By Saleemul Huq
Apr 8 2020 (IPS-Partners)

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. However, the scale and rapidity of the crisis has already revealed a number of aspects of the global economy and governance that we used to think were unchangeable realities. After the crisis is finally over, we will be faced with a fork in the road. One path will be to try to go back to business as usual as it was before the pandemic. The other path is an opportunity to forsake the “business as usual” model as no longer fit for purpose and move towards a completely different, and indeed much better, future. However, the decision on which path we want to choose will be made now and every decision we make is important in choosing which future pathway we will be on.

I will describe some of the things that can be described as the “old normal” and indicate the kind of decisions that can take us to the new (and better) normal.

The first major shift in global power dynamics that we can see before our eyes in real time is the transition of global leadership from USA to China. This was always expected to occur some time in the next decade or two, but it has happened in 2020! To pick just a couple of indicators, we have seen how the US under Trump’s leadership has completely cut itself off from the rest of the world and withdrawn into a fortress cut off from everyone else. At the same time, we are already seeing China emerge from its lockdown and begin to support other countries with tackling the virus as it hits them. China has sent doctors and medical teams to countries like Italy and have been sending testing kits and other necessary items to countries like Bangladesh. They have even sent equipment to the US. On this dimension alone, we are seeing the emergence of a new global leader tackling a global emergency.

Another important disruption of the old normal is our dependence on oil and other fossil fuels to provide energy to the global economy. As the global demand for oil drops drastically due to the lack of economic activity, the price war between the oil producers is removing the veil that used to protect their cartel-like collusion to keep prices higher than would be if it was a truly supply and demand market based product that it claimed to be.

This also points to what the new normal can be—when the oil and other fossil fuel companies go hat in hand to their respective governments for a massive bailout, they should be refused a single cent of subsidy from the public purse. This also applies to the airline industry, who do not deserve such handouts as well. Any decision to provide subsidies to fossil fuel companies will lock us into the old normal, which is the wrong way to go.

The third revelation that is happening before us is the visible role of the sectors of society that have the greatest value for human survival, and it is quite clear that scientists, along with medical and health workers, are clearly much more valuable than billionaires and even millionaires. Even the hospital cleaners and supermarket shelves stockers are more important now than the richest people who are staying at home.

The fourth revelation is not exactly unknown but has become absolutely stark with each passing day; and it is that the poorest individuals and households living in the informal settlements in the world’s biggest cities are amongst the most vulnerable, not just to the virus but also to the measures of social distancing being made around the world. An important observation in this respect is that the groups who are most vulnerable to coronavirus and to social distancing measures are also the same people who are amongst the most vulnerable to the adverse impacts of climate change.

Hence in terms of next steps, we will need to put in place policies and investment strategies that support the most vulnerable communities in each and every country, whether developed or developing. This speaks to whether we genuinely agree that we are all in this together, or we revert back to each of us looking out only for ourselves, whether as individuals or as countries.

Finally, the destruction of biodiversity and the potential of viruses to jump from animals to humans (which we had so far ignored) has revealed how shortsighted our actions have been. If we ignore this particular revelation and go back to business as usual, we will have shown that we are beyond redemption.

So what decisions are needed to change direction from the old normal towards the new (and better) normal?

Number one is for the presidents and prime ministers of each and every country to recognise that they cannot ignore scientific evidence. This has been demonstrated by the Covid-19 pandemic and will be even more true about climate change, going forward. Every leader who listened to scientists was able to reduce considerably the number of their citizens who lost their lives due to the virus.

Number two is the way that the massive economic stimulus will be allocated. This is a golden opportunity to redirect investment away from large corporations and towards people who matter, which includes smaller companies and even individuals. The time may finally be ripe for the adoption of a basic human income.

Number three is how the lessons from tackling the Covid-19 virus can be immediately applied towards meeting the even bigger threat of climate change that is still to come. This includes a rapid shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy immediately by removing the subsidies that the fossil fuel companies have received so far.

In the context of Bangladesh, we need to take every precaution against coronavirus making a big impact on the health of our citizens, while also minimising the negative impacts on the poorest and most vulnerable from the social distancing measures that have been applied so far. While we still have many hurdles ahead, we must join together as a country where each and every one of us recognises and takes actions to help each other, not because our Prime Minister told us what to do, but out of a sense of solidarity with our fellow citizens.

I will conclude by focusing on the most important aspect of the possible new normal—which is a world where all countries and people from all walks of life, whether rich or poor, retain a sense of solidarity with each other that is many times stronger than any sense of otherness between groups, whether on grounds of religion, race or class.

Out of crisis comes the opportunity to do things differently, and making a change in our attitudes is perhaps the single most important step that each and every one of us can take in order to usher in the new normal that we all want.

Saleemul Huq is Director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development at the Independent University Bangladesh.

This story was originally published by The Daily Star, Bangladesh

Thousands of children from different schools and colleges bring out a procession at Manik Mia Avenue expressing solidarity with the global climate strike. PHOTO: STAR/PRABIR DAS

By Saleemul Huq
Feb 26 2020 (IPS-Partners)

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.

While this is indeed a pioneering resolution, it will mean very little unless implemented.

The climate emergency side of the twin track declaration has already received significant priority within national planning and even budgeting by virtue of the clearly visible adverse impacts of climate change that Bangladesh has already started to face over the last few years.

The good news is that the government is about to publish the revised Bangladesh Climate Change Strategy and Action Plan (BCCSAP), which will take us to 2030, while the original BCCSAP from 2009 has reached its end. The most important element in the revised BCCSAP is that instead of having separate and parallel funds and projects for tackling climate change, we now need to rapidly shift into mainstreaming or integrating climate change actions into all national, sectoral and local level plans, as well as into every ministry’s and agency’s workplan going forward.

The upcoming preparation of the 8th Five Year Plan is a great opportunity for the Bangladesh government to again show how to integrate climate change into all chapters of the plan, and not just a stand-alone chapter for environment and climate change.

At the same time, the ministry of finance should be lauded for preparing a climate change budget every year for the last few years, and should be encouraged to include even more ministries in the next year’s budget. It also needs to enhance the monitoring and evaluation of these expenditures to assess their actual effectiveness on the ground.

Also, non-government organisations (NGOs), private sector, education sector and media need to gear up their own actions to tackle climate change so that it is a whole-of-society effort and not just a whole-of-government effort.

Here, it is important to also point out the synergies with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), of which, SDG 13 is explicitly about tackling climate change—hence these efforts at finding synergies across sectors will give us significant dividends in enhancing the quality of our economic development going forward.

When it comes to protecting our biodiversity, which includes both individual species of plants and animals, as well as entire habitats and ecosystems, we are unfortunately in a very bad position as we have failed to protect our natural environment because of the kind of growth we have pursued. We now stand at a very significant crossroad, where a business-as-usual attitude will lead to us losing whatever natural resources we have left in a very short period of time. Hence, protecting the environment while also growing has to be the new agenda going forward. This paradigm shift goes under several terms such as green development or Nature Based Solutions (NBS), but the label is less important than the necessity to acknowledge that every day we are destroying our natural environment bit by bit, and that this must not just stop but be reversed as soon as possible.

This is where the parliamentary standing committee on environment has a very important role to play, as it is the constitutionally mandated body to oversee that national development is protecting and not destroying our natural environment. It’s declaration of the planetary emergency has demonstrated that it is indeed very concerned about these issues. But now it needs to exert its constitutionally mandated power over the executive to ensure that it means what it says.

I would also like to add that there is an extremely energetic resource that they can harness if they wish, namely the youth of our country, starting with all the university students and then high school and even primary school students. The paradigm shift that is needed is to make this agenda everybody’s agenda and not just leave it to government authorities only.

At the same time, the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MOEFCC) has an extremely important role to play within the government, where its role is to try to protect the natural environment against forces, often other powerful ministries within the government, who want to get permission to build over natural habitats. I must say that over the last few decades, the different heads of the ministry have recognised their duty and done their best to try and protect the environment, but have often failed against the desires of powerful interests, both within as well as outside the government.

Hence, we have to realise that protecting our natural environment requires us to fight the forces who want to destroy it in every way possible, from within the government by the MOEFCC, and outside it by conscious citizens, who will oppose any visible destruction of the natural habitat that they see happening anywhere in the country.

The most effective means of protecting our natural environment is for every citizen to see it as her or his duty to do so. I believe we can do it.

Saleemul Huq is Director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development at the Independent University, Bangladesh.

