‘Nansen Initiative’ consultations begins on Friday

Bangladesh is going to host the regional consultation of the ‘Nansen Initiative’ on climate change, disasters and human mobility in South Asia and the Indian Ocean region.

The three-day meeting will begin on April 3 in Khulna, Foreign Secretary Md Shahidul Haque announced on Wednesday at a press briefing.

He said 10 countries of the region would take part in the consultations where officials, experts, and members of the civil society would discuss issues like displacement, mobility, migration and climate change.

He said they would also visit the cyclone Aila affected area in Dacope to see the living conditions of the displaced people.

Nansen Initiative was officially launched in Oct 2012 by the governments of Switzerland and Norway.

It works on building consensus on the development of a protection agenda addressing the needs of people displaced across international borders due to disasters and the effects of climate change.

Bangladesh is one of the nine countries who led this initiative.

Recent studies showed that one in every seven people in Bangladesh would be displaced due to climate change by 2050.

This consultation  is the part of the global process which will culminate in a global summit at Geneva in Oct.

“The (Nansen) process will close in Oct through a global summit in Geneva where a presentation on the protection agenda will be presented for future actions,” said Atle Solberg, Head of the Nansen Initiative Secretariat in Geneva.

He said this process still remained “outside the UN and that  the global summit countries would decide how to take it forward. The plan is to link it somehow with the UN process in future”.

Swiss ambassador in Dhaka Christian Fotsch, Chief of Mission of International Organisation for Migration (IOM) Sarat Dash, and Charge de Affairs of the Norway embassy Arne Hague were present at the press briefing.

Displacement is being considered globally as a key issue and that’s why those displaced due to climate change remain beyond the scope of supportive global action as they are not defined as refugees.

But Bangladesh, where thousands of people face displacement internally every year due to river erosion, is pushing  global forums for treating i displacement as  an international problem since the climate change is global phenomenon.

Bangladesh has urged the international community to incorporate climate change induced “displacement” in the post-2015 development goals as it feels from its own experience that the problem is real.

The Swiss ambassador said they would closely work with Dhaka on migration and displacement issues.

Climate change is already causing more displacement than  conflicts in the world, he said, citing statistics that 166 million were displaced between 2008 and 2013.