Tag: The Daily Star
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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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Thinking outside the box
The issue of loss and damage from climate change has been a politically sensitive topic in the negotiations under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) as developed countries see it as opening the way for claiming compensation from them based on their liability. However, there have been several breakthroughs on the issue…
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Tackling poverty and climate change at the same time
Over the coming decades, at the global level as well as in Bangladesh we will be faced with two major challenges: tackling poverty and climate change. Although at first glance the two issues may not seem to be linked, I will argue that we cannot tackle either without also tackling the other at the same…
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We have crossed the tipping point on climate change
Until now, scientists working on climate change have been talking about the scenarios, forecasts and even predictions of adverse impacts due to human induced climate change that would occur in the future if we failed to prevent it from happening. However, in the last twelve months or so the same scientists have now been saying…
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A note on the environmental aspects of Rohingya camps
It has been nearly a year since the latest influx of the Rohingya people after they were forcibly driven out of Myanmar and into Bangladesh. Since last August, over 700,000 refugees, mostly women and children, have been housed, fed, clothed and provided with medical attention by a combination of Bangladesh’s military and civilian authorities and…
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Limiting global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees
In the run-up to the negotiations under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in its 21st Conference of Parties (COP21) in December 2015, one of the most politically contentious issues was whether the limit of the long-term global temperature rise should be kept at 2 degrees centigrade or changed to 1.5 degrees.…
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What we can learn from the Green Climate Fund crisis
The Green Climate Fund (GCF) was created under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) to channel up to USD 100 billion a year from 2020 onwards from the developed countries to the developing countries to help them tackle climate change through both mitigation and adaptation projects. The fund started four years ago…
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Answering the Talanoa Dialogue questions
At the 23rd Conference of Parties (COP23) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), held last December under the presidency of the prime minister of Fiji, a new feature called the Talanoa Dialogue was introduced. Talanoa Dialogue is a traditional form of decision-making in the Pacific which is very different from the…