Saleemul Huq, the loudest champion of the climate vulnerable, dies at 71

DHAKA – United Nations-backed COP meetings, the most important global forum to tackle climate change, see few successes. Professor Saleemul Huq was the enabler of one of its biggest yet, and his sudden death last week has many worried the world has lost a guiding voice as big fights brew ahead of the COP28 meeting due to start in late November.

Prof Huq was a climate scientist who contributed to major reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), headed the International Centre on Climate Change and Development in Bangladesh, and trained and mentored hundreds of people on climate issues.

He died of a heart attack on Oct 28.

The annual climate conferences, organised under the auspices of the UN, have been running for nearly 30 years and Prof Huq was present at each one of them.

He was a key driving force behind securing a consensus among all countries at COP27 in Egypt in 2022 to create a fund that would compensate poor countries for damages from climate impacts.

How exactly the fund will function is already proving to be one of the major contentious issues at COP28.

Professor Rachel Kyte, dean emerita of the Fletcher School at Tufts University, who knew Prof Huq through his time at COPs attributed his success to his ability to communicate effectively with a broad swathe of people.

“He could talk in terms that anybody on the street would understand. He could speak to the detail of negotiated language. He could speak in economic and political terms,” she said.

“And he could speak with moral authority.”

COP meetings inevitably feature big fights among developed countries, which are responsible for the vast amount of historic planet-warming pollution and developing countries, which are suffering from the vast majority of impacts wrought by perturbed weather patterns.

Growing up in the low-lying country of Bangladesh, Prof Huq recognised early that what mattered most to poor countries is how to adapt to a warming planet and deal with the destruction from extreme weather events.

Slowly, as Prof Huq convinced more people of the urgency, those issues rose to the level of global negotiations.

“He was a proper public intellectual,” said Mr Nigel Topping, the UN’s high-level champion of climate action.

The climate scientist wrote regular op-eds in the Daily Star, a Bangladeshi newspaper, alongside the work he did to put the ideas in practice.

Born in 1952 to parents who worked in Pakistan’s diplomatic services with postings across the world, Prof Huq grew up in Europe, Asia and Africa. His Bengali parents settled in Bangladesh after it gained independence from Pakistan in 1971.

He studied botany at Imperial College in London in 1978, then returned to Bangladesh to run an independent think-tank on environmental issues.

Prof Huq wrote hundreds of scientific papers and contributed to three major reports from the IPCC.

He maintained his ties to Britain, gaining citizenship and being awarded the Order of the British Empire for his services fighting climate change.

“He was an absolute champion of a people-centered approach” to tackling climate change, said Ms Farhana Yamin, a climate lawyer who worked with Prof Huq on scientific reports.

“At that time, the scientific community was mainly focused on greenhouse gases and physical impacts.”

Those who worked with him made frequent references to how generous he was with his time and expertise. That helped him create one of the biggest networks of advocates who understood developing country issues and played crucial roles at COP meetings.

As someone from a highly climate-vulnerable country, he did not only bring the moral authority, but also tangible solutions on how to adapt to climate change.

For example, Prof Huq showed how communities affected by climate change are not only victims, but also are often the people who come up with the most effective solutions.

“He was a persistent and patient champion of the issues of communities” in climate-vulnerable countries, said Mr Harjeet Singh, head of global political strategy at Climate Action Network.

Prof Huq was ecstatic after COP27, when countries signed off on creating a loss and damage fund, but he knew it was only the first step.

In Dubai at COP28, the goal is to put in place the structure to make it work and there are already fights on who will host the fund and who will pay money into it – even before anything has been decided on how climate-vulnerable countries can tap into the pot.

“A loss and damage fund was finally achieved at COP27, but it needs strong advocates to ensure it is followed and expanded,” writes geography Professor Farhana Sultana, at Syracuse University, in an intro to an op-ed she was working on with Prof Huq.

“His sudden death is a blow to the global south, and to all those who work towards climate justice.” BLOOMBERG