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. During the bilateral discussion between the Prime Minister and Ban Ki-moon, she offered to host the regional centre …

Highlights • Rural livelihoods are intrinsically connected with seasonal climate fluctuations. • Rural livelihoods get more economic benefits from the local ecosystem services (ES) during monsoon and post-monsoon months. • Livelihoods of ES dependent are vulnerable in the pre-monsoon season. • Communities are increasingly diversifying their livelihood strategies to non-ES sectors. • Non-ES dependent livelihoods enjoy increasingly better economic security. …

Finding solutions to the global problem of climate change Last week, Bangladesh hosted a major global climate change meeting in Dhaka, hosted by Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina with Ban Ki-moon, former secretary general of the United Nations, Chief Executive Kristalina Georgieva from the World Bank, and President Heine of the Marshall Islands present. The visiting dignitaries all praised the role …

This paper aims to understand how environmental stressors influence people’s livelihood options in the coastal belt of Bangladesh. We argue that environmental stressors such as cyclones, riverbank erosion, salinity intrusion, and floods have negative impacts on people’s lives by reducing their livelihood options. Twelve in-depth interviews (Livelihood Histories) and twelve Focus Group Discussions (FGD) based on two Participatory Rural Appraisal …

At the turn of the century, under the United Nations, all countries agreed to try to achieve a set of ten Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by 2015. Bangladesh was relatively successful at achieving most of them. Since then, all countries have negotiated and agreed upon a set of seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to be achieved by 2030. Besides the …

The haor basin in the northeastern part of Bangladesh is currently experiencing severe flash floods, causing considerable hardship to people, and destroying crops and other infrastructure. Some people are asking if this flood can be attributed to human-induced climate change. Firstly, it is important to distinguish weather events (like rains, cyclones and floods, etc.) from climate. The former happens on …

ADAPTATION TO CLIMATE CHANGE Apart of the historic Paris Agreement on Climate Change, agreed in 2015, was the pledge by developed countries to provide a minimum of USD 100 billion a year from 2020 onwards, to assist developing countries tackle climate change through both mitigation and adaptation. They also created a new funding body called the Green Climate Fund (GCF) …

Over the last decade, developed countries have contributed tens of billions of US dollars in climate finance to developing countries to support both mitigation actions (to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases that cause climate change), as well as adaptation (to tackle the adverse impacts of climate change). Most of the funding has gone to support mitigation actions in a few …

As the climate changes, Bangladesh is also changing. This is most obvious in terms of biophysical changes — stronger hurricanes, harder rainfall and more salinity — but it is also affecting the government’s budget, institutional systems, and the way it manages its finances. The question is as climate change accelerates, can Bangladesh change fast enough? There are many changes from …