Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has urged the world to invest in preventing climate change instead of spending money on weapons and wars. He made this call at a security conference in Munich, Germany on Friday (February 16).
Bangabandhu’s daughter presented 6 proposals to deal with climate change. In this episode, US Special Envoy on Climate Change, John Kerry, was on stage with the Prime Minister as a guest. Besides, many world leaders including US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken were also present there.
Pointing out that Bangladesh is facing a dire threat due to global warming, the Prime Minister said that this problem cannot be solved alone. This requires the goodwill of the developed world. For this reason, he put forward 6-point proposal.
In his first proposal, the Prime Minister said, “We need to find a solution to climate finance allocations to keep us on the right track.” He said that developed countries should comply with the commitment to pay 100 billion US dollars every year for two years till 2025 based on the plan.
Sheikh Hasina said, by the end of this year, we all must agree on a new climate finance target of 100 billion US dollars after 2025 based on scientific evidence.
In the second resolution, the Prime Minister said the world must rid itself of war and conflict, illegal occupation and the brutal killing of unarmed civilians, especially women and children, which the world is witnessing in Gaza and elsewhere. He said the impact of sanctions and counter-sanctions was felt far beyond the sense of conflict.
In the third recommendation, he said, the current level of adaptation financing needs to be at least doubled to address the acute funding imbalance for climate mitigation and adaptation. To this end, he thanked the French President for pledging 1 billion Euros to help Bangladesh adapt.
In the fourth proposal, the Prime Minister said that the long-standing issue of facilitating access to funds from the existing international climate fund for developing countries should be resolved with the opportunity to invest in their capacity.
He said, in the case of Bangladesh, we have only two eligible institutions to receive financing from the Green Climate Fund and two more are in the process.
In the fifth proposal, Sheikh Hasina said, in terms of reforms in the management of global financing, meaningful results should be shown by increasing the opportunity to get grants and favorable loans for them, especially to eliminate the debt burden of climate-risk countries.
In the concluding remarks, the Prime Minister said that governments need to invest in proper planning, policies and measures for the flow of private capital for climate programmes. In addition, international financial institutions should develop innovative, blended financing mechanisms to attract private capital for projects. He also made a clear comment at the time that without the participation of the private sector, the huge deficit of climate finance cannot be effectively solved.
Earlier, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres expressed concern over the global situation in his opening speech at the Munich Security Summit. He said that the world is going through a worse time than the Cold War, now the whole world is divided, which is not desirable at all.
US ambassador John Kerry claimed that the world is moving in a positive direction to prevent climate change following the Dubai conference.
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