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 …

The Paris Agreement (PA) on climate change which was achieved at the 21st conference of Parties (COP21) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Paris in December 2015 was historic in several ways. Firstly, it, unlike its predecessor the Kyoto Protocol, which only required developed countries to take actions to reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases, …

Over the next two to three decades, there are two major overarching trends that Bangladesh will have to deal with, and therefore have to plan for as well. The first trend is a positive one, which is our desire, and indeed commitment, to graduating out of Least Developed Country (LDC) status within less than a decade. The second, more negative …

Assessing the GCF’s performance on funding adaptation for the most vulnerable countries By the end of this year, the Green Climate Fund (GCF) — the main international fund designated to help countries address climate change — will have been active for six years. At this point, it would be a good time to reflect back and evaluate the progress of …

Bangladesh has just hosted a big international conference on migration as the co-chair, with Germany, of the Global Forum on Migration and Development. While the focus of the Conference was mostly on the current problems related to international migration there was some discussion of the possible impacts of climate change on migration in the future. There was also the launching …