By Saleemul Huq
As we enter the new year of 2020, we are in fact making a very significant transition when it comes to the issue of climate change.
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In scientific terms it means that the adverse impacts, and associated loss and damage, from climatic events such as floods, droughts, cyclones and wildfires can now be clearly attributed to the fact that human induced climate change has raised global temperature by over one degree centigrade from pre-industrial times and that abnormally severe events have now become the “new normal”.
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At the same time a new constituency of activists have arrived on the global scene with the potential to make a significant difference, namely the school strikers led by Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg. The scientific community had been warning global policymakers for several decades about the potential dangers of human induced climate change and the need to take action. And then the adversely affected vulnerable developing countries like Bangladesh and Tuvalu had added their voices in the last decade and the global leaders were able to agree on the Paris Agreement on Climate Change at the 21st Conference of Parties (COP21) in December 2015. However, since the withdrawal from the Paris Agreement by Trump and the election of leaders like Bolsanaro in Brazil and Scott Morrison in Australia, these leaders have decided to block any further action to tackle the climate change emergency.
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At the global level, we now need to develop coalitions of the willing amongst governments of countries, both developing as well as developed, who want to take action to tackle climate change. Here Bangladesh has an important opportunity to play a leadership role, as Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina will be taking over the chair of the Climate Vulnerable Forum (CVF) from President Hilda Heine of the Marshall Islands in mid-2020 and will be chair for the following two years.
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