This story was originally published by The Daily Star, Bangladesh

Bangladesh should align its many different plans and goals related to climate change for a greater impact. PHOTO: REUTERS

By Saleemul Huq
Jan 23 2019 (The Daily Star, Bangladesh)

Bangladesh has a long tradition of national development planning under the aegis of the General Economics Division (GED) of the Planning Commission, through the seven Five Year Plans prepared since we became an independent country. Recently, there have been a number of additional types of planning which will need to be well-aligned if we wish to achieve our goal of becoming a climate-resilient country by 2030. Some of these require examination and we need to discuss ways to ensure their mutual alignment going forward.

The first and longest-term one is the recently approved Delta Plan that has a time horizon up to 2100. Only the Netherlands has drawn up such a long-term plan and Bangladesh is the second country in the world to do so. It is more of an aspirational evolution towards our future development rather than a detailed plan, as the normal five-year plans will still remain the overriding planning vehicle, with the next one being the 8th Five Year Plan (8FYP)—which will start from 2021 onwards.

The second vehicle is to the year 2041 which is a perspective plan that is supposed to earn Bangladesh the middle-income status over the next few decades. This will also need to be translated into five-year segments to feed into the 8th, 9th, 10th and 11th Five Year Plans to be implemented over that time period.

Then we have a set of 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) which have a time horizon of 2030 to be achieved. These goals are global goals agreed at the level of the United Nations for all countries to implement at the national level, using common metrics to measure progress towards each of the 17 goals. In case of Bangladesh, all 17 SDGs have been mapped onto different lead ministries and support ministries for each goal by the Planning Commission. In addition, a high-powered monitoring unit has been set up at the prime minister’s office to track progress by each ministry for each of the 17 SDGs.

In addition to these development-oriented goals, there is also a goal on disaster risk reduction under the global Sendai Framework which each country is supposed to try to achieve disaster resilience by 2030. In case of Bangladesh, the lead for this is assigned to the Ministry of Disaster Management and Relief (DMDR). There are also civil society and military allies and actors that are involved in the implementation of this plan.

Finally, there are two climate change related goals agreed globally under the Paris Agreement on Climate Change to be achieved by 2030. The first goal—which is about mitigation—is to reduce emissions of Greenhouse Gases that cause climate change so that global temperatures are kept below 1.5 Degrees Centigrade by achieving 100 percent reliance on renewable energy in every country by 2050. The second goal is to achieve transformational adaptation to the adverse impacts of climate change in every country in order to make them climate-resilient by 2030. In case of Bangladesh, we have a number of planning documents under the aegis of the Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change (MOEFCC).

The first is the Bangladesh Climate Change Strategy and Action Plan (BCCSAP), first prepared in 2009 and now being updated to take it to 2030. There is another called the Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) that every country has to prepare to show how it will achieve the mitigation goal of the Paris Agreement. The Bangladesh NDC has pledged to reduce the national emissions of Greenhouse Gases by 5 percent by 2030, and if we get additional funding and technology, then we can reduce them by up to 15 percent. Finally, we are about to develop the National Adaptation Plan (NAP) which every developing country has to prepare to chart its objective of becoming climate-resilient by 2030.

In addition to these plans and goals, there are also others in different sectors, such as health, energy, agriculture, and water development, which are being developed by the respective ministries and departments.

It is clear from the above discussion that there is a lot of potential overlaps and lack of synergies unless these are addressed from the very beginning to ensure that each plan is well-aligned and linked, where necessary, to the other relevant plan(s). Also, it is imperative that the Five Year Plans should be the main vehicles into which all the others will be mainstreamed, starting with 8FYP which we will have to start developing very soon.

There are three overarching ways in which we can ensure that such synergies and mainstreaming is effectively achieved over the coming decades.

The first is to ensure that all the plans are aligned with each other while the 8FYP is started and developed. This is the responsibility of each ministry to liaise with the General Economics Division in the Planning Commission to ensure that the 8FYP receives inputs from all the other plans and goals. It is up to the GED to lead this process.

The second major action that has to take place is a very robust monitoring system for all the plans and goals cutting across the different sectors. This has already been put in place by the prime minister under her own direction with a well-respected former civil servant in charge. This is indeed a very good development. In this connection, it will also be useful to add a section of academics and researchers so that in addition to simply monitoring progress, we also have genuine learning-by-doing to inform and improve future Five Year Plans after 8FYP.

Finally, it is important to recognise that one of the biggest differences between the past and the future of the country is the shift from public sources of investment to private sources and also for the private sector to implement most of the plans. Hence, the country will have to become better at ensuring a whole-of-society approach rather than just a whole-of-government one with regard to both the planning and implementation of all these tasks. Bangladesh would do well to ensure that we find synergies and alignments among all the different plans.

Saleemul Huq is Director, International Centre for Climate Change and Development, Independent University, Bangladesh (IUB).
Email: Saleem.icccad@iub.edu.bd

This story was originally published by The Daily Star, Bangladesh

By Saleemul Huq
Jan 16 2019 (The Daily Star, Bangladesh)

At the beginning of January 2019 Bangladesh started to take the required steps to become a climate resilient country by 2030 by achieving transformational adaptation to climate change impacts.

While there are many strands to fulfil this important strategy, one of the first is to generate, disseminate and use good quality scientific knowledge so that the process is a rigorous learning-by-doing one.

Thus the recently completed fifth annual Gobeshona Conference at the Independent University, Bangladesh, with several hundred researchers and scientists from over fifty universities and research institutes, participating over three days with nearly a hundred scientific papers presented in over twenty different thematic sessions, has got us off to a good start.

The fourth and final day consisted of a science-policy-dialogue with senior policymakers with whom the scientists shared some of the latest research findings and also received advice on what kinds of research would help the decision-makers in future. The annual Gobeshona Conference has thus become a major means of assessing the state of our scientific knowledge as well as setting future research agendas.

The first major cross-cutting issue was to emphasise the need to invest in our youth in order to make them not just ready for employment but to turn them into problem solvers. We had a group of university students selected from universities in Bangladesh, Nepal and Bhutan participating in the conference who then stayed an extra day to develop their own workplan going forward. This workplan goes well beyond simply raising awareness about the climate change problems and focuses on how to solve some aspect of the problem by each of the youth in their own respective settings. This network of university students will be both Bangladesh-wide as well as students in universities which are part of the Least Developed Countries Universities Consortium on Climate Change (LUCCC).

It is important to note that transformation will take place over the next decade and today’s youth will be the leaders of tomorrow. Another important point to note is that coming up with solutions for tackling climate change in Bangladesh will also be applicable in other countries which means we can export our knowledge in future.

The second major cross-cutting theme was on gender, but going well beyond simply focusing on the vulnerability of women and girls to the adverse impacts of climate change. Here the emphasis will be on empowerment of women to become agents of change in tackling and solving climate change impacts in different settings. This also related to the first point of empowerment of youth but with an emphasis on girls over boys.

The current generation of women in Bangladesh have already demonstrated their ability to contribute to the economy of the country, such as in the garment industries. The next generation will have to move from employment as labour to using their minds to become problem solvers and not just employees.

The third major cross-cutting issue that came up time and again in different thematic sessions, including urban, coastal and migration sessions, was the need to anticipate and ensure that future migration due to climate change is done in a planned and enabled manner and not under distressed conditions. The challenge here is to make the current problem of environmental migration due to distress conditions into a possible adaptation to future climate change by investing in education and empowering the youth, primarily girls, in the low-lying coastal parts of the country and at the same time investing in setting up climate resilient migrant friendly cities and towns around the country so that the future climate migrants don’t all end up in Dhaka.

The fourth and final point to make is that the three cross-cutting issues described above are not separate but intertwined together and while funding will be a key requirement, an even more important requirement and investment will be in knowledge and education of the right kind. It is only by enabling the country to institute effective means of learning from practice that we can continuously improve our actions in order to achieve transformational adaptation outcomes.

In this context the Annual Gobeshona Conference will continue to play a key role in taking stock of our progress each January and building on what is successful and dropping what is not. Also from January 2020 onwards the event will become a truly global event where we will invite the rest of the world to come and learn from Bangladesh how to go about achieving transformational adaptation at national scale.

Saleemul Huq is Director, International Centre for Climate Change and Development, Independent University, Bangladesh. Email: Saleem.icccad@iub.edu.bd

This story was originally published by The Daily Star, Bangladesh

Fifteen-year-old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg castigated world leaders at COP24, accusing them of stealing her and other children's futures by failing to adequately address climate change. PHOTO: CONNECT4CLIMATE/YOUTUBE

By Saleemul Huq
Dec 19 2018 (The Daily Star, Bangladesh)

After a time extension of an extra day, the Rulebook for the Paris Agreement was adopted at COP24 in Katowice, Poland on December 15. It is a significant achievement as it will enable all countries to implement all the different elements of the Paris Agreement in a manner that can be measured, reported and verified in a uniform manner.

