Bangladesh needs fast-track access to global funds in an effort to avert any climate disaster in future, said the International Chamber of Commerce-Bangladesh (ICCB) in its latest news bulletin yesterday.

During November 29-December 10, international negotiations in Cancun forged an agreement to curb climate change, which includes a fund for helping developing countries.

According to the draft documents, it is a must to cut carbon emissions but it fails to achieve the pledges made by the countries, in the absence of a proper mechanism.
To protect poor nations against climate impacts and pave the way for low-carbon development, a decision was reached for setting up a green climate fund, which plans to raise and disburse $100 billion a year by 2020, ICCB mentioned in the bulletin.
However, Japan, US and European Union made an insufficient fund of $30 billion, it said.

ICCB warned that it may be too late to protect mankind from climate disasters.
Bangladesh faces tremendous natural disasters. The extreme nature of floods, typhoons and droughts has made Bangladesh among the top 10 nations susceptible to climate change, according to a report from German Watch Global Climate Risk Index (CRI)-2011.

German Watch, a nonprofit research organisation, published its sixth CRI on the sidelines of global climate conference. The CRI was on the basis of four indicators: total death tolls, number of events, loss of property of each person and loss of gross domestic product.

Bangladesh is often labelled as the poster child by many experts for the catastrophic climate change, ICCB says. The nations geography and topography make it vulnerable to extreme flooding and global warming, ICCB added.

As the situation is likely to get worse in decades to come, Bangladesh must pursue to have international support for a bigger pie of the green climate fund to implement projects to safeguard the nation and its people from the manmade disaster, ICCB suggested