'Dev partners should strongly support climate change related actions of LDCs'

Development partners should strongly and decisively support the climate change-related action and ambitions of the world's Least Developed Countries (LDCs), experts said at a workshop in the capital on Monday.  

In this context, they said the developed countries should deliver $100 billion of finance per annum that they had promised to provide to the countries hit by climate change.

Such observations came during a workshop on "Unctad LDC Report 2022: Implications for Bangladesh" organised by Support to Sustainable Graduation Project (Ssgp) of Economic Relations Division (ERD), reads a press release.

Addressing as the chief guest, State Minister of the Ministry of Planning Shamsul Alam said Bangladesh continues to seek a 50-50 distribution between adaptation and mitigation from international climate financing.  

He also asked the partners from the international public and private sector to join in Bangladesh's climate change related efforts in the spirit of the Paris Agreement.

UN Resident Coordinator in Bangladesh Gwyn Lewis attended the workshop, chaired by ERD Secretary Sharifa Khan.

Gwyn Lewis said "While emission reduction cannot be the primary goal of LDCs including Bangladesh, the country can and should reap every co-benefit of developing its economy along a low carbon pathway".

Sharifa Khan, in her keynote presentation, identified inadequate and complex financing mechanisms as one of the major challenges towards Bangladesh's green transition.

"Bangladesh spends over $1 billion while receiving only $417 million from the Green Climate Fund" she informed.

Noting that transition to climate resilient technology is costly, she pointed out that the development partners are more interested in financing mitigation measures while providing less attention to adaptation. 

The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (Unctad) annually publishes a report that provides a comprehensive and authoritative source of socio-economic analysis and data on the LDCs.

The report with the theme "The low-carbon transition and its daunting implications for structural transformation", published on 3 November, noted that LDCs are on the front lines of the climate crisis although they had barely contributed to climate change.

It also observed that although LDCs had set ambitious emission-reduction targets for themselves, international support for adaptation and sustainable development of LDCs had so far fallen remarkably short of what is needed, both in terms of climate finance and access to environmentally-sound technologies.

Additional Secretary of the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change Iqbal Abdullah Harun, Executive Director of the Policy Research Institute Ahsan H Mansur, Chief of the LDC Section of Unctad Rolf Traeger and Director of Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association Asif Ashraf also spoke.

Discussants called for simplifying the access to climate financing as well as cheaper access to relevant technologies.