Climate scientist’s message to the world

SALEEMUL Huq was a pioneering climate scientist from Bangladesh who pushed to get the world to understand, pay for and adapt to worsening warming impacts on poorer nations.

“Saleem always focused on the poor and marginalised, making sure that climate change was about people, their lives, health and livelihoods,” said University of Washington climate and health scientist Kristie Ebi, a friend of Mr Huq’s.

Mr Huq, who died of cardiac arrest in Dhaka aged 71, directed and helped found the International Centre for Climate Change and Development there.

He was also a senior associate and programme founder at the International Institute for Environment and Development in London and taught at universities in England and Bangladesh.

He was an early force for community-based efforts to adapt to what climate change did to poor nations.

Queen Elizabeth II bestowed the Order of the British Empire on him in 2022 for his efforts.

“As a dual Bangladeshi and British citizen, I have been working for two decades to enhance collaboration between the universities and researchers in both countries to tackle the twin global challenges of poverty eradication and dealing with climate change,” Mr Huq said in receiving the honour.

Mr Huq published hundreds of scientific and popular articles and was named as one of the top 10 scientists in the world by the scientific journal Nature in 2022.

For years, one of Mr Huq’s biggest goals was to create a loss and damage programme for developing nations hit hard by climate change, paid for by richer nations that mostly created the problem with their emissions.

United Nations climate negotiators last year approved the creation of that fund, but efforts to get it going further have so far stalled.

Mr Huq, who had been to every United Nations climate negotiations session, called Conferences of

Parties (Cops), started a 20-year tradition of a special focus on adapting to climate change, initially called Adaptation Days, said Ms Ebi.

He did it by bringing a rural Bangladeshi farmer to the high-level negotiations to just talk about her experiences.

That has now blossomed into a multi-day event and focuses on adaptation, said former US Environmental Protection Agency official Joel Smith, a friend of Mr Huq’s.

At those Cops, Mr Huq was so busy, talking to so many people, that his friends and colleagues used to joke when they could not find him at his makeshift office that “Saleem is everywhere ... he’s just not here”, Ms Ebi said.