Saleemul Huq

As nearly the entire globe remains in lockdown and international travel is almost at a standstill, international meetings are being cancelled and often replaced by conference calls on Zoom and other online meeting platforms.

The Covid-19 pandemic is still having severe impacts on many countries and it is not at all clear how long it will take to play out globally.

The Covid-19 pandemic is still making its way around the world and it will be some time before it is over. Nevertheless, even at this early stage, there are some lessons that can be drawn on regarding how best to be prepared to deal with the much bigger problem of climate change impacts which will be coming soon after.

The Climate Change Emergency has been declared first by the youth, led by Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg and her Fridays for Future movement of school children striking every Friday to urge leaders to treat climate change as a truly global emergency.

The Bangladesh parliament, led by the parliamentary standing committee on environment, recently declared a planetary emergency in Bangladesh. This is ground breaking in that most other parliaments around the world have declared a climate change emergency, but none have also added a biodiversity emergency as the Bangladesh parliament has. So ours is a twin track emergency, not just a single track.

Over the next decade, there are going to be four mega global trends that all countries in the world will have to deal with.

The year 2020 is going to be remembered for a long time to come as being a pivotal year in the global war against human induced climate change.

The 25th annual Conference of Parties (COP25) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was held in November 2019 in Madrid, Spain under the presidency of Chile, since the political conditions in Santiago, Chile were not conducive to holding the conference there. Unfortunately, COP25 went into overtime by two days and nights and even then, it was not possible to reach an agreement on some key topics. It was universally deemed to be a failure.

Bangladesh, quite rightly, has aspirations to meet the global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as well as the Climate Change goals by 2030, and then to graduate into being a middle income country by 2041.

All over the world, in poor and the richer countries, the communities that are the most vulnerable to the adverse impacts of climate change are generally the poorest ones.

As Bangla-desh prepares to graduate from the Least Developed Countries (LDC) category in the next few years, we need to plan our relationship with other LDCs in the context of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

The Climate Vulnerable Forum (CVF) currently consists of 48 vulnerable developing countries from all the different groups of ...

As we enter the new year of 2020, we are in fact making a very significant transition when it comes to the issue of climate change.

As this is my last column for 2019, I am going to share some of its highlights and also my verdict on the year as well as some reflections on the next year and the next decade.

The 25th Conference of Parties (COP25) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) started on December 2 and was due to finish after about two weeks, on December 13 (Friday).

The 25th Conference of Parties (COP25) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) being held in Madrid

The 25th annual Conference of the Parties (COP25) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) opened in Madrid, Spain on Monday with a high-level event of the Climate Vulnerable Forum (CVF).

The global negotiations on how to tackle climate change take place in December at the annual Conference of Parties (COP) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)

The Bangladesh parliament has declared a planetary emergency in a resolution adopted a few days ago. This is indeed a major initiative and the parliamentarians should be applauded for it.

The 15th annual global microinsurance conference was held last week in Bangladesh for the first time with the theme of “Coping with climate risk”. It was inaugurated by the