Editorial
Sheikh Hasina on climate change effects
Technology transfer and resource availability are key in meeting challenges
PRIME Minister Sheikh Hasina's call in Stockholm for a realistic fund to be established to help countries like Bangladesh deal with the effects of climate change in the face of a dire need to scale up finances for the purpose has been timely. And it's because of the all too loud alarm bells sounded in recent times about the dangers to which the least developed countries of the world are exposed. We believe the Bangladesh leader was speaking for all vulnerable nations when she suggested that the finance they need should not come in the form of loans. In other words, climate change adaptation financing, in her view, must be distinct from and also in addition to ODA targets of gross national incomes for developing as well as least developed countries.
The suggestion comes against the backdrop of realities as they happen to be in Bangladesh today. As Sheikh Hasina pointed out in Stockholm, climate-related factors will result in 40,000,000 people in Bangladesh losing their means of livelihood, with the additional fact of 20,000,000 more being displaced by 2050 owing to natural calamities generated by climate change. The picture is thus not rosy for Bangladesh. Neither is it for other countries. Which is why it becomes important that LDCs be given affordable access to technology by developed nations to tackle the oncoming crisis. For Bangladesh, the problem has not merely been one of energy efficiency. It has also been about a greening of energy sources; and it all boils down to issues of funding. Resource constraints have held it back from pursuing the development goals necessary for its socio-economic development. And now comes new climatic changes. Now, one severe effect of climate change will obviously be of people getting uprooted from their land and finding themselves in the unenviable position of having turned into climate refugees. There are already the portents here, particularly related to the threats which life along the country's coastal regions is faced with. In similar manner, millions more across Asia and Africa will be displaced as a consequence of climatic factors.
One way of tackling the issues nations, especially LDCs, are up against is to set up a new legal regime to guarantee the social, cultural and economic rehabilitation of climate refugees. It is an idea whose time came quite sometime ago. For the world, especially the developed part of it (and it was largely responsible for the climate change phenomenon), it is now time to act on it. Globalisation is not merely a coming together of nations in the sense of economic interdependence. It is also a call for collective survival strategies in the face of calamities.
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