Feature
Building capacity for climate change and development:
An international centre in Bangladesh
INDEPENDENT University, Bangladesh (IUB) has been endowed with the prestigious and socio-beneficial opportunity to become the only national institution to collaborate with two other institutions of international repute, namely the International Institute of Environment and Development (IIED) (www.iied.org) based in the United Kingdom and the Bangladesh Centre for Advanced Studies (BCAS) (www.bcas.net), in establishing an International Centre for Climate Change and Development (ICCCAD). These three institutions have already signed a Memorandum of Understanding for developing ICCCAD to run regular post graduate courses at Masters and PhD level and will also be running short courses for others, including NGOs, Donors, media, private sector, etc.
It is well known that climate change will have long-term adverse effect on majority portion of the world, particularly in the least developed countries (LDCs). Therefore, it is only natural for the LDCs to take necessary precautions against this immense impact in the coming decades. The link between climate change and development is now well established and so is the need for expertise and enhanced capacity on this relatively new subject particularly in the LDCs. Bangladesh is an LDC and is also one of the most vulnerable countries to the adverse impacts of climate change. However, it is also one in which many innovative actions are taking place both on adaptation as well as mitigation at many levels including national program, sectorial agencies, NGOs, communities as well as the private sector. Bangladesh is thus becoming a living Laboratory on adaptation to climate change and IUB being the sole institution of Bangladesh to be associated in this international venture can only bring beneficial progress in the process.
The newly created Centre is expected to be established during 2008 and start its first Masters and PD Courses in 2009. It will be headed by Dr. Saleemul Haq, currently Head of the Climate Change Group at IIED and leading expert in climate change and development, and will be governed by an International Advisory Board with eminent international experts to be co-chaired by Dr. R. K. Pachauri, Chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel Chancellor of the University of Sussex, UK and Chief Scientific Adviser to the Department for International Development (DFID) of the UK.
The Centre will be offering scholarships for up to fifteen international Masters and five PhD students from the LDCs each year and will also run short courses on different themes including Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) and Adaptation, Adaptation and Mitigation linkages, Economics of Adaptation, Community Based Adaptation, Clean Development Mechanism, etc. the Centre will also host the annual International Conference on Community Based Adaptation (CBA), the next one being from 22 to 27 February 2009.
The Centre will be located in the new campus of IUB at Boshundhara and will have a national and international teaching staff. Plans are also being made of establishing academic and research links with some leading universities in the world including the United Nations University (UNU), the Institute for Development Studies (IDS), the University of East Anglia, Oxford University and Imperial College in the UK; Universities of Toronto, Guelph and British Columbia in Canada and Wesleyan, Harvard and Yale in the US as well as a number of universities in developing countries.
(Student of Media and Communication Department, Independent University, Bangladesh)
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