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. This is the fourth year in succession that the Climate Change Budget has been included to cover 25 different ministries across the government. The total …

Climate change and disaster risks are increasingly affecting the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) across the world. Bangladesh, a lower- middle-income country which graduated from the LDC status in 2015, is no exception. In this backdrop, the Department of Environment, Ministry of Environment and Forests is executing the Formulation and Advancement of the National Adaptation Plan (NAP) Process funded by the …

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. The governance of the CVF is through a Troika system, with the current chair and the two previous chairs making collective decisions. Thus, the Minister of Marshall Islands as the previous chair and the …

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 …

As the COVID-19 pandemic grips the world with unfolding health, economic and social impacts, grassroots communities are developing their own coping mechanisms in the face of the crisis. It is important to capture and document these stories in real time as the world faces up to an even longer term challenge of climate change. Voices from the Frontline is a …

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. Unfortunately, such multiple emergencies are no longer going to be rare going forward. So we need …

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. The next major opportunity to tackle the climate change emergency will be at the 26th Conference of Parties (COP26) to be held in Glasgow, Scotland next year. Prime …

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. I would …

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 …

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. Therefore, one of …