Given all this budget slashing, all that bail-outing, leaders of the European Union have promised Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina that funds pledged to Bangladesh for the European Union Climate Change Adaptation Fund would be delivered.
Bangladesh is something of a case study for devising policy and infrastructure to combat the consequences of global cliamte change; a canary in the coal mine. Often flooded city and country-wide, during the monsoon season, successive Bangladeshi governments have worked hard to figure out ways to rebound to normalcy, on what seems like an annual basis.
So it is little wonder that European Council President Herman Von Rompuy and European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso promised the government that it would raise the funds pledged.
No doubt they know that whither goes Bangladesh, so goes the world. Bangladesh’s research and development and investment in infrastructure, as a low-lying country, can only be helpful to other countries only now beginning to get clued into the ravages of rain and endemic flooding.
This is of course a long-term investment proposition. But there are urgent short to medium term interests at work. Indeed, the developed countries of the world can ill-afford to sit back and watch the world drown even as India and China push on their air and water pollution friendly industrial development strategies, strategies that could have negative, global consequences on the environment in the next ten years.