Bangladesh to claim 15% of global fund for climate ills

Xinhua: The Bangladeshi government will claim at least 15 percent of the global fund for climate ills per year, the South Asian country's State Minister for Environment said Tuesday, with a plea for per capita-based allocation of the adaptation aid."We'll claim at least 15 percent of the climate adaptation fund per year for Bangladesh's 150 million people which is around 15 percent of the world's around 1 billion climate victims," Hasan Mahmud, State Minister for Environment and Forests, told reporters at a press conference Tuesday.

He said the country and its people have already been the worst victims of the global climate change, which is further posing serious threats to lives and their livelihoods. Mentioning the consequences of the cyclonic storms SIDR followed by two consecutive floods in 2007 and Aila in May 2009 which battered Bangladesh's coastal areas, Mahmud said several million people of the country have already been displaced from their homes due to the climate change shocks with no fault of their own.

In 2008, according to a paper distributed among journalists at the press conference, developed countries emitted more than 18 billion tons of greenhouse gases (GHG) such as carbon dioxide. Out of this, it said the United States, Japan, EU and Russia together emitted 14 billion tons….

Karnafuli River, Chittagong, Bangladesh, shot by Sabilaenun, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 License