Dhaka is keen to create “greater climate collaboration” between Bangladesh's Climate Vulnerable Forum (CVF) Presidency and the Commonwealth.
Saida Muna Tasneem, Bangladesh High Commissioner to the UK, said Bangladesh looks forward to such collaboration and connectivity under the leadership of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina.
She said Dhaka is specially focused in building climate resilience post-Covid strategies for the Commonwealth Climate Vulnerable Countries.
The High Commissioner was giving a briefing on Bangladesh's CVF and the Vulnerable Twenty (V20) Group of Finance Ministers Presidency at the Commonwealth Board of Governors extra-ordinary meeting on post-Covid strategies in London last Friday.
She also proposed for a CVF-Commonwealth Leaders High Level Meeting at the upcoming Kigali Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in Rwanda in June 2021.
She highlighted some of Bangladesh’s CVF Presidency priorities including reducing climate vulnerability, 1.5 degrees campaign, financing for NDCs, scale-up loss and damage efforts, and linkages between climate change, human rights, and displacement.
The High Commissioner said Bangladesh also takes pride in hosting the South Asian Regional Office of Global Center on Adaptation (GCA) in Dhaka, jointly inaugurated last week by Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and former UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon, to accelerate climate adaptation actions and solutions in South Asia.
She called for vaccine multilateralism and called upon the global vaccine research institutions and manufacturers to provide licensing rights for manufacturing Covid-19 vaccines by the countries like Bangladesh where WTO TRIPS Agreement is exempted in the pharmaceuticals sector.
The High Commission in a statement said Bangladesh was highly praised by the Commonwealth Secretary General and many Commonwealth High Commissioners for its manufacturing successes in PPE and antiviral drugs in the post-Covid global market.