Saleemul Huq

Saleemul Huq was born in Karachi to a Bangladeshi diplomat family and educated across Europe, Africa, and Asia before earning a PhD in plant biology from Imperial College London in 1979. He returned to newly independent Bangladesh to co-found the Bangladesh Centre for Advanced Studies (BCAS), one of the Global South's premier environmental research institutes.

Huq became the world's leading voice on climate adaptation for vulnerable developing nations. As a lead author on multiple Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment reports, he attended every single UN Climate Change Conference (COP) from COP1 in 1995 to COP27 in 2022. Serving as director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development (ICCCAD) in Dhaka and senior fellow at IIED in London, Huq relentlessly championed the principle that wealthy polluter nations must compensate vulnerable countries for irrevocable climate destruction, culminating in the historic adoption of the Loss and Damage Fund in Sharm el-Sheikh in 2022. Nature named him one of the "10 people who shaped science" that year.