However, COP24 also represents a major failure to rise towards collective action to face the global challenge which has been highlighted by the scientific community in the IPCC’S special report on 1.5 degrees Celsius.

The most vulnerable developing countries, including Bangladesh and small island countries, made this a major issue for consideration in the COP. They were also strongly supported by the civil society and by children. In the end they could not succeed due to the intransigence of President Trump’s US delegation along with Saudi Arabia, Russia and Kuwait. The battle revolved around a seemingly trivial word of whether the COP should “welcome” (which was supported by 193 out of 197 countries) or merely “note” the IPCC report (which only the four countries supported). In the end these four countries prevailed by simply welcoming the completion of the report but not its contents.

This was a major setback for both science and the most vulnerable developing countries for enhancing collective global action to keep global temperature rise below 1.5 degrees Celsius.

Nevertheless there were a number of good decisions on adaptation and inclusion of loss and damage in several tracks of the Paris Rulebook.

The Paris Agreement reached in 2015 has been a major game-changer in terms of enabling all stakeholders to independently implement the different elements of the Agreement without needing government endorsement anymore. This is best illustrated by the fact that despite President Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, the US is on track to fulfill the commitments in emission reduction promised by Barack Obama. Despite Trump’s attempts to promote coal, investors at the state and city level in the US are moving to renewables because they are cheaper.

Another example is the unofficial US pavilion at COP24, called “We are still in,” which was run by states, cities and companies from the US; it was one of the most popular pavilions at COP24.

An amazing moment at COP24 was the speech of 15-year-old Swedish student Greta Thunberg who started a school boycott to protest inaction to tackle climate change in Sweden, which has been emulated in many other countries around the world. She spoke with such clarity and maturity that she put all the world’s leaders who were there (mostly old men) to shame.

Finally, there was the personal intervention of United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres who came to Katowice to inaugurate COP24 and then made an unscheduled reappearance at the end to try to break a deadlock. In the end, an agreement was indeed reached but that was a full day after the official end of COP24.

The Bangladesh delegation this year did not include any ministers as they are busy with the upcoming elections. The delegation was led by the Secretary of the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change and there were representatives from the Ministry of Disaster Management, Foreign Affairs and Energy along with experts who have been negotiating on behalf of Bangladesh and, in some cases, also on behalf of the Least Developed Countries (LDC) Group to which we belong. The delegation would meet every evening and invite non-governmental delegates from Bangladesh to join in the discussion. Thus Bangladesh was able to present itself and its views effectively through both official negotiations and civil society channels. There was also a team from Channel i who were sending daily reports from COP24 back to Bangladesh.

Next year’s COP25 will be held in December 2019 in Santiago, Chile and one of the major items for decision-making will be on loss and damage. However, before COP25 begins, Mr Antonio Guterres will be convening a climate change summit in New York in September 2019 during the UN General Assembly which will be a major opportunity for Bangladesh to highlight its actions to tackle climate change and urge others to do so as well. At this summit, it will be possible to form coalitions of the willing and not wait to achieve consensus which is needed at the COPs.

There is much preparatory work to do before next September and December if we wish to get some good results from these two major global meetings. It is an opportunity for the government of Bangladesh to work with civil society to make sure we go in well prepared.

Saleemul Huq is Director, International Centre for Climate Change and Development, Independent University, Bangladesh. Email: Saleem.icccad@iub.edu.bd

This story was originally published by The Daily Star, Bangladesh

People attend a demonstration to urge politicians to act against climate change in Paris, France, as the COP24 is held in Poland, December 8, 2018. PHOTO: Piroschka van de Wouw/ REUTERS

By Saleemul Huq
Dec 12 2018 (The Daily Star, Bangladesh)

The first week of the two-week 24th Conference of Parties (COP24) under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) being held in Katowice, Poland has just ended with a major political difference between the countries who wish to raise ambitions to take faster action to tackle climate change in light of the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Special Report on 1.5 degrees, and those who are associated with fossil fuel interests.

The IPCC report was asked for by the COP in 2015 and was produced by the best scientists around the world. It was then adopted by all governments who are part of the IPCC in October this year. The report shows that there is a very significant difference between a world with a 1.5 degree and a 2 degrees higher global atmospheric temperature. It will affect all countries, not just the poorest. The report also said action was still possible if all countries agree to raise their ambitions for reducing emissions of greenhouse gases. The need is for all countries to be reliant on 100 percent renewable energy no later than 2050.

The IPCC presented their report to COP24 in Katowice last week. Normally it would be a very routine matter for the COP to acknowledge it and take its findings into the COP decision making process.

However in this case it was not accepted and the argument took place over one word: “welcome”. The vast majority of countries said they would like to “welcome” the IPCC report. However the US, Saudi Arabia and Russia would not accept that word and would only allow the COP to take “note” the IPCC report. This may sound like a trivial play of word but it signifies a major stand from the fossil fuel interests which are being represented here by Saudi Arabia, US and Russia.

To give an example of how the US is doing that, there are two sets of events being hosted by the US, one by the Trump administration and the second by others including states like California, cities like New York, and companies and universities. This second pavilion has the slogan of “we are still in” the Paris Agreement. It is one of the most popular pavilions at the COP!

On the other hand the official Trump delegation is holding a special event to promote coal as the future which has been paid for by the coal industry in the US. Many countries are asking why Trump has even bothered to send a delegation to the COP if he wants to leave the Paris Agreement? The answer is that he doesn’t just want to leave it but rather to prevent other countries from making progress. In this goal he has gained the support of Saudi Arabia and Russia (which is really a trio who are becoming a major global partnership on more than climate change).

So it is now clear that the division of interests is very clear between those who wish to take real action to tackle the global emergency of climate change and those who want to promote fossil fuels sales. It is no longer the case that those questioning the reality of human induced climate change is doing so because of ignorance, but rather that they are deliberately trying to subvert action.

The answers may well lie in Saudi Arabia and Russia joining Trump to leave the Paris Agreement and let the rest of us carry on tackling this global emergency.

Saleemul Huq is director, International Centre for Climate Change and Development, Independent University, Bangladesh.
Email: Saleem.icccad@iub.edu.bd

This story was originally published by The Daily Star, Bangladesh

PHOTO: PETER ANDREWS/REUTERS

By Saleemul Huq
Jul 18 2018 (The Daily Star, Bangladesh)

In the run-up to the negotiations under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in its 21st Conference of Parties (COP21) in December 2015, one of the most politically contentious issues was whether the limit of the long-term global temperature rise should be kept at 2 degrees centigrade or changed to 1.5 degrees.

Bangladesh, as part of the Least Developed Countries (LDC) Group of Negotiators under the leadership of Angola, and also the Climate Vulnerable Forum (CVF) under the leadership of President Aquino of the Philippines, was very active in advocating for a change to 1.5 degrees. However, there was strong initial resistance from the developed countries as well as large developing countries such as China and India, and also the oil-exporting countries led by Saudi Arabia. The specific technical argument they used was the need for more scientific studies and wanted the topic passed on to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to produce a special report which would take several years.

However, by the end of COP21, we were able to convince all the countries to include 1.5 degrees as an aspirational goal with the main goal being “well below 2 degrees” in the Paris Agreement on Climate Change. This was a major victory for the vulnerable developing countries including Bangladesh.

In the meantime, the IPCC did indeed go ahead with the preparation of the Special Report on 1.5 degrees over the last few years, and a draft final report has been prepared which is expected to be finalised for dissemination in October at the IPCC Plenary.

However, the draft final report has been leaked and is already available, even though it is yet to be finalised and endorsed by the IPCC. Based on this leaked report, I am going to share some key messages which are unlikely to change in the final official version in October.

The first finding is the difference in global impacts for 2 degrees versus 1.5 degrees. They have shown that the additional cost of climate change impacts will be over USD 10 trillion globally over the next few decades, and that these adverse impacts will be worst in certain locations and groups. The greatest hotspots are West Africa and South Asia, and within the latter category, coastal Bangladesh will be a major hotspot that will lead to tens of millions of people being forced to migrate.

The second assessment made by the IPCC is how feasible the goal of staying below 1.5 degrees is. The answer is that it is still possible to do so but it will require the current efforts to reduce emissions to not just be doubled but redoubled. This particular result will be a key issue in COP24 to be held in December 2018 in Katowice, Poland, where the issue of raising ambition and measuring, verifying and measuring progress is expected to be agreed on.

The third and final topic which is addressed in the report is the emerging realisation globally that not only is zero emission going to be possible, but it may in fact be very profitable for companies engaged in providing sustainable energy solutions to replace fossil fuels-based energy.

