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), which is hosted in a different continent each year. This year it was the turn of South America, and COP25 was supposed to have been held in Santiago, Chile from …

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. Although other countries’ parliaments—such as the United Kingdom—had declared climate emergency, Bangladesh is the first country to declare a planetary emergency. The difference is that the notion of a planetary …

The Bangladeshi scholar Saleemul Huq has been observing international climate negotiations from the start. In our interview, he assessed the EU’s role. In what sense is the EU important in climate talks? It is extremely important because it is a block of rich nations which are still willing to be ambitious. By contrast, the USA under President Donald Trump is …

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 prime minister who felt that the insurance industry could play a key role in not only managing recovery from natural disasters, but also in tackling climate change in the future. The …

Bangladesh is facing two global megatrends with significant national repercussions. The first is the rapidly urbanising world we live in, where half the global population is already living in cities and towns and Bangladesh will soon cross that threshold as well. The government of Bangladesh under the direction of the prime minister has taken up the policy to enable every …

Humanity has made a “tragic, desperate mess” of the planet, said Sir David Attenborough, the 93-year-old naturalist and documentary filmmaker on announcing his new series of documentaries called “Seven Worlds, One Planet” due to be broadcast on the BBC. He has spent a lifetime making iconic documentaries on the natural wonders of both the earth as well as the oceans …

We are all immensely proud of the economic development being achieved by Bangladesh and looking forward to our graduation from Least Developed Country (LDC) status to middle income country status within the next few years. However, as we move our development pathway forward we are facing a very significant fork in the road ahead and we will have to make …

Last week in New York, the United Nations Secretary General (UNSG) Antonia Guitteres held a Global Action Summit where he invited world leaders from selected countries only to come with “plans not speeches” to raise the level of ambition to tackle climate change. Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina was amongst those invited but US President Trump was not (although he …

We have known about the denial of climate change by president Trump of the United States and that he has decided to withdraw his country from the Paris Agreement and is also actively undermining efforts in the US to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. However, joining Greta Thunberg on the climate strike and march in New York on Friday, along …

Leaders from developing and developed countries are converging on New York for the UN Climate Action Summit next week (September 23). The purpose is to declare the concrete steps they are taking to lower their carbon emissions so they can meet the targets agreed at the 2015 UN climate summit in Paris. One element to make it possible for the …