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 socio-economic parameters, Bangladesh can be …

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 was relatively simple, as it …

The development gains and hard-earned productivity of Bangladesh are at risk of being inverted if the 1.5 degree Celsius limit of the Paris Agreement is breached. To that end, it remains imperative to equip vulnerable communities, key sectors and the government with vital instruments to bring about resilience and stability for all. At the end of last year, Bangladesh’s Prime …

In past weeks, there have been a number of significant events which may seem unconnected but are actually deeply connected in terms of whether the world is able to successfully come out of the current Covid-19 pandemic and also deal with the looming catastrophe of climate change. The first event was Cyclone Yaas, which hit India more than Bangladesh but …

The leaders of the G7 countries—consisting of the US, UK, Canada, Japan, Italy, France and Germany—will be holding their annual meeting in the UK in the second week of June and have a number of major issues on their agenda, including how to roll out global vaccination against the coronavirus and how to tackle climate change. What do they need …

The world is having to tackle three major emergencies at the same time. The first is obviously the Covid-19 pandemic that is still raging around the world, the second is climate change, which is also getting much worse every year, and finally, there is biodiversity loss, which will mean the loss of up to a million species if we cannot …

The year 2020 will be remembered as not just the year of the pandemic, but also for the experienced human-induced climate change impacts, making loss and damage from those impacts a reality. What this means is that every climate-related hazard such as heatwaves, droughts, floods and cyclones are no longer entirely natural events, but have become more severe because the …

Last week, I wrote in this daily about the need for Bangladesh to take a “whole of society” approach to international diplomacy on tackling climate change globally, rather than depending on the annual Conference of Parties (COP) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) which meets only once a year for two weeks. Climate change is now …

One can argue that the issue of tackling climate change in Bangladesh has already achieved a whole-of-government approach, and is also rapidly moving towards a whole-of-society approach. However, our international diplomacy on tackling climate change also needs to develop both approaches. What do these two terms mean, and how are they being rolled out? The whole-of-government approach means that not …

One of the positive outcomes of the Paris Agreement on Climate Change back in 2015 was a pledge from the rich countries to provide USD 100 billion a year, starting from 2020, to help the poorer countries tackle climate change through both mitigation and adaptation actions. However, the year 2020 has come and gone, but this pledge was not delivered. …