Saleemul Huq

The historic Paris Agreement on Climate Change, agreed at the 21st Conference of Parties (COP21) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Paris, France in 2015, was a major outcome that all vulnerable developing countries, including Bangladesh, strongly fought for.

In last week’s column, I proposed that the Bangladesh National Adaptation Plan (NAP) that is now being developed should be innovative and not just a business-as-usual (BAU) report that will gather dust on a shelf, as many such plans have done in the past.

Under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), all countries are supposed to develop their respective National Adaptation Plan (NAP) according to a prescribed format provided by international experts.

Last week, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and former UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon jointly launched the new South Asian Regional office of the Global Centre on Adaptation (GCA).

During July last year, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina hosted the Global Commission on Adaptation meeting in Dhaka attended by the co-chairs of the Commission, former Secretary General of the United Nations Ban Ki-moon and Kristalina Georgiva, head of the International Monetary Fund.

In the international negotiations on climate change impacts under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the issue of loss and damage has always been a politically sensitive topic—it brings up issues of liability and compensation, which many developed countries regard as taboo topics.

The global Covid-19 pandemic is now just over half a year old and arguably still in its early stages.

In January 2021, the International Centre for Climate Change and Development at the Independent University, Bangladesh will be holding the 7th annual Gobeshona conference with an overall theme of starting a ten year journey to promote locally led adaptation towards resilience in Bangladesh, as well as in other vulnerable developing countries, including the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) and the Climate Vulnerable Forum (CVF) countries.

As Bangladesh is inundated by severe floods not long after being hit by super cyclone Amphan, we are seeing the adverse impacts of human induced climate change in reality.

One of the distinguishing features of the global Covid-19 pandemic has been to expose who the frontline workers around the world are and who the frontline victims of the pandemic are, both from the public health perspective and as a result of the impact of lockdown measures.

The adverse impacts of human induced climate change are already occurring around the world, including in Bangladesh.

The government of the United Kingdom has had a very cordial relationship with Bangladesh since our independence and the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) has been a significant bilateral development partner for many years.

Earlier this month, the Finance Minister of Bangladesh presented a special Climate Change Budget as part of the national budget for the fiscal year 2020-21, which accounts for approximately 7.5 percent of the national budget.

Last week, Bangladesh formally took over the leadership of the group of nearly 50 countries in the Climate Vulnerable Forum (CVF) for the next two years.

As Bangladesh assumes the leadership of the Climate Vulnerable Forum (CVF) for the next two years, including at the next Conference of Parties (COP26) to be held in Glasgow, Scotland in November 2021, there is an opportunity for Bangladesh to push for the issue of loss and damage from climate change to be made a central topic for discussion at COP26. This is quite a politically sensitive issue that goes well beyond mitigation and adaptation, which have been the main focus of climate change conferences until now.

In the last few weeks, the world has been having to deal with the double emergency of the pandemic as well as climate change, while Bangladesh and West Bengal had to deal with a triple emergency, with super cyclone Amphan hitting us quite badly.

The current Covid-19 pandemic emergency is combining with the climate change emergency as we speak, and as we tackle the first, we also need to tackle the second at the same time.

I had written in a previous column about the fact that the next Conference of Parties (COP26) under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which was to have been held in November 2020 in Glasgow, Scotland with the United Kingdom as COP26 President, had to be postponed to 2021 due to the global Covid-19 pandemic.

One of the key revelations of the Covid-19 pandemic is that things that we held to be true in the past are now seen to have been myths, and as we transition from the old order into a new (and hopefully better) order going forward, we can build a better world by fixing much of what was wrong with the old world.

One of the biggest lessons coming out of the Covid-19 pandemic is that we are living in an interlinked world where no country can cut itself off for very long and no country can tackle the problem by itself. This lesson is even more true as we battle the double whammy of Covid-19 and the climate change.