* Climate summit logistics favour rich, but wild weather hits all
* Failure to deliver climate finance for vulnerable ‘a farce’
* Youth and big-emitting developing nations start to tip balance
By Laurie Goering
GLASGOW, Nov 1 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – For top Bangladeshi scientist Saleemul Huq, the inequities of climate change are hard to avoid – even at the COP26 U.N. talks in Glasgow.
Since arriving for the crunch negotiations, he’s made a long daily commute to the conference venue by train from his hotel in Edinburgh – the nearest place he could afford a room, as the summit sent prices rocketing in Glasgow.
“Last week, with the floods, it was taking me several hours with cancelled trains. That’s loss and damage from climate change” – a problem that now reaches well beyond traditionally climate-vulnerable countries like Bangladesh, he said.
Huq, 69, director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development in Dhaka, has attended every one of the 26 COP meetings held since the first in Berlin, in 1995.
Over the years his hair has gradually turned white and he’s swung from depression – “I didn’t get out of bed for 48 hours after Copenhagen”, when efforts to seal a global climate deal in 2009 failed – to joy at winning the Paris Agreement in 2015.
This year, Huq – an elder statesman of the talks – doesn’t see a lot to like, and he’s angry.
