French FM urges rich states for technological, financial support to Bangladesh for climate effects

All countries, particularly the rich, must help Bangladesh to tackle the impacts of climate change, the French foreign minister has said in Dhaka.

“You are not responsible for the (carbon) emission, but you are having the consequences,” Laurent Fabius said on Monday at a press briefing at the end of a whirlwind visit along with German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier.

He said Bangladesh, despite many of its activities including early warning system, needed “technological and financial” support to adopt more to the impacts of climate change.

Their joint visit, the first of its kind, came ahead of the December climate summit in Paris, which is meant to deliver a draft that could lead to a new world climate treaty to replace the expired Kyoto Protocol.

They had to cancel their plans to go to the southern Patuakhali district by helicopter, due to bad weather, to inaugurate one of the anti-cyclone shelters built with German support.

Instead, they spent two hours on the river Bangshi at the Dhaka suburb of Savar on Bangladesh’s traditional wooded boat and saw the impacts of climate change on both sides of the river.

In a joint statement after the trip, the two ministers said they witnessed “the impact of ups and downs of the river level on the environment”.

During their travel, they also saw the vast inundated areas, where bricks are usually made. “These areas are now under flood and only the chimneys can be seen,” they said in the statement.

They said this joint trip underlined the commitment of the two European nations “to broker a pragmatic, yet comprehensive, legally-binding agreement in Paris”.

“Tackling climate change is a challenging task for the whole international community. And the burden to avoid further environmental hazards caused by climate change has to be shared.”

At the press briefing, the French minister, who would chair the Paris conference, said it was interesting to work with Bangladesh on climate change as the country was “deeply concerned” by the impacts.

“Bangladesh has a very positive action and position and as a matter of fact we are at the same line.

“Nothing was more valuable (than) to come on the ground to see what is happening,” Fabius said, explaining the visit.

Their visit also marked the topping-off ceremony of the first-ever Franco-German embassy of the world being built in Dhaka.

He said the joint embassy was “a symbol of our relationship and triangular relations”.

The embassy, which will be ready for operation at the beginning of next summer, would be a “green” building.

Climate deal hopes

Fabius said they were “optimistic” this time to have a climate deal as the expectations among the countries were “great”.

His optimism, however, belies the fact that the latest round of climate talks in the German city of Bonn in June ended with a failure to deliver common ground for the negotiations at the UN climate summit in Paris.

“The phenomenon (climate change) is deeper than before. We have to tackle it,” he said.

He said even China, the US and some other countries who were opposing the carbon emission deal decided to commit this time.

“We need a legally binding agreement,” he said.

“But the difficulty is that some countries have problems with the notion of legality as they have to ratify that in their own parliament.

The Paris talks are meant to deliver an agreement on which to base a new world climate treaty to replace the expired Kyoto Protocol. But experts now fear that there is not enough time left to see any major breakthrough.

“We are working on a formula which can be accepted by different countries,” the French foreign minister said. But all must work to mitigate climate change so that the temperature could be stick under the two degree limit.

He said a new report would be released next month to trace the financing pattern of climate change.

He also sounded optimism that the promised $100 billion climate funds per year by 2020 in Cancun would be raised by the industrialised countries to support concrete mitigation actions by developing countries.

These funds would be raised from a mix of public and private sources.

The French foreign minister left Dhaka in a regular Etihad flight to Paris.

His German counterpart will leave early in Tuesday morning in his special flight which carried the both ministers from Berlin to Dhaka.