Category: Daily Star Article
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Can Bangladesh become a knowledgeable economy?
Over the next decade, there are going to be four mega global trends that all countries in the world will have to deal with. The first is the global impacts of human induced climate change which will be felt in all countries both rich and poor. While efforts to keep global mean temperature below 1.5…
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Tackling global climate change
The year 2020 is going to be remembered for a long time to come as being a pivotal year in the global war against human induced climate change. This new decade will be crucial in determining whether or not we will be able to successfully tackle what is morphing from a climate change problem into…
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COP25 mistakes must not be repeated in Glasgow
The 25th annual Conference of Parties (COP25) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was held in November 2019 in Madrid, Spain under the presidency of Chile, since the political conditions in Santiago, Chile were not conducive to holding the conference there. Unfortunately, COP25 went into overtime by two days and nights…
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Capturing the demographic dividend while tackling climate change
Bangladesh, quite rightly, has aspirations to meet the global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as well as the Climate Change goals by 2030, and then to graduate into being a middle income country by 2041. It is commonly acknowledged that the key to achieving both these goals lies in educating and empowering the young girls and…
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Why do the most vulnerable communities receive so little of the climate change funds?
All over the world, in poor and the richer countries, the communities that are the most vulnerable to the adverse impacts of climate change are generally the poorest ones. However, as there are far more poor communities in developing countries, the vast majority of the globally most vulnerable communities are in the poorest developing countries.…
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Promoting South-South cooperation to tackle climate change
As Bangla-desh prepares to graduate from the Least Developed Countries (LDC) category in the next few years, we need to plan our relationship with other LDCs in the context of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Bangladesh has been a very active member of the LDC Group, which in turn has become…
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CLIMATE VULNERABLE FORUM Time for a new direction as Bangladesh moves to take the helm
The Climate Vulnerable Forum (CVF) currently consists of 48 vulnerable developing countries from all the different groups of vulnerable countries under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The CVF was formed by then President Nasheed of the Maldives in 2009 in the run up to the fifteenth Conference of Parties (COP15) held…
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What lies ahead for climate change
As we enter the new year of 2020, we are in fact making a very significant transition when it comes to the issue of climate change. The first transition is a semantic one, but nevertheless a very significant one, namely that in 2019 we acknowledged that the climate change problem has become the climate change…
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CLIMATE NEGOTIATIONS UNDER UNFCCC An effective platform for branding Bangladesh
The 25th Conference of Parties (COP25) of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) ended just days ago. Already, many reviews, mostly negative, have come out globally including in this newspaper. I called the COPs often a process of “active inaction” in my first book on climate politics published by Routledge in 2014. The…
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CLIMATE CHANGE Highlights from 2019 and the path ahead
As this is my last column for 2019, I am going to share some of its highlights and also my verdict on the year as well as some reflections on the next year and the next decade. In terms of the climate change issue, there were a number of important turning points in 2019. The…
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COP25: Another round of active inaction
The UN’s longest-ever climate negotiations, continuing non-stop for almost two extra days, drew to a close on December 15 with not much to celebrate. Nations on both sides—developed and developing—held hardline positions resulting in utter disappointment, so expressed grudgingly by the UN Secretary General himself. Countries failed to agree on many of the sought-after outcomes,…
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COP25: Long but barely fruitful
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…