Tag: The Daily Star
-
Can we get some solid progress in climate action, please?
Last week, a number of events were held around the world to promote actions to tackle climate change and get everyone ready ahead of the 26th UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26), to be held in Glasgow, Scotland in November this year. The week started off with a high-level meeting at the United…
-
Delivering climate finance is the key to COP26 success
This week, United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres held a high-level meeting on climate change in New York, where Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina was one of the leaders invited to add momentum to the actions needed to tackle climate change before the upcoming climate conference, COP26, hosted by the United Kingdom and scheduled to be…
-
Tackling climate emergency requires a global pact
The impacts of the recent hurricane Ida in the United States, which killed more than 50 people and caused floods as far as in New York, was acknowledged by President Joe Biden as being more severe because of human-induced climate change. The same has been proven unequivocally by the science of attribution for having raised…
-
Young people can be saviours in dealing with climate change
In just the last few days, there have been two major reports from the United Nations on the status of global climate change and our efforts to tackle it. The first was on the science of climate change impacts by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which, in its sixth assessment report, confirmed…
-
We must urgently prioritise adaptation to address the climate emergency
The recently-published report of Working Group-I of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is a renewed wakeup call on the urgency of taking action at the global level to address climate change. It has, with more accuracy and confidence, confirmed that at least one degree Celsius of temperature rise compared to pre-industrial level can…
-
Latest IPCC climate report shows time is running out to save the planet
The science of climate change is assessed every six or so years under the aegis of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which was set up several decades ago by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO)—and it consists of the governments of all UN member states. The IPCC…
-
The era of loss and damage from climate change is upon usWe must act immediately if we are to avert its worst impacts
Over the last week of July 2021, we all watched on our TV screens as the heat dome and wildfires in north-western US and Canada took many lives and destroyed the town of Lytton in Canada. Then, the devastating floods in Germany and Belgium cost several hundred lives, followed by more loss of lives from…
-
Delivery of climate finance will be the key to COP26
The upcoming 26th Conference of Parties (COP26) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is to be held in Glasgow, Scotland in November, with the United Kingdom as the host. The incoming COP26 President designate Alok Sharma has rightly said that the delivery of the “totemic 100 billion US Dollar” in climate…
-
Vulnerable countries take the lead in tackling climate change
Last week, Bangladesh hosted the climate finance summit called by the nearly 50 vulnerable developing countries that are part of the Climate Vulnerable Forum (CVF), which is chaired by Bangladesh for the current two-year term. The summit was moderated by the former President of the Maldives, Mohamed Nasheed, who is the CVF Ambassador for Ambition,…
-
Bangladesh needs to invest in climate diplomacy
As Bangladesh aims to graduate out of Least Developed Country (LDC) status over the next few years and become more intimately involved in various international activities and issues, we need to make tackling climate change a national and diplomatic priority as well. This means that every new Bangladeshi diplomat should have a basic understanding of…
-
Building back a greener Bangladesh
The title of this article has been borrowed from an on-line discussion organised by the Policy Research Institute on June 20, 2021. I was a panelist at the event, which some current and former World Bank officials had participated in, together with most of the famous environmental experts of Bangladesh. With its physical and…
-
Is a global goal on adaptation possible?
At the historic Paris Agreement on Climate Change made at the 21st Conference of Parties (COP21) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in 2015, all the countries of the world agreed on a global goal on mitigation as well as setting a global goal on adaptation. The global goal on mitigation…