The Bangladeshi climate scientist Saleemul Huq has died in Dhaka at the age of 71. Saleemul Huq served as a lead author on two of the definitive assessments of the Earth’s climate published by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and was the director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development. In 2021, he appeared on Democracy Now!, saying wealthy nations like the U.S. and Germany had a lot to learn about climate adaptation from poorer countries like Bangladesh.

Saleemul Huq: “The number of deaths that we saw in Germany, in one of the richest countries in the world — nearly 200 Germans actually died from flash floods — would never have happened in Bangladesh. We would have evacuated them. We do evacuate everybody that’s in the path of floods or in cyclones. In Germany, they weren’t able to do that. So, Germany could learn a lot from Bangladesh, and so could the United States.”

Saleemul Huq has died of a heart attack in Bangladesh at the age of 71. Click here to see all of our interviews with Saleemul Huq.