Climate change is no longer a distant threat. According to IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), the effects of climate change have already been observed, and scientific findings indicate that precautionary and prompt action has become imperative.
Preferring economic development rather than for sustainability, industrialized countries invested heavily in carbon intensive technologies, such as coal-fired power plants, massive road systems, and electrical grids. Some greenhouse gases remaining in the atmosphere for centuries, human induced emissions have guaranteed the inevitability of climate change regardless of policy responses. Most greenhouse gases have been and are emitted to meet the needs of modern industrial societies. The burden of impacts is likely to be most serious in developing countries even though they have contributed very little to historical emissions.
Developed countries account for high percentages of annual greenhouse gas emissions. In 2000 total emission of all greenhouse gases was 24,790 million tones CO2 equivalents of which share of the G8 countries, least developed countries and other countries were 48%, 0.4% and 51.60%, respectively. Annual CO2 emission per person from the burning of oil, natural gas and coal in 2003 for USA, Russia, UK, Japan, China, Brazil, India, Senegal and Bangladesh were 20 tones, 11.2 tones, 9.5 tones, 9.4 tones, 2.7 tones, 2.0 tones 1.0 ton, 0.5 ton and 0.2 ton, respectively.
Since the beginning of the industrial revolution the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide has increased exponentially from about 280 parts per million (ppm) in 1800 to over 380 ppm in 2006. The concentration of carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere are now at the highest levels over 650,000 years. The level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is very closely linked to global temperature. IPCC has projected that by 2100 atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide could have reached between 540 ppm and 970 ppm and that, as a result, global surface temperature could rise by between 1.4 degree C and 5.8 degree C.
Climate change threatens the basic elements of life for people around the world -- access to water, food, health, and use of land and the environment. On current trends, average global temperatures could rise by 2 - 3°C within the next fifty years or so, leading to many severe impacts, often mediated by water, including more frequent droughts and floods.
Rising sea levels will result in tens to hundreds of millions more people flooded each year. There will be serious risks and increasing pressures for coastal protection in South East Asia (Bangladesh and Vietnam), small islands in the Caribbean and the Pacific, and large coastal cities, such as Tokyo, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Mumbai, Calcutta, Karachi, Buenos Aires, St Petersburg, New York, Miami and London. By the middle of the century, 200 million more people may become permanently displaced due to rising sea levels, heavier floods, and more intense droughts, according to one estimate. Melting or collapse of ice sheets would raise sea levels and eventually threaten at least 4 million Km2 of land, which today is home to 5% of the world's population. .
In particular, sea level rise is of grave concern to a developing country like Bangladesh with a vast, low-lying, densely populated deltaic coast. Tens of millions of people are at risk of becoming climate refugees. One meter sea level rise will inundate about one fifth area of Bangladesh which will displace 25-30 million people. This is many times higher than the entire population of all pacific islands combined, and twice the total population of Australia or the Netherlands. Bangladesh is the victim of climate change without inducing any climate change acitivites.
Bangladesh is fully committed to addressing the challenges of climate change and has signed the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in June 1992 at Rio and ratified it on 15 April 1994 and the Kyoto Protocol on 22 October, 2001.
* The adaptation fund must be fast tracked and the least developed countries should get top priority under it. Efforts are should made to substantially increase the level of support to the LDCs, particularly through operationalizing and developing new mechanism/instruments with adequate resources, in adaptation needs of various sections such as agriculture, forestry, protection of coastal belt, biological diversity, eco-system, infrastructure, health etc, so that they can manage climate risk and adapt better to the speed and the scale of climate change and its impacts.
* Adaptation fund and LDCs fund under GEF should be simplified with reduced transaction costs. Greater focus of the funds should be accorded to the project and programme implementation, not on reports and consultation exercises. The RAF should be revised to take into consideration the special situation of the most disadvantaged countries, the LDC Parties. The GEF criteria of co-financing of adaptation projects are a serious constraint for the LDCs. GEF should look for options to overcome this conditionality. Global environmental benefits should not be used as criteria for access to funds under the RAF.
* Agreement for development of vulnerability index and categorization of countries according to their vulnerability in order to identify scale of specific needs and actions for adaptation to climate change under future climate change regime is urgently required.
* Efforts should be made for process simplification and uniform geographical distribution of CDM projects along with capacity building of LDCs.
* There should be consensus for establishment of an International Adaptation Centre to address relevant needs, finding of priorities and devices of adaptation regime. This institution will spearhead the sharing of know-how and practice to build necessary capacity among the vulnerable nations, pooling, sharing and building on each other's capacity.
* Preferential access to environmentally sound technologies know-how, practices and process pertinent to climate change is crucial for LDCs. There should be specific modalities in the post Kyoto instrument for the development, application and diffusion of both mitigation and adaptation technologies to LDCs at an affordable cost.
* Any further delay in setting targets for deeper cuts in GHG emission will jeopardize the very existence of millions of people with little staying power. COP 15th should agree on firm reduction commitment without which effective adaptation measures cannot be designed along with funding and technology deployment. Bangladesh believes that to prevent dangerous anthropogenic climate change, the global average temperature increases must be kept as far below 2°C as possible. In this regard, deeper cut of GHG (40% within 2020 and 80% by 2050) is urgently needed.
* Displacement of millions of people from coastal areas is inevitable due to sea level rise as indicated by the IPCC. COP should consider the permanent migration issue of climate refugees.
Fifteen years have already been passed but negotiation processes of UNFCCC have yet to deliver a substantial outcome regarding mitigation, adaptation, financing and technology transfer in line with the related articles of the convention for supporting developing countries to combat climate change, rather than providing a complex and tedious negotiation process.
Attitudes of the World Leaders who are the top emmitter manifest that COP-15 may not yield any encouraging result regarding deep emmission cut for the second commitment period. It is noticed that there is lack of progress to comply with present commitment period too by the Annex-I countries. Bangladesh as a most vulnerable country to climate change cannot sit idle or cannot depend only on UNFCCC. Hopefully, the government of Bangladesh is pursuing intensive bilateral talks with the countries and development partners for getting support to combat climate change.
