Madrid, Spain is now half way through with the technical level negotiations having been completed and the ministers now arriving in to lock the final political agreements. There are two major politically sensitive issues which will have to be addressed by …

The 25th annual Conference of the Parties (COP25) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) opened in Madrid, Spain on Monday with a high-level event of the Climate Vulnerable Forum (CVF). There, in the presence of UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, the current chair of the CVF, President Hilda Heine of the Marshall Islands, announced that she would …

Dr Saleemul Huq, director of International Centre for Climate Change and Development (ICCCAD) and one of the World’s 100 Most Influential People in Climate Policy for 2019, speaks with DhakaTribune's Mehedi Al Amin about Bangladesh’s priorities in the upcoming COP25. This is the first of a three-part series What will the negotiation be like this year at the COP25? Under the …

The global negotiations on how to tackle climate change take place in December at the annual Conference of Parties (COP) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which is hosted in a different continent each year. This year it was the turn of South America, and COP25 was supposed to have been held in Santiago, Chile from …

The Bangladesh parliament has declared a planetary emergency in a resolution adopted a few days ago. This is indeed a major initiative and the parliamentarians should be applauded for it. Although other countries’ parliaments—such as the United Kingdom—had declared climate emergency, Bangladesh is the first country to declare a planetary emergency. The difference is that the notion of a planetary …

The Bangladeshi scholar Saleemul Huq has been observing international climate negotiations from the start. In our interview, he assessed the EU’s role. In what sense is the EU important in climate talks? It is extremely important because it is a block of rich nations which are still willing to be ambitious. By contrast, the USA under President Donald Trump is …

The 15th annual global microinsurance conference was held last week in Bangladesh for the first time with the theme of “Coping with climate risk”. It was inaugurated by the prime minister who felt that the insurance industry could play a key role in not only managing recovery from natural disasters, but also in tackling climate change in the future. The …