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 boys who will become the …

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. Hence, at the international climate …

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 a very strong negotiating group …

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 in December 2009 in Copenhagen, …

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 “emergency”. This means that we …

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 zenith of its failure was …

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 first, and by far the …

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, including rules to set up …

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 on Sunday afternoon. It is …

The 25th Conference of Parties (COP25) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) being held in Madrid, Spain is now half way through with the technical level negotiations having been completed and the ministers now arriving in to lock the final political agreements. There are two major politically sensitive issues which will have to be addressed by …