Pakistan orders US out of drone base

Pakistan has stopped US drone flights from a remote airbase in the western province of