Saleemul Huq

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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. 

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 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.

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 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.

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 stem the tide.

The year 2020 will be remembered as not just the year of the pandemic, but also for the experienced human-induced climate change impacts,

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.

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.

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.

Under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), all governments of the nearly 200 countries that have ratified the treaty meet twice a year to review progress and make decisions about next steps.

US President Biden’s first act upon being sworn in as President on January 20, 2021, was to officially notify the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) that he was withdrawing former President Trump’s withdrawal letter from the Paris Agreement on Climate Change and that the United States was rejoining the Paris Agreement.

The United Kingdom—as the incoming President of the 26th Conference of Parties (COP26) under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), to be held in Glasgow, Scotland in November—held a ministerial meeting on March 31 to discuss the issue of raising adequate funds for enabling developing countries to tackle climate change.

As Bangladesh celebrated 50 years as an independent country this year, it also reached the 50th year of British-Bangladesh relations.

As we are now well into the second decade of this century, it is widely acknowledged that this coming decade is our last opportunity to keep the increasing rate of the global atmospheric temperature below 1.5 degrees Celsius and prevent the catastrophic impacts of human-induced climate change from occurring around the world.