Bangladesh: Climate change diplomacy is now the challenge

By Saleemul Huq

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In September this year, the current Secretary General of the UN, Antonio Guiterres, called for a Climate Change Summit where the invitees are only the leaders who he feels are being proactive in tackling climate change. Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina of Bangladesh is one of those leaders invited to the adaptation and resilience track of the summit. He has asked leaders to come with “plans not speeches” and also to bring “offers” as well as “asks”.

It is therefore clear that Bangladesh has already embarked on climate change diplomacy under the leadership of the prime minister herself.

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First, the prime minister can take a message from the people of Bangladesh that the country wants to change the narrative of it being regarded as one of the world’s most vulnerable countries to climate change, to becoming one of the most resilient ones. Also associated with this message is that, it is a whole-of-society approach where, under the leadership of the government, it is attempting to involve civil society, academics, youth, the private sector and media in a collective enterprise to become more resilient.

The second message that should be upheld is how Bangladesh has been investing in enhancing its own resilience for over a decade with its own budget and has learned a great deal about local level adaptation in particular and how to integrate climate change planning into national, sectoral and local level plans—something that would be required of all countries sooner rather than later. Bangladesh will be happy to share its own experiential knowledge in tackling climate change both South-South as well as South-North. In this respect, we should invite representatives from other countries to join the annual Gobeshona conference every January, where current research on tackling climate change in Bangladesh is shared with each other.

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