Global Climate Change: Bangladesh at severe risk

Climate change is having, and will continue to have strong, differential effects on people within and between countries and regions, for the present and future generations. Bangladesh is one of the worst affected among the countries that are facing the early impact of climate change said International Chamber of Commerce-Bangladesh (ICCB), The World Business Organisation in the Editorial of its Quarterly News Bulletin released on 18th October.

The United Nations warns that a quarter of Bangladesh's coastline could be inundated, and about 17% of the land mass go under water, if the sea rises 3 feet in the next 50 years; roughly 30 million Bangladeshis will be displaced from their homes and farms, making them "climate refugees".

According to Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) after the 2030s, river flows could drop dramatically, turning the great glacier-fed rivers of Asia into seasonal monsoon-fed rivers.

As a result, water shortages in Asia could affect more than a billion people by the 2050s. The impact of higher temperatures, more variable precipitation, extreme weather events (including intense floods, droughts, and storms) and sea level rise are already felt in Bangladesh and will continue to intensify.

A study by the Asian Development Bank (ADB) reveals that if the current trends persist until 2050, the||crop production in South Asia would decline significantly and melting Himalayan glaciers and other climate change impacts will pose a direct threat to the water and food security of more than 1.6 billion people in South Asia.

There are predictions that globally harvests may drop 20 to 40 per cent by the end of this century as a result of global warming.

New research, by economists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), finds that in years with higher temperatures, poor countries would experience significantly slower economic growth. The results further suggest that global warming could widen the gap between rich and the poor.

According to latest estimates, "annual per capita greenhouse gas (GHG) pollution" in Bangladesh is 0.9 as against 2.2 in India, 5.5 in China, 11 in Europe, 27 in US, 30 in Australia, and 6.7 in the world.

The people of Bangladesh are suffering the harsh effects of climate change, even though we are responsible for only one-.fifth of one per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions.

Particularly since the industrial revolution, countries that are now developed have been profligate in their use of fossil-fuel energy for development; the GHGs they have emitted have created the problem we currently face. Now, as our countries want to develop, we face innumerable problems that are the direct consequences of the actions of others. Our industrial development will be much more expensive than it has been for countries that have developed earlier The way out of global warming is not easy, assuming we are not already too late. It will cost between $500 and $600 billion annually to enable poor developing states to shift to renewable energy resources instead of relying on fuels that worsen global warming, according to a United Nations report released on September 1, 2009. Technology is available for cost-effective environment friendly production processes in developed countries; equally important will be the life-style changes in the developed countries, to reduce their emissions of GHGs.

To recoup the current climate-change related losses, Bangladesh has sought $500 million on an urgent basis as financial assistance from the UN and developed countries. In addition, we have presented the country paper to the- UN seeking a further $5 billion as compensation for next five years.

We praise the timely initiative. However, Bangladesh must participate effectively and raise the compensation issue in the negotiations leading to the In-nation UN Conference on Climate Change in Copenhagen during December 09. The developed countries have the responsibility to cut their emissions to sustainable levels, and at the same time help us overcome the consequences of their actions.