Climate Vulnerable Forum

The Climate Vulnerable Forum (CVF) is a south-south cooperation and advocacy platform of developing nations disproportionately affected by global warming despite contributing negligibly to greenhouse-gas emissions. It was founded on 9 November 2009 in the Maldives under President Mohamed Nasheed, on the eve of the Copenhagen COP15 summit, where the inaugural members adopted the Declaration of the Climate Vulnerable Forum. Bangladesh, a low-lying deltaic nation acutely exposed to sea-level rise, cyclones, and salinity intrusion, has been a founding pillar of the bloc and twice held its rotating chairship — under Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina for the 2011–2013 term and again for the 2020–2022 term, when Dhaka hosted the secretariat of the allied CVF-V20 finance group. The Forum is not a treaty body but a voluntary coalition that coordinates the negotiating leverage of climate-vulnerable states within the UNFCCC process.

The CVF operates principally as a moral and diplomatic pressure group inside the climate negotiations. Its membership has grown from the original eleven to roughly fifty-eight countries spanning Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Latin America, and the Pacific, collectively representing well over a billion people. The Forum pioneered the demand to limit warming to 1.5°C rather than 2°C — a position later enshrined in the Paris Agreement (Article 2) adopted at COP21 in 2015, where the CVF's "1.5 to stay alive" advocacy proved decisive. Its financial arm, the Vulnerable Twenty Group (V20), established in Lima in 2015, is a dedicated ministerial dialogue of finance ministers that pushes for scaled-up adaptation finance, the operationalisation of loss and damage mechanisms, and instruments such as the Global Shield against Climate Risks. The Forum's signature outputs include the Dhaka–Glasgow Declaration and the Climate Vulnerability Monitor, a periodic assessment quantifying the human and economic toll of inaction.

In the current period (2026), the CVF remains a leading voice for the loss and damage fund agreed in principle at COP27 (Sharm el-Sheikh, 2022) and operationalised at COP28 (Dubai, 2023), pressing developed economies to honour the long-promised and repeatedly missed US$100 billion annual climate-finance commitment and to deliver the larger New Collective Quantified Goal. Bangladesh's leadership institutionalised the Mujib Climate Prosperity Plan, a flagship resilience-and-renewables strategy launched during its chairship, positioning the country as a global thought-leader on adaptation rather than merely a victim. Ghana assumed the chairship after Bangladesh, continuing the Forum's rotating model.

For the BCS examination, the CVF is tested in the Bangladesh Affairs and Bangladesh and International Affairs / Bangladesh in the World papers. Candidates should memorise the founding date and venue (Maldives, 2009), Bangladesh's two chairship terms, the link to the V20 and the secretariat hosted in Dhaka, and the bloc's role in securing the 1.5°C target in the Paris Agreement. Question angles typically ask candidates to evaluate Bangladesh's climate diplomacy, distinguish the CVF from the UNFCCC and the LDC Group, or connect the Forum to loss-and-damage finance — making precise recall of named declarations and dates essential for full marks.