Saleemul Huq, a Bangladeshi climate change activist, has died at the age of 71

Saleemul Huq, a Bangladeshi-British scientist who played a leading role in his efforts to get rich countries to compensate poorer countries for the harmful effects of climate change caused largely by the developed world, died on Saturday in the capital city Dhaka, Bangladesh. He was 71.

His death was confirmed by the International Center for Climate Change and Development in Dhaka, a research organization he led and helped found. Bangladesh’s The Daily Star newspaper, to which he wrote a column, said the cause was a heart attack. He died at home, a relative said.

Mr Huq (pronounced hook), who trained as a botanist, was perhaps the leading proponent of the idea that greenhouse gas emissions in the developed world had a disproportionate impact on the climate in poorer countries, and that rich countries should pay for measures to curb or reverse these effects.

He was one of the few who had been to every climate summit organized by the United Nations COP (for the Conference of the Parties), since the first in 1995.

At the most recent summit, in Egypt in 2022, he helped push through an international commitment to establish a fund to compensate for the damage. “It’s a shame he won’t be able to see the fruits of it,” the relative, who asked not to be identified, said in a telephone interview. “He is clearly irreplaceable.”

The British magazine Nature named Mr. Huq one of “10 people who will help shape science in 2022.”

Those who knew him said he was deeply influenced by what he saw happening in his country. Climate change seemed to be happening in real time before his eyes, impacting many Bangladeshis.

Cyclone Amphan, amplified by warmer ocean temperatures, displaced thousands of people in Bangladesh in 2020 after the storm destroyed their homes. “This is loss and damage to people’s livelihoods,” he told The New York Times in 2021, using a phrase he called “a euphemism for terms we shouldn’t use, namely ‘liability and compensation.’ ”

In his last piece he writes a column in The Guardian Written jointly with Farhana Sultana of Syracuse University and published on November 1, Mr Huq struck a pessimistic tone.

“Unfortunately, in many cases the damage has already been done,” the authors wrote. “In more and more places, adaptation is no longer possible – for example where displacement, ecosystem damage and loss of homeland due to sea level rise have already occurred. This is ‘loss and damage’ in real time.”

Writing in The Daily Star on October 4, Mr Huq said about the “world leaders” he considered largely responsible for the greenhouse gas problem: “It is not that they do nothing, but that they do too little too late. ”

In June, he wrote an open letter to the president of the upcoming COP in Dubai, in which he described how in Bangladesh “every day more than 2,000 climate-displaced people arrive in Dhaka on foot, by bicycle, by boat and by bus and disappear into the slums of the city.”

“No one is taking care of them,” he added, “but they are people who are being forced to move by man-made climate change and are therefore the responsibility of the UNFCCC,” the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

In general, however, he was not a pessimist. Colleagues remembered him as an inspirational figure whose continued emphasis on the participation of poorer countries in the global fight against climate change appeared to finally be paying off.

Mr Huq was a familiar and friendly presence at the COP and other global meetings on climate change, as willing to speak to journalists as he was to people making the cut.

Asif Saleh, the executive director of the Bangladesh-based international development organization BRAC, wrote of Mr Huq in a tribute on LinkedIn: “At the COP event, he was one of the most sought-after figures – journalists, negotiators, NGOs, young activists, government ministers – they all watched with him for a few minutes. He didn’t disappoint either. He was sitting on a table and there was a steady stream of people paying their dues to him.”

Mr Huq’s basic message was that “climate change is real and it is happening in these places, in the far reaches of Bangladesh and Burundi,” said Achala AbeysingheAsia regional director of the Global Green Growth Institute in Seoul, in a telephone interview.

“Unless there is a champion who can talk about it,” she said, “no one will.”

Saleemul Huq was born on October 2, 1952 in Karachi, Pakistan, to Zahoorul and Shajeda Huq. His father served in Pakistan’s diplomatic service and Mr Huq grew up in Berlin, Nairobi, Jakarta and London.

He obtained a PhD in botany from Imperial College London. In Bangladesh, he taught botany at the University of Dhaka and helped establish the Bangladesh Center for Advanced Studies, an environmental research organization.

Mr. Huq was also an associate of the International Institute for Environment and Development in London, and contributed to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

He is survived by his wife Kashana Huq; his daughter, Sadaf Huq; and his son Saqib.

“For him, the most important thing was that there are no ‘victims’ of climate change,” said Dr. Lisa Schipper of the University of Bonn in Germany, an expert on climate change in the global south. “Everyone is an actor. He wanted us to see people in Bangladesh as people with knowledge. He talked about Bangladesh as a laboratory. He wanted scientists and policymakers to come to Bangladesh, and he wanted to ensure that developing countries got the money they were entitled to.”

Somini Sengupta reporting contributed.