Gobeshona goes global due to Covid pandemic

The Gobeshona platform of universities and research Institutes doing research on climate change in Bangladesh was created in 2013 with a handful of members and has now grown to over fifty members. During that time it has supported a monthly webinar for researchers to share their research with each other and also held an annual conference over four days hosted by the Independent University Bangladesh with several hundred participants from Bangladesh as well as from outside Bangladesh.

However in 2021 due to the covid pandemic, the annual conference could not be held in person so we decided to hold it entirely online instead. As it was now going to be online we reached out to friends around the world inviting them to run online sessions to share their own experiences and work.

The response we got was overwhelming and we decided to run nearly a hundred sessions over 24 hours each day over seven days with three eight-hour segments first for the Asia Pacific region and then for the Africa and Europe time zones and the final eight hours for the Americas.

The overall theme for the conference was Locally Led Adaptation (LLA) and there were sessions from Japan to India, to Bangladesh to Nepal, to Africa, Europe, and the Americas.

It was such a great success that we have decided to keep the annual Gobeshona conference online and also keep it as a Global Conference on LLA going forward.

So in March 2022, we held the second Global Gobeshona Conference on LLA with the theme of linking local to Global decision-making with a focus on the upcoming 27th Conference of Parties (COP27) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) to be held in November 2022 in Sharm Al Shaikh, Egypt.

This year we again had nearly a hundred sessions from around the world and are sharing some of the outputs from the sessions in this special issue of Climate Tribune.

We hope our readers will find them interesting and useful.