State Minister for Environment and Forest Mostafizur Rahman told parliament yesterday that an additional 16 percent land of Bangladesh would submerge during monsoon floods by 2080 due to climate change.

A new global free trade accord could help fight climate change by making clean-energy products more widely available, the World Trade Organization and United Nations Environment Program said on Friday.

Bucking conventional thinking about the climate hazards of shipping products by air, land and sea, the two agencies argued that a new Doha Round pact would do more good than harm.

President Zillur Rahman on Thursday called upon all to join the ongoing plantation programme to make the country more greenery for facing the adverse affects of climate change.

"We all would have to be more sincere in preserving and developing plants for the greater interest of the nation," he said while inaugurating the tree plantation programme-2009 at Bangabhaban in the city.

Major economies including the United States and China are considering setting a goal of halving world greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 when they hold a summit in Italy next month, a draft document showed.

The United States and Canada must do more than currently proposed to tackle greenhouse gases, France says in a position paper ahead of global climate talks in Copenhagen this December.

The government document seen by Reuters, titled: "Possible outline of a fair and ambitious agreement in Copenhagen," is the strongest message yet to the United States and Canada from within the European Union.

The United States has been resisting European calls for industrialized nations to target an upper limit for global warming of 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit), according to a draft summit text.