Hence, more and more countries are planning to bring forward their respective goals of reaching zero emission which is what is needed to stay below 1.5 degrees.

In conclusion, the IPCC Special Report on 1.5 degrees, which we expect to be finalised and released in October, is likely to feed into COP24 in December in Poland. Hence, Bangladesh and other vulnerable countries have to ensure maximum pressure on all countries to raise their levels of ambition in order to keep global temperature rise below 1.5 degrees.

Saleemul Huq is Director, International Centre for Climate Change and Development at the Independent University, Bangladesh (IUB).
Email: saleem.icccad@iub.edu.bd

This story was originally published by The Daily Star, Bangladesh

Americans protest President Trump's withdrawal from the Paris Agreement on Climate Change outside the White House in June 2017. PHOTO: ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP

By Saleemul Huq
Jun 6 2018 (The Daily Star, Bangladesh)

A year has passed since President Trump announced that the United States would formally withdraw from the Paris Agreement on Climate Change. What has happened since has been a mixture of good and bad—but on the whole, more good than bad.

The obvious bad news was that the biggest and richest country was reneging on a commitment made by its president in Paris. This had several consequences, including the halting of the US pledge to provide funding for the Green Climate Fund (GCF) as part of the commitment of developed countries to provide USD 100 billion each year from 2020 onwards.

It also meant that the US federal government would not try to fulfil the commitments that it had made under President Obama to reduce its emissions of greenhouse gases.

However, the worst news is by far for the citizens of the US rather than for the rest of the world. This is the denial of the science and reality of human induced climate change by Trump and the head of the Environment Protection Agency (EPA). This has already had the effect of depriving US citizens of the protection from its own federal government to adapt to the adverse impacts of climate change. The more than 4,000 deaths of US citizens in Puerto Rico attributable to Hurricane Maria are just one example.

In contrast, the good news is that many people in the US are not following or even supporting their president. There is a growing movement of Americans who say they are still in the Paris Agreement and will do their best to fulfil the US commitments made under President Obama.

For example, around 20 governors of states, led by Governor Jerry Brown of California, have declared their intentions to fulfil their obligations under the Paris Agreement. In fact, California (which by itself is the 7th largest economy in the world) will be hosting a global summit on climate change in September this year.

At the same time, Mayor De Blasio of New York is leading many dozens of mayors of cities who are committed to fulfilling their obligations as well. In fact, he has re-constituted President Obama’s Climate Change Experts Advisory Committee which Trump had dismissed as soon as he moved
into the White House. This committee is now based at Columbia University in New York and is being funded by both the city of New York and the Governor of the State of New York.

Another even more important change for the better is the market driven shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy across the US even in states under Republican governors. This, despite efforts by Trump to subsidise the coal industry. No one wants to invest in coal any more.

At the international level the major reaction to the US withdrawal from the Paris Agreement was to rally everyone else to redouble their commitment. Thus, for example, President Macron of France offered to make up the financial contribution of the US in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) while other developed countries have promised to make up the US deficit of USD 100 billion per year from 2020 onwards.

Another important indicator of US’ isolation on this issue is the fact that not a single country joined the US in withdrawing from the Paris Agreement (unlike when they withdrew from the Kyoto Protocol with Australia by their side).

Perhaps the biggest shift that has taken place, which is not necessarily directly attributable to Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris Agreement, is the inexorable global shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy driven by a combination of technological advances in wind and solar energy efficiency, along with improved electricity storage capacity (which allows the intermittency problem to be solved).

Countries like China and India are in the forefront of this revolution in energy systems and are likely to be the winners in the 21st-century race to a post-fossil fuel world leaving the US behind and 20th-century technologies.

Finally, while it is important to acknowledge that the decision of Trump to officially withdraw from the Paris Agreement is not a good development for the world, nevertheless, the fact that the rest of the world, and indeed even the people in the US, don’t agree with him is the ultimate good news.

One of the most important, but under-appreciated elements of the Paris Agreement on Climate Change is that while it required the leaders of all countries to come to an agreement first, the implementation of the agreement does not necessarily need those leaders anymore. Anyone and everyone can do his or her own part to implement the agreement without permission from political leaders.

In less than a year of President Trump’s withdrawal, this fact has become abundantly clear.

Saleemul Huq is Director, International Centre for Climate Change and Development at the Independent University, Bangladesh.
Email: Saleem.icccad@iub.edu.bd

This story was originally published by The Daily Star, Bangladesh

By Saleemul Huq
May 30 2018 (The Daily Star, Bangladesh)

The Green Climate Fund (GCF) was set up under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) to channel much of the USD 100 billion a year starting from 2020 onwards that the developed countries have promised to provide to developing countries to tackle climate change through both mitigation and adaptation projects and activities.

The GCF with its headquarters in Songdo, South Korea has already started functioning and has also approved a number of projects for mitigation and only a few for adaptation.

The reason is that although the GCF Board has tasked the managers to award only half the funds for mitigation and ensure that at least half goes for adaptation with a focus on the most vulnerable developing countries, they are finding it difficult to approve adaptation projects.

Hence in practice the projects approved so far have been mostly for mitigation rather than for adaptation. One major reason is that the GCF’s mandate is to support projects that tackle climate change and not just support run-of-the-mill development projects—and adaptation to climate change project proposals looks very similar to development projects. Indeed the GCF Board has already rejected two projects (one from Bangladesh and the other from Ethiopia) on the grounds that (some of) the Board members were unconvinced that the projects were not just development projects dressed up as adaptation projects.

So the project submitter, UNDP, had to go back and redesign the proposals to demonstrate that they were primarily adaptation projects with some development co-benefits. Fortunately, they were able to redesign, resubmit and get approval for both proposals, but a lot of effort was wasted in the process.

I will discuss some reasons for this skewed performance in favour of mitigation and provide some ideas on how the GCF can restore the balance by enhancing investment in adaptation projects.

The first and foremost reason why mitigation projects are easy to approve is that the climate change benefit of reducing emissions of greenhouse gases by mitigation is relatively easy to calculate and demonstrate. Identifying and calculating adaptation to climate change benefits that are different from development benefits is an impossible task.

The GCF should try to benefit from the more than a decade of developing, funding and implementing adaptation projects around the world by others, including the Global Environment Facility (GEF) and Adaptation Fund (AF) as well as national governments and NGOs to find some practical guidance on how to design adaptation projects well. Based on some of my own experiences, I am going to share some lessons and suggest ways forward for consideration by the GCF Secretariat and Board.

My first observation is that almost all adaptation projects will have development co-benefits but not all development projects will have adaptation co-benefits. Hence using climate change impact analysis as the basis for selecting the location, the beneficiaries and the proposed interventions is the correct methodology to follow. Once that is done, development co-benefits can also be included in the proposed interventions. This, I will call the “climate first” principle.

The second lesson is the timescale issue: a normal development project would generally have the development benefits delivered during the project period itself so that the benefits of the investment are immediately visible (and can be evaluated). Take for example a project to install tube wells for drinking water where the number of wells installed and amount of water being supplied can be measured immediately after the project ends and the project can thus be evaluated a success (or failure as the case may be).

On the other hand, the impacts of human-induced climate change lie decades ahead and are unlikely to occur during the project period (which is typically around five years or so). Hence it will be impossible to evaluate the success of the project immediately after it is over since the success (or lack of it) can only be judged many years later.

Thus an adaptation project is more like a programme for planting fruit trees, where the project output is the number of seeds planted, but the outcome is the number of trees which grow to provide fruits many years later. Someone needs to continue to take care of the trees as they grow and someone else needs to monitor their growth and evaluate the fruit production.

Hence for a project to be truly about adaptation to climate change, it needs to include in its design both a clear “exit strategy” and a post-project “sustainability plan.” This is the “sustainability” principle.

The third lesson flows from the above: the need to focus the project investment in capacity building of the project’s “legacy partners,” who will be responsible for developing and implementing the post-project sustainability plan. Thus the real investment of an adaptation project is building the adaptive capacity of the legacy partners. I call this the “capacity building” principle.

The fourth and final lesson is that adaptation to climate change is still a relatively young science and the practice and new knowledge are being developed in a learning-by-doing manner. This means that new knowledge comes from practitioners who will learn what works and what doesn’t through experiential knowledge. This will allow future investment to focus on the successful investments and not in those that don’t work. However, it will require investment in harnessing the experiential knowledge by including specialists (or researchers). I will call this the “inclusion of researchers” principle.

Finally, I would like to suggest that the GCF invest in setting up a specialist group of researchers who would be able to serve this function at the national level as well as be a network of knowledge across countries. A network of universities and research institutions would be ideally placed to maximise the potential knowledge generated from the future portfolio of adaptation projects that the GCF will hopefully fund over the coming years.

This group of universities and research institutions can also develop and help deliver capacity building through training and mentoring of the project implementers.

Saleemul Huq is Director, International Centre for Climate Change and Development at the Independent University, Bangladesh.
Email: Saleem.icccad@iub.edu.bd

This story was originally published by The Daily Star, Bangladesh

Photo: Mumit M

By Saleemul Huq
Sep 13 2017 (The Daily Star, Bangladesh)

The principles of equity, justice and fairness are fundamental to understanding and addressing the challenges of global climate change. This is because the problem has been caused by the emissions of the rich countries for several centuries but will primarily impact the poorest people and poorest countries.

Hence, when countries came together to discuss and agree to take actions under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) these principles were fundamental to the discussions.

However, the way in which each of these terms was perceived and addressed is very specific to the climate change issue. I will try to explain below how each principle is dealt with under the UNFCCC.

Let us start with the principle of equity. This is addressed under the UNFCCC under a famous phrase that goes like “common but differentiated responsibilities” (CBDR). This means that while acknowledging that tackling climate change is a common problem for all countries and hence every country needs to take actions, some countries (the richer countries) have nevertheless a greater responsibility as they have been the main beneficiaries of emissions for the last two centuries. This is also sometimes called their “historic responsibilities” for past emissions.

This principle has been accepted by the richer countries and the countries are named in Annex 1 of the UNFCCC (and they are sometimes referred to as the “Annex 1 countries”).

This principle was used in designing the Kyoto Protocol under the UNFCCC some years ago where the Annex 1 countries agreed to make commitments to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions while the non-Annex 1 countries did not have to do so.

The principle of justice, although related to equity, has a different meaning under the UNFCCC and involves different sets of countries. Whereas the principle of equity is used in the context of Annex 1 countries versus non-Annex 1 countries, the principle of justice (or more accurately, injustice) is about the adverse impacts of climate change on poor people and countries whereas the problem has been created by the emissions of richer people and countries.

In this context, it is the poorest and most vulnerable developing countries, such as the Least Developed Countries (LDCs), Small Island Developing States (SIDS) and countries in Africa, who want all the major emitting countries (who now include large developing countries such as China and India) to take actions to reduce their emissions and also provide finance for adaptation to climate change.

So while the principle of equity is relevant to mitigation actions, and the argument is between the developed countries and the large developing countries (such as China and India), the principle of justice is relevant in the context of both mitigation as well as adaptation and involves the poorest and most vulnerable countries versus both the rich as well as large developing countries.

The principle of justice has been incorporated in the Paris Agreement on climate change in two ways. First, by making it a universal agreement where all countries (not only the Annex 1 countries) have agreed to take actions to reduce their respective emissions.

The second way that the principle of justice is acknowledged is under the articles on Adaptation and on Loss and Damage, under which the poorest and most vulnerable countries are supposed to be funded to support them to tackle the adverse impacts of climate change.

The third principle, related to fairness, is not so much an official article under the UNFCCC but rather a principle that underlies the way in which countries perceive the application of the other two principles, and fairness can be very subjective in its application. For example, the speech by US President Trump in the White House Rose Garden in which he announced his intention to withdraw from the Paris Agreement invoked the principle of fairness as he felt that the agreement was unfair to the US.

Hence, for any negotiating text to be agreed in the UNFCCC, it requires each country (and group of countries) to agree that the outcome is fair to them. If they do not feel it is fair, then they will not agree.

It is important to recall that while the UNFCCC is a formal global treaty between 195 sovereign nations, who have to agree on everything by consensus, the principles of equity, justice and fairness also have more general applications for all people. This is particularly important when considering the role of communities, companies and even individuals.

For example, in the hurricanes Harvey and Irma hitting the United States and the floods affecting Nepal, India and Bangladesh, the people and communities that are being affected most are the poorest, even in the US. And richer people and companies from these countries as well as from around the world are coming to their assistance. Therefore, the principles of equity, justice and fairness are fundamental for each and every one of us to both understand and agree on how to tackle the problems associated with human-induced climate change.

Saleemul Huq is Director, International Centre for Climate Change and Development at the Independent University, Bangladesh.
Email: saleem.icccad@iub.edu.bd

This story was originally published by The Daily Star, Bangladesh

Flood-hit Gobordhan village of Lalmonirhat on July 10, 2017. Photo: Star File

By Saleemul Huq
Aug 31 2017 (The Daily Star, Bangladesh)

In the past week, there have been devastating floods in Houston, Texas in the United States of America as well as in Nepal, India and Bangladesh, not to mention China as well.

Although these events occurred in very different parts of the planet and each had somewhat unique causes and circumstances, nevertheless, their severity can now credibly be linked to human induced climate change that has already raised global mean atmospheric temperatures above one degree Centigrade since pre-industrial times.

Let me start with Hurricane Harvey in the Gulf of Mexico. While the scientific models for hurricanes in the Atlantic, Typhoons in the Pacific and Cyclones in the Bay of Bengal do not forecast an increase in the number of these events, the higher sea surface temperatures due to human induced climate change will definitely cause some of the events to be more severe than they otherwise would have been.

Hence, the intensity of Hurricane Harvey which went very rapidly from a category 1 to a category 4 storm when it made landfall was due to the elevated sea surface temperature in the Gulf of Mexico. Secondly, after the Hurricane made landfall and wind speeds came down, it became a tropical storm, but it lingered over the coast of Texas picking up moisture from the sea and dropping it further inland on Houston which then suffered devastating flash floods days after the hurricane had passed.

This combination of Hurricane and floods was what made the event so devastating and is mostly due to the higher temperature of the sea in the Gulf of Mexico at that time, which can reasonably be attributed to human induced climate change.

In South Asia, the monsoon rains in the upper reaches of the Ganges in the Himalayan mountains started to cause significant flooding in Nepal some days ago and then the flood waters travelled south into India where many millions of people were flooded and finally into Bangladesh where millions more were affected in the last few days.

The scientific models of the South Asian monsoon are not all in agreement with regard to forecasts of what will happen with climate change, but the general consensus seems to be that while the overall precipitation across the entire year is not likely to go either up or down significantly due to climate change, the pattern of rainfall will change significantly with greater precipitation in the monsoon season and less in the dry season. Paradoxically, this will likely lead to more flooding in the wet season and more droughts in the dry season, even if the overall amount of rainfall across the year does not change very much.

This scenario is what we can see happening already with rainfall patterns becoming more erratic and unpredictable.

Hence, we can also reasonably attribute the severity of the recent floods in South Asia to human induced climate change.

An interesting contrast between the US and the countries of South Asia is the acceptance of the science of climate change and the willingness to take adaptation actions to tackle the problem—President Trump and his cabinet colleagues all deny the very science of climate change and are thus endangering the safety of their own citizens.

The bottom line seems to be that we have already entered the era of the anthropocene, in which, human activities have cumulatively resulted in changing global weather patterns as well other global phenomenon such forest fires and sea level rise.

Saleemul Huq is Director, International Centre for Climate Change and Development at the Independent University, Bangladesh.
E-mail: saleem.icccad@iub.edu.bd

This story was originally published by The Daily Star, Bangladesh

The G20 meeting of leaders of the world’s 20 biggest economies ended a few days ago in Hamburg, Germany with a strong statement of commitment for implementing the Paris Agreement on Climate Change by 19 of the leaders, with the exception of President Trump who has decided to withdraw the US from the Paris Agreement.

US President Donald Trump prepares to give a speech during the panel discussion “Launch Event Women’s Entrepreneur Finance Initiative” on the second day of the G20 Summit in Hamburg, Germany, July 8, 2017. Photo: REUTERS/Patrik STOLLARZ/Pool

This is not the first time that the US has refused to join a global consensus on climate change as it happened once before in 1997, when the Kyoto Protocol was agreed at the 3rd Conference of Parties (COP3) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), including by the US under President Clinton in the White House and Vice-President Al Gore who himself was in Kyoto. However, soon after that the Republicans won the presidential election and George W Bush became president and decided to withdraw the US from the Kyoto Protocol. He also lobbied other countries to join the US and did manage to get Prime Minister Howard of Australia to join him in withdrawing from the Kyoto Protocol.

However, this time around no other country has joined the US in withdrawing from the Paris Agreement and countries like China and India (the biggest and third biggest emitters of greenhouse gases, respectively) have even pledged to enhance their actions to combat climate change.

If this had happened only a few years ago it is likely that countries like China and India would have refused to abide by their commitments if the US decided to withdraw. However, that China is now in fact willing to become a leader in the field of renewable energy and in decreasing dependence on fossil fuels, especially coal, is a sign of greater level of understanding about the global nature of the climate change problem. An interesting, perhaps unforeseen, consequence of President Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris Agreement is the upwelling of support from mayors of dozens of cities and governors of major states like California to pledge commitment to implement the Paris Agreement. The UNFCCC has responded by allowing provinces and cities to sign up on their own to implement the Agreement. Thus, the implementation of the Agreement no longer depends only on heads of government but can also be done by each and every one of us from any country.

Another interesting development is the creation a few years ago of the V20 (Vulnerable 20) Group of the most vulnerable countries as a counterpart to the G20 to advocate for stronger action to tackle climate change by G20 and all other countries as well. This V20 Group, currently chaired by Ethiopia, was set up by the Climate Vulnerable Forum (CVF) of which Bangladesh is a founder member and previous chair. The V20 has now become a leader in tackling climate change and is moving towards 100 percent renewable energy by 2050.

Bangladesh and the Marshall Islands are jointly responsible for developing the partnership strategy for the V20 and a delegation from the Marshall Islands is expected in Dhaka soon to hold bilateral talks with Bangladesh to develop the plan of action for the V20 countries.

Thus, China is now taking the lead on tackling climate change globally; Germany is taking the lead amongst the developed countries; and the V20 is taking the lead amongst the vulnerable developing countries.

Saleemul Huq is Director, International Centre for Climate Change and Development at the Independent University, Bangladesh.
E-mail: Saleem.icccad@iub.edu.bd

This story was originally published by The Daily Star, Bangladesh

Since the announcement by President Trump that the US will withdraw from the Paris Agreement to tackle climate change, he has been facing a whirlwind of push backs and rejection by all the 195 countries who are parties to the Paris Agreement (only Syria and Nicaragua did not sign it), and it looks like the US will be on its own on this issue from now on, and is already being termed a rogue state by many.

Image: Sarah Wasko-Media Matters

This is about Article 8 of the Paris Agreement, which is on an issue called Loss and Damage from climate change, a fiercely fought topic in the negotiations going into Paris which was not resolved until the last hour of the final agreement in Paris at midnight on December 12, 2015.

Before going into the 21st Conference of Parties (COP21) to be held in Paris in December 2015, under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), there were a series of negotiations to prepare the final negotiating text which would then be finalised over the two weeks of COP21.

Going into Paris, every Article had some proposed text from the developed countries (called option 1) and another few paragraphs of text from the developing countries (called option 2), and in many cases, the two options presented opposing ideas. The idea was that all countries would spend two weeks in Paris at COP21, finding a compromise text between the two opposing options to emerge with a consensus text as part of the Paris Agreement.

However, the exception to this pattern was Article 8 on loss and damage where the developing countries proposed a few paragraphs of text, but the option from the developed countries wasn’t just to offer no text but to instead propose that this Article be deleted completely!

Why was this the case?

The reason is because the issue of loss and damage from climate change refers to the residual impacts of human induced climate change when efforts to prevent impacts by mitigation have been insufficient, and also when efforts to adapt to those impacts are not enough either. The resulting impacts and the resulting loss and damage, thus, can be attributed to human induced changes to the climate.

In such cases, the loss and damage is no longer due to natural causes but due to human interference in the climate system. Hence, there is a potential liability and claims for compensation to be made by the victims against the polluters.

That is why the developed countries had fought tooth and nail to refuse to accept any discussion of liability and compensation in the UNFCCC talks for over twenty years. However, the breakthrough came at COP19 in Warsaw, Poland in 2013, where they were forced to accept the setting up of the Warsaw International Mechanism on Loss and Damage (which was understood to be a euphemism for liability and compensation).

So coming in to the COP21 talks in Paris in December 2015, the developed countries did not want to accept a new separate Article on Loss and Damage in the Paris Agreement at all. Hence, this Article became one of the most politically charged and sensitive issues in the COP21, talks. The developing countries, led by the small island developing states and the Least Developed Countries (LDC) group, in which Bangladeshi negotiators played an important role, pushed to include loss and damage in Article 8.

After very hard negotiations for two weeks, initially at the level of the technical negotiators and then ministers, it was still not resolved until the last few hours of COP21 when Prime Minister Enele Sopoaga of Tuvalu, on behalf of the developing countries, and US Secretary of State John Kerry, on behalf of the developed countries, requested their negotiators to leave the room and agreed on the final text that was eventually accepted as the Loss and Damage Article 8 of the Paris Agreement.

The reason that John Kerry of the US finally accepted Article 8 on Loss and Damage was because the Prime Minister of Tuvalu allowed him to insert a paragraph into the COP21 decision associated with the Article which specifically stated that Article 8 of the Paris Agreement could NOT be used to claim compensation on the basis of liability from the polluting countries. This was specifically inserted to protect the US from potential future claims for compensation once loss and damage from climate change is established.

So as per President Trump’s announcement when the US officially withdraws from the Paris Agreement, the US will lose the protection of this clause and hence will be open to claims for compensation from people, communities and countries that suffer loss and damage that can be attributed to human induced climate change. I am not sure if any of President Trump’s advisers told him about this unintended consequence of his decision to leave the Paris Agreement!

The writer is Director of the International Center for Climate Change and Development at the Independent University, Bangladesh.

Email: Saleem.icccad@iub.edu.bd

This story was originally published by The Daily Star, Bangladesh

Source: bloglines72py

By Saleemul Huq
Mar 30 2017 (The Daily Star, Bangladesh)

The subject of adaptation to climate change has gone through two major phases already and is now on its third phase.

The first phase was about identifying and stopping “maladaptation” to the future impacts of climate change. This was based on initial vulnerability assessments in each country, and identifying policies and actions that instead of reducing vulnerability were in fact enhancing vulnerability to climate change impacts, such as building on floodplains that would be flooded more frequently in future due to climate change. A major portion of this phase, of vulnerability assessments, has already been completed in most countries, and steps to prevent further maladaptations are now in place.

The second phase of adaptation to climate change, which is still underway, looks at current and planned investments in different sectors of countries, adding investments and actions to make them more adaptive to the adverse impacts of climate change. This phase is called “incremental adaptation”, and cities and countries around the world are currently focusing on this phase of adaptation.

The third phase, which is still in the stage of theory rather than implementation, is the notion of “transformational adaptation”, which means going well beyond just incremental adaptation to manage the additional risks due to climate change to make transformational changes.

I will share below some thoughts on how Bangladesh can become perhaps the world’s first country to carry out transformational adaptation at scale.

First, let me start with the more conventional incremental adaptation phase where we have already identified the low lying coastal zones of the country as being the most vulnerable to possible salinity intrusion due to sea level rise, affecting millions of people living there. Another associated vulnerability to those millions of people forced to drink saline water is that young women, particularly pregnant mothers, are especially vulnerable to high blood pressure which can lead to problems at childbirth. Therefore, the immediate (incremental) adaptation is to provide fresh and safe drinking water to these people, especially to young women.

However, we can also start to think about moving beyond simply looking at girls as victims of climate change but rather as potential agents of change, not only for themselves and their respective families but for the entire country. This can be done if we formulate a priority programme of investment in education (not just quantity but also quality), that can enhance the skills of the girls of Bangladesh (with a focus on the coastal zone). This will enable them to obtain gainful employment in towns and cities inland away from the coast.

There is one other corollary that will need to be done at the same time; investing in creating educational and job opportunities in around a dozen towns further inland so that girls can study or work within their own communities.

Thus, over the next decade or so, the young girls of today can become agents for enhancing Bangladesh’s resilience to climate change through transformational adaptation. The women of Bangladesh over the last several decades have already contributed to a transformation through their education and family planning awareness programmes to bring down the population growth rate from over 3 percent to less than 2 percent over a single generation. With the right kind of investment and support, the girls of today can help the subsequent transformation of the country over the next generation.

The writer is Director, International Centre for Climate Change and Development at the Independent University, Bangladesh.
E-mail: Saleem.icccad@iub.edu.bd

This story was originally published by The Daily Star, Bangladesh

Excerpt:

By Saleemul Huq
Mar 23 2017 (The Daily Star, Bangladesh)

In the historic Paris Agreement reached in December 2015 at the 21st Conference of Parties (COP21) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), all countries agreed to collectively achieve two global goals. The first was to keep the long-term global temperature increase well below 2 degrees centigrade, or if possible, below 1.5 degrees. The second was to try to achieve a Global Goal on Adaptation (GGA).

Countries also agreed to track the progress towards achieving both these goals through a periodic process of global stocktaking. Such periodic stocktaking would be done by adding up the mitigation and adaptation actions by each country as provided in their respective National Determined Contribution (NDC) and National Adaptation Plan (NAP) reports.

This will require being able to measure global progress towards achieving the two goals. It is relatively easy to measure the total amount of emissions of the different greenhouse gases (GHGs) that cause global warming and to calculate the total Global Warming Potential (GWP) of each of the different GHGs (for example, each molecule of methane causes as much warming as twenty molecules of carbon dioxide) and aggregate all of the emission globally to see where we are headed in achieving the long-term temperature goal. At the moment, the globally aggregated emissions from all NDCs submitted so far is taking the world to nearly 3 degrees of temperature rise so we are not on track to achieve the goal, but we have time to enhance the mitigation activities and reduce the emissions of GHGs even faster in future.

When it comes to agreeing on the adaptation goal, and also how to measure progress, it is not as easy as it is for mitigation.

Whereas measuring mitigation has a common GWP to aggregate all the GHGs and a long-term temperature goal for adaptation, there is no agreed long term goal for achieving adaptation at the global level, nor are there agreed metrics or indicators which can be measured in each country and then aggregated to the global level.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) based in Paris, France, convened a Climate Change Experts Group Forum earlier this month to bring together experts and negotiators from the key negotiating groups to try to get some consensus at the technical level on measuring mitigation and adaptation for the first Global Stock take.

I was invited to facilitate the discussion on the adaption goal. The interesting debate offered varied outlooks of individuals and groups who had differing views on what should be measured and aggregated.

The result was that there is no agreement on what the global goal on adaptation should look like. This is because adaptation is very location-specific and almost unique in each place on the globe. Hence, even aggregating from the local to the national level, let alone from the national to the global level, is a challenge.

The net result of the expert dialogue was to agree that a lot more work needs to be done at the scientific and technical level amongst adaptation scientists and practitioners in order to find some potential proxy indicators that could be used for the first global stocktaking while better ones are developed over time.

However, in the end there was one aspect of the global adaptation goal that was relatively easy to be agreed upon, namely how much of the global funds for tackling climate change should go to adaptation and mitigation.

Here the agreed goal is to achieve a balance of 50/50 out of the total amount of USD 100 billion a year, starting from 2020 onwards. On this measure, the current ratio is less than 20 percent of global funds going towards adaptation and more than 80 percent to mitigation. Hence, there is still a long way to go towards the global goal on adaptation.

The writer is Director, International Centre for Climate Change and Development at the Independent University, Bangladesh.
E-mail: Saleem.icccad@iub.edu.bd

This story was originally published by The Daily Star, Bangladesh

Over the next two to three decades, there are two major overarching trends that Bangladesh will have to deal with, and therefore have to plan for as well. The first trend is a positive one, which is our desire, and indeed commitment, to graduating out of Least Developed Country (LDC) status within less than a decade. The second, more negative trend, is to tackle the adverse impacts of climate change that will occur along the way.

Source: RemiNetwork.com

First let us define what we mean by the private sector which is a very large catch-all term that includes everything from multinational companies operating in Bangladesh to large Bangladeshi corporations to small and medium enterprises (SMEs) as well as individual farmers and road-side vendors.

For the purposes of this column, I will use the term to mean the larger corporations (counting both multinational as well as national ones) as well as SMEs.

In this domain again there are major sectors in which they can be disaggregated like finance and banking, industry, energy, transport, garments, textiles, tea growing, etc. Each sector is usually represented by trade and industry associations who are all members of the major chambers of commerce and industry such as the Dhaka Chamber of Commerce and Industry (DCCI) and Federation of Bangladesh Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FBCCI).

For the overall economic development of the country, the key roles will have to start with finance and banking sectors which can leverage both national and international capital to invest in the other industries and commercial sectors at a much larger scale than we have done in the past while reducing our dependence on concessional loans and grants through Official Development Assistance (ODA) from the richer countries. This will enable the country become much more self-reliant economically.

On the climate change front, there are two separate aspects, like two sides of a coin that need to be considered, namely threats and opportunities.

With regard to threats of adverse impacts of climate change, as one of the world’s most vulnerable countries, Bangladesh has to prepare itself to face more frequent (and possibly more severe) floods, cyclones and droughts as well as sea level rise in coming decades.

However, Bangladesh has a long history of successfully tackling such challenges, such as the cyclone warning systems and shelter programmes, which have resulted in lives lost from cyclones to drop by nearly 100 percent over the last few decades. Cyclones still happen and cause damage to crops and infrastructure but human lives lost have been successfully prevented.

So for the private sector, the requirement is for all of them to become aware of the climate change risks that they will have to face over time and build their own capacity to prepare to face those risks without too much damage to their business. For the larger corporations, they can afford to pay for this advice and capacity building but for SMEs, there will need to be an investment from the government to initially provide information to raise awareness and then do training and capacity building to enable them to take necessary actions.

For the other side of the coin, namely opportunities to make profits, there are two domains of such opportunities available for the private companies in Bangladesh.

The first is to tackle the emissions of greenhouse gases through climate change mitigation actions, which include promoting renewable energy such as solar energy, where a number of Bangladeshi companies are already making good profits. The second is to find profit making business opportunities for adaptation to the adverse impacts of climate change through things like selling saline, flood and drought tolerant varieties of crops and other agricultural products, insurance schemes and other activities. This is a relatively unexplored area where Bangladeshi companies can indeed become pioneers and possibly even export their expertise to other companies over time.

It may be noticed that I did not mention the issue of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). This is not because I don’t recognise its role but because depending on CSR alone will not be enough. Unless we can unleash the power of profit-making from good development and tackling climate change, we will not be able to make the changes at the scale required to meet our aspirations and goals. However, with the right kind of policies, and incentives along with knowledge generation and sharing, it is well within our grasp.

The writer is Director, International Centre for Climate Change and Development at the Independent University, Bangladesh.
E-mail: Saleem.icccad@iub.edu.bd

This story was originally published by The Daily Star, Bangladesh

Although President Trump has only been in office for less than a month, it is already becoming clear how he intends to carry out implementing his campaign pledges and who he is appointing in his cabinet. It is therefore possible to assess some likely actions and policies on climate change based on his campaign statements and also some of his advisers’ statements and most importantly from his own Twitter statements.

PHOTO: AFP

The second point that is becoming clear is that his key advisers in the White House are very strong right wing ideologues, who have an agenda that they want to pursue, an agenda which is extremely anti environment and anti climate change. As long as they call the shots, there is unlikely to be any compromise despite meetings with Al Gore and de Caprio.

Thirdly, there seems to be an interesting tension developing between these key advisers in the White House and the cabinet members; even though they have the same objectives they do not necessarily share the same extreme views on how to implement those objectives.

All the above factors will play themselves out as the Trump administration develops and implements its policies and actions on climate change. Let us now examine them one by one.

Paris Agreement

It is still not clear what the US under Trump will do regarding the Paris Agreement. He is on record as having said he would withdraw but then his Secretary of State Rex Tillersen, during his confirmation hearings, said that he would prefer that the US stayed in the Paris Agreement. We will see soon which strategy prevails. In any case, the rest of the world has to be prepared to deal with a US administration that is going to be actively hostile to taking any action. So in a way it is better that the US withdraws from the Paris Agreement, thus making it a rogue state as far as climate change is concerned, and allowing the rest of the world to continue to implement the agreement. If the US decides to stay, then it will try to drag everyone backwards and make progress very difficult.

Funding climate change

In the last hours of the Obama administration, the US gave a USD 500 million contribution to the Green Climate Fund (GCF) as its contribution towards the USD 100 billion dollars a year from 2020 onwards promised by the developed countries. It is almost certain that will be the last contribution that the US will make for another four years while Trump is the president. His officials have already started to look at completely de-funding the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) as well as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). For the rest of the developed and developing countries, they will need to step up and fill the funding gap left by the US withdrawal. It would be interesting to see if countries like China and India, who are already developing their own climate change funding streams bilaterally, also join the GCF as donors.

Domestic actions

The appointment of Scott Pruitt as head of the Environment Protection Agency (EPA) and the actions already taken to take down climate information from US government websites and the witch hunt of climate change scientists has already put a chill on the scientific community within the Federal Government. This will certainly result in a roll back and reversal of even the modest executive actions that the Obama administration had taken to curb coal pollution.

However, the support for renewable energy that the Obama administration has put in place has already generated so much investment and jobs that reversing it may prove to be quite unpopular, even in states governed by Republican governors. So it will be interesting to see how much the Trump ideologues try to reverse the investments in renewable energy.

Divestment from Fossil fuels

One of the strongest winds that is currently blowing in the global investment community is a divestment from fossil fuel energy companies to renewable energy companies. This is for two reasons. First, because renewable energy is becoming cheaper and more efficient day by day and can now out-compete most fossil fuels. The second is that investors are seeing added risks in fossil fuel companies, especially coal as their reserves will be worthless if they are not allowed to mine it. This risk factor has already made divestment out of coal inevitable and if Trump wants to give the coal miners their jobs back, he will have to invest in the coal mines himself as no other investors is likely to do so.

Thus, Trump is actually going against a strong market driven trend, away from fossil fuels towards renewable energy which will get stronger every year and will be difficult to reverse, even for the US.

Finally, for Bangladesh and other vulnerable countries, the loss of US leadership will be a setback but it does not need to be a debilitating one. We will need to redouble our efforts both at home as well as internationally to implement the Paris Agreement both on its mitigation as well as adaptation goals.

The writer is Director, International Centre for Climate Change and Development , Independent University, Bangladesh.
Saleemul.huq@iied.org

This story was originally published by The Daily Star, Bangladesh

Bangladesh has been one of the worst victims of global warming, with thousands of people being killed by cyclones in recent years that have become more frequent and deadlier. PHOTO: AFP

By Saleemul Huq
Jan 27 2017 (The Daily Star, Bangladesh)

Under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), developed countries have agreed to provide developing countries with USD 100 billion per year, starting from 2020 onwards, to help tackle climate change through both mitigation and adaptation.

They also created a new funding body called the Green Climate Fund (GCF) to channel the money through. The GCF is an independent entity with its headquarters in Songdo, Korea, and its own board with half of its members belonging to developed countries and the other half to developing countries. Bangladesh has been a member of the board for a number of years on behalf of the Least Developed Countries (LDC) group but will be stepping down soon to be replaced by Malawi.

The fund is already up and running, and has received about USD 10 billion already, which it has started allocating to developing countries.

The GCF Board has decided to allocate half their funds to support mitigation actions to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases and half for adaptation, which will in turn be prioritised towards the LDCs, the small island developing states (SIDS) and Africa.

The GCF has also introduced two modalities for receiving applications for funding, one is through Multilateral Implementing Entities (MIEs), such as UNDP, FAO, UNEP etc, and the other is through National Implementing Entities (NIEs), which are selected entities from each developing country. Both MIEs and NIES have to apply for and receive accreditation by the GCF Board before they can then apply for project funding. The accreditation process is quite time-consuming and cumbersome, and requires the applicant organisation to demonstrate that it has good fiduciary, governance, gender, and monitoring rules and procedures. Each developing country government also has to appoint a National Designated Authority (NDA) who will approve candidate organisations for applying for NIE accreditation. Such entities can be from the public or private sector, or also from NGOs.

The government of Bangladesh appointed the Economic Resources Division (ERD) of the Ministry of Finance (MOF) as its National Designated Authority over a year ago, and since then, the division has been engaging with a number of public and private sector entities and NGOs to encourage them to consider applying to the GCF for accreditation to become National Implementing Entities. So far six public sector entities have started the process of applying for NIE status, but this is taking a long time as the GCF requires a lot of documentation, and there is a lot of back and forth with queries. It is to be hoped that at least a couple of entities should be able to get the NIE status soon.

In the meantime, some ministries and agencies of the Bangladesh government have also applied for projects through MIEs, which had already been accredited by the GCF. The first such project was for enhancing the resilience of small-scale infrastructure projects by the Local Government Engineering Department (LGED), which was submitted through the German Development Bank, KFW, while the GCF Board has approved approximately USD 40 million as grant with some matching funds from the government.

The second project has been submitted by the Ministry of Women’s And Children’s Affairs (MOWCA) through UNDP for nearly USD 80 million for providing safe drinking water to women and girls in coastal areas suffering from saline intrusion in their drinking water. This project was sent back by the GCF Board from its last meeting with advice to revise and resubmit it later with better justification as to why it is a climate change project and not just a development one.

Even though the experience of the GCF is itself new and evolving, and Bangladesh has been engaging with them for a relatively short while, it is still possible to draw some early lessons.

The first lesson is that we need to build the capacity of our own NDA, NIEs and public and private sector about what climate change is, and how a climate change project or activity differs from a normal development project. Thus, simply trying to sell old wine in a new bottle will not work. The second lesson is that having transparent and robust systems to both track where climate finance is flowing and also monitor whether it is being used effectively is extremely important. As Bangladesh will have to compete with other vulnerable countries to get climate funding, merely asserting our high vulnerability to climate impacts will only get us sympathy but no money. In order to get funds over a period of time, we will have to demonstrate absorption capacity with transparent and robust monitoring systems as well.

Given that it is still early days for global climate finance to start flowing, there is still time for Bangladesh to learn how to access the funds and build good transparent systems to track the funds and robust systems to monitor their use. In the longer run, our ability to get a reasonably fair share of these global climate funds lies in whether we can rise to the challenge of building our own capacity and systems.

The writer is Director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development at Independent University, Bangladesh Email: Saleemul.huq@iied.org

This story was originally published by The Daily Star, Bangladesh

After the Paris Agreement on climate change endorsed by every participating country last December at the 21st Conference of Parties (COP21) of the United Nations Convention in Climate Change (UNFCCC), all the participants , including both developing as well as developed countries, have to put in place a clear strategy to not only reduce emissions of greenhouse gases through mitigation actions, but also to adapt to the adverse impacts of human-induced climate change.

The main vehicle through which each country has to report to the UNFCCC is the Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) where every country has to provide information on its mitigation strategies and proposed actions. Although reporting on their adaptation actions is not mandatory in the NDC, many countries have chosen to include adaptation along with mitigation.

It is therefore necessary to find common metrics and indicators in order to compare adaptation across countries, otherwise there will be a bunch of apples and oranges with no basis for comparison.

For mitigation measurements, this is less of a problem as the common metric for measurement is how much greenhouse gas emissions will be reduced by each country. From this data, it is easy to aggregate across all countries and find a global mitigation amount which can then be compared to the goal of reaching either 2 degrees Celsius long term temperature or even a 1.5 degrees goal.

However, for adaptation, there is no such common metric to measure against and neither is it possible to aggregate across countries.

It is therefore essential to try to come up with some proxy metrics and indicators that might allow comparison (and possibly aggregation) across countries. One such common metric is the amount of money being invested in adaptation activities in each country as well as the amount being transferred from the rich countries to the poorer countries. This can also be compared to the total needs for adaptation, and thus an Adaptation Gap can be assessed in terms of money.

The recent Adaptation Gap Report by UNEP attempts to do so and finds a gap of at least US$25 billion a year at present, which is likely to grow in future.

Another, more bottom-up, metric that might be usefully explored is to try to assess (and if possible even measure) adaptive capacity of people at different scales. Thus, one could think of applying his analysis to individuals, households, communities, cities, institutions and even countries. Indeed, it may even be possible to aggregate to global scale as well.

Just to provide some food for thought on how such an adaptation capacity metric might be developed, let us take the knowledge of climate change as the proxy indicator of adaptive capacity (the hypothesis being that those more knowledgeable about climate change have higher adaptive capacity than those less knowledgeable).

A possible scale for such adaptive capacity might be on a scale of levels zero to five, with zero being no knowledge about climate change, one and two being levels of awareness of the problem of potential adverse impacts of climate change, and levels three through four being levels of knowledge about solutions (i.e. adaptation) to the problems, while five would be the highest level of adaptive capacity.

An indicator of knowledge might then be understanding climate change related terms and jargon. So a possible set of indicators may be as follows:

Level Zero: no knowledge of climate change

Levels One and two (low): knowledge of around ten to twenty words (for example, mitigation, adaptation, greenhouse gases, fossil fuels, maladaptation, etc).

Levels three to four (medium to high): knowledge of between twenty and fifty words and acronyms (including for example UNFCCC, IPCC, REDD, NAPA,NAP, 2 Degrees, 1.5 Degrees , incremental adaptation, etc).

Levels Five (very high): knowledge of fifty or above words (for example, transformative adaptation, Paris Agreement, LDC, CVF, etc).

Thus one could assess where an individual is on such a scale of adaptive capacity and then also aggregate across many individuals within communities and countries, and even globally for all citizens of the planet.

Ultimately, if all the citizens on the planet are to successfully adapt to the adverse impacts of climate change, they will need to climb this knowledge ladder to reach the upper range of level five, or at least four.

The writer is Director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development (ICCCAD) based at the Independent University, Bangladesh. Email: Saleemul.huq@iied.org

This story was originally published by The Daily Star, Bangladesh