Haseeb Md. Irfanullah

The United Nations declared 2021-2030 as the “Decade on Ecosystem Restoration”. Such declarations bring us both good news and bad. First,

Being born and brought up in Lalbag of Old Dhaka, I often find myself in the middle of a large, rapidly changing archaeological site by the Buriganga River.

When we talk about nature-based solutions (NbS)—that is protecting, managing, restoring or creating ecosystems for the benefit of the people and biodiversity—we almost always think of wilderness or rural areas.

Farmers of the south-central districts of Bangladesh, namely Barishal, Gopalganj, Madaripur, and Pirojpur, have been practicing floating agriculture for decades, if not centuries.

The third batch of Rohingya refugees entered Bhashan Char on January 29 and January 30, 2021. Out of Cox’s Bazar’s 867,000 refugees, about 6,700 have now been voluntarily relocated since December 2020 to this island on the Bay of Bengal.

In 2020, Nature-based Solutions, or NbS, has emerged as a much-talked-about environmental concept in Bangladesh.

Twenty-Four years ago, when the prime ministers of Bangladesh and India signed the Ganges Water Sharing Treaty on December 12, 1996, it was quite a different world to mark such a milestone.

We may blame Covid-19 for drawing our attention away from biodiversity conservation. But the truth is, for a long time, we have been talking about biodiversity a lot, rather than saving it.

It is an irony that while between 2000 and 2019, the world GDP grew by 260 percent, two billion people still do not have regular access to safe, healthy, and sufficient food—they still do not have food security.

Over the last three years, the Rohingya refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar and Teknaf have been telling us many stories of failures, successes and uncertainties.

I always wanted to take two photographs of the same spot of Tanguar Haor—one in the driest month of the year and one in the wettest.

Barsha-Kaal, or the rainy season, has officially arrived this week. If we were not shackled by Covid-19, we would have been welcoming monsoon with singing and dancing at public gatherings, arranging tree fairs, and planting hundreds and thousands of saplings all over the country. A perfect time to make our country greener!

Well, the Sundar-bans has done it again! As it has been doing for hundreds of years. This time, it took the blow of super-cyclone Amphan and saved us from severe devastation.

Due to the pandemic, we are doing a lot of otherwise-unusual things—be it maintaining physical distance in public places,

The coronavirus pandemic has revealed three alarming connections between us and nature.

Our current under-standing and response to the ongoing “corona crisis” are results of extensive, fast-track research. The possible transfer of the

In the middle of the devastating coronavirus crisis, we have come across some good news about the environment.

The first academic journal, Le Journal des Sçavans, was published on January 5, 1665 from Paris. Over the past three centuries—according to the latest STM Report 2018 by the International Association of Scientific,

According to the Global Risks Report 2020 from the World Economic Forum (WEF), biodiversity loss is now the third most serious risk our world is facing in terms of impact.

On May 29, 2014, soon after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published the second volume of its massive Fifth Assessment Report, an interesting article was written in The Daily Star.