Category: Daily Star Article
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Is 100 percent renewable energy feasible?
Midway through the two-week-long 22nd Conference of Parties (COP22) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) held in November 2016 in Marrakech, Morocco, the presidential election results in the USA were announced. The result, Trump winning the election, was like a bombshell in the COP. First, US citizens, both in the official…
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A year after Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement
A year has passed since President Trump announced that the United States would formally withdraw from the Paris Agreement on Climate Change. What has happened since has been a mixture of good and bad—but on the whole, more good than bad. The obvious bad news was that the biggest and richest country was reneging on…
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Designing adaptation projects for the Green Climate Fund
The Green Climate Fund (GCF) was set up under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) to channel much of the USD 100 billion a year starting from 2020 onwards that the developed countries have promised to provide to developing countries to tackle climate change through both mitigation and adaptation projects and activities.…
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Green Climate Fund: Still a work in progress
The Green Climate Fund (GCF) was created under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) to channel USD 100 billion a year starting from 2020 onwards, which the developed countries have pledged to provide to developing countries to tackle climate change through both mitigation as well as adaptation activities. The Secretariat of the…
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Fixing the rules for climate change action from Fiji to Poland
The Paris Agreement on Climate Change adopted at the 21st Conference of Parties (COP 21) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) held in December 2015 is the road map for all countries to tackle climate change by 2030. However, the rule book for the countries to follow will have to be…
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The battle over terminology: Adaptation vs resilience
In the negotiations under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), every word used can be contested between countries (sometimes they even argue for hours about a coma!). Hence every term has to be accepted by consensus by all the countries for it to be adopted in any UNFCCC decision. Under these circumstances…
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Time to make polluters pay for climate change
At the 19th Conference of Parties (COP19) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) held in Warsaw, Poland in 2013, there was a breakthrough agreement to set up the Warsaw International Mechanism (WIM) on Loss and Damage with its Executive Committee having equal representation from developed and developing countries. Bangladesh was also…
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Building national capacity to tackle climate change
Under Article 6 of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), all countries are supposed to ensure awareness, education and capacity building to tackle climate change with the developed countries also promising to support these efforts in the developing countries. Each year, at the annual Conference of the Parties (COP), there is a…
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The ‘Talanoa Dialogue’ on Climate Change
The 196 countries that are signatories to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) meet each year around December at the annual Conference of Parties (COP) to review progress on implementing the decisions. The COP moves to a different continent each year as each continent hosts it in turn. The last (23rd) conference,…
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Updating Bangladesh’s climate change strategy and action plan
In 2009 Bangladesh developed and released the Bangladesh Climate Change Strategy and Action Plan (BCCSAP) which was the first of its kind at that time. It was a remarkable document for a number of reasons. Firstly, it was developed entirely by Bangladeshi experts with Bangladesh government’s own funds, rather than by international consultants funded by…
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Building climate resilient, migrant-friendly cities
A recent report from the World Bank has looked at the potential number of people who will be displaced and become climate migrants due to the adverse impacts of climate change around the world by 2050. The report estimated the number to be around 140 million across Asia and Africa, with 40 million in South…
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Risks and opportunities of LDC graduation
The prime minister, the government and the people of Bangladesh can be justly proud that the country will now be able to graduate out of the Least Developed Country (LDC) status within the next few years. However, this graduation comes with both risks as well as opportunities. The first risk is that we will lose…