Category: Daily Star Article
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Making polluters pay for loss and damage
The recent devastation in Mozambique due to two successive hurricanes (Aida and Kenneth) of unprecedented severity for southern Africa, are a clear indicator that we are now living in a climate changed world. And that the huge loss and damage sustained by the people of Mozambique is due to human-induced climate change and not just…
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How the Green Climate Fund can be more effective
It has now been well over five years since the Green Climate Fund (GCF) was set up with its headquarters in Songdo, Korea to support both mitigation and adaptation projects and programmes in developing countries. It received an initial contribution of around USD 10 billion and is now undergoing a review of its performance in…
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Children are at risk due to climate change, but they are also sources of solutions
A recent report from Unicef mentions that 19 million (or one in three) children in Bangladesh are at risk from the effects of climate change. This is indeed an alarming potential risk for the country. However, all such reports about future adverse impacts of future climate change have an unwritten codicil which says “if we…
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Time to enhance global support to the most vulnerable communities
The massive cyclone Idai that devastated Mozambique, Malawi and Zimbabwe last week has destroyed 90 percent of Beira, the second biggest city in Mozambique. This was a cyclone of unprecedented severity for that part of Africa and has been rightly attributed to human-induced climate change by the scientific community. Hence, we are now unequivocally living…
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How children are educating adults on climate change
Over the last two decades or more, the global scientific community has been raising the alarm about climate change, through the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which were then considered by the governments of the world at the annual Conference of Parties (COP) under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate…
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A talking point for COP25 -A realistic approach needed to fund loss and damage from climate change
The topic of loss and damage from human-induced climate change has been a highly politically sensitive issue in international negotiations under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) for many years with vulnerable developing countries, including Bangladesh, arguing in its favour and the rich countries arguing against it. In recent years, there have…
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Why we should set our sights on climate diplomacy
Over the last two decades, the issue of global climate change has shifted from being primarily an environmental issue to a global security and diplomatic issue as well. Hence many countries have shifted responsibility from the ministry of environment to the foreign ministry as the focal ministry to handle the issue. This is also a…
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ROHINGYA CRISIS- Environmental challenges that can’t be ignored
It is now well over a year since nearly 700,000 Rohingyas were forced out of Myanmar and Bangladesh opened its borders to them and gave them shelter in the Cox’s Bazar region. The immediate emergency period is coming to an end and the government of Bangladesh as well as all the international and national agencies…
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Climate change, a global security threat -Early action is needed to avoid worst case scenario
In the last week of January, the United Nations Security Council in New York held a special session on climate change as a global security threat. It was not the first time such a session had been held but it was by far a much more alarmist session as we now acknowledge that human-induced climate…
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Aligning climate plans for a greater impact
Bangladesh has a long tradition of national development planning under the aegis of the General Economics Division (GED) of the Planning Commission, through the seven Five Year Plans prepared since we became an independent country. Recently, there have been a number of additional types of planning which will need to be well-aligned if we wish…
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Bangladesh starts its journey towards climate resilience
At the beginning of January 2019 Bangladesh started to take the required steps to become a climate resilient country by 2030 by achieving transformational adaptation to climate change impacts. While there are many strands to fulfil this important strategy, one of the first is to generate, disseminate and use good quality scientific knowledge so that…