SUPPORT OUR JOURNALISM: Please consider donating to keep our website running and free for all - thank you!

Denmark

Crown Princess Mary begins Bangladesh trip with sustainability focus

Crown Princess Mary of Denmark has begun a three-day trip to Bangladesh focused on the impacts of climate change on all sectors of the country.

Her Royal Highness is accompanied by Danish Minister for Development and Cooperation, Flemming Møller Mortensen and will be in Bangladesh from 25 to 27 April. 

The Crown Princess’s trip also serves as a celebration of the 50th anniversary of Danish-Bangladeshi diplomatic ties. 

The program includes institutional visits, such as a meeting with the Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and a lunch with the Danish business community in Bangladesh, before moving on to areas that better represent the issues that the visit is centred around. 

Her Royal Highness will visit the district of Cox’s Bazar, a former national park that was turned into a refugee camp for what the United Nations estimates as roughly 700000 Rohingya people. 

Because of the preexisting issues in the area, Cox’s Bazar frequently experiences natural catastrophes such as monsoons, cyclones and mudslides, making the refugees’s condition even more precarious. 

The Crown Princess will then undertake one last visit in Sundarbans, one of the world’s largest mangrove areas that is a symbol of climate change in action. Because of it, cyclones are more frequent and water levels are rising, forcing all involved to work together towards a more sustainable solution. 

Denmark has always been a pioneer in the research and implementation of tools to combat climate change. However, Bangladesh is one of the world’s poorest countries, and 11th globally for population density, meaning that the effects of its increased exposure to climate change-induced natural disasters are felt even more heavily. 

Crown Princess Mary had already visited Bangladesh before in 2017. Five years ago, her trip was focused on women’s rights, as Her Royal Highness remembered in an Instagram post on the Royal Household’s account.

Both she and Crown Prince Frederik have focused a lot of their recent work on green energy and the fight against climate change, with the Crown Princess set to speak at a panel on fashion sustainability in early June.