International Centre for Climate Change Adaptation and Development

Dear all

Here is news about adaptation to climate change in the Least Developed Countries….

The International Institute for Environment and Development (www.iied.org) is teaming up with the Bangladesh Centre for Advanced Studies (www.bcas.net) and the Independent University, Bangladesh (www.iub.edu.bd) to create a new International Centre for Climate Change Adaptation and Development .

The move reflects the fact that some climate change impacts are now inevitable and that communities need to adapt to the changes ahead, especially in the United Nations list of Least Developed Countries (LDCs).

The ICCCAD is the brainchild of and will be led by Dr Saleemul Huq, head of IIED's climate change group. It will offer scholarships to up to fifteen international Masters and five PhD students from the LDCs each year and will also run short courses on different themes including disaster risk reduction and adaptation, adaptation and mitigation linkages, economics of adaptation, community based adaptation, clean development mechanism, etc., for students, NGOs, donors, media, private sector, etc.

The centre will be officially launched on 27 February 2009 in Dhaka, Bangladesh after the first meeting of its international advisory board, whose members include Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Professor Gordon Conway, chief scientific advisor to the UK Department for International Development.

The ICCCAD will be located in the new campus of IUB being constructed just outside Dhaka and will have a national and international teaching staff. It will also establish (talks are already ongoing) academic and research links with some leading universities in the world including the United Nations University, the Institute for Development Studies, the University of East Anglia, Oxford University and Imperial College in the UK; Universities of Toronto, Guelph and British Columbia in Canada and Wesleyan, Harvard and Yale in the US as well as a number of universities in developing countries.

For more information about ICCCAD, email me (mike.shanahan@iied.org) or Saleem (saleemul.huq@iied.org) or call: +44 (0)20 7388 2117

Best wishes
Mike

Mike Shanahan
Press Officer
International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED)
3 Endsleigh Street, London WC1H 0DD, UK.

Tel: +44 (0)20 7388 2117
Fax: +44 (0)20 7388 2826
Email: mike.shanahan@iied.org
http://www.iied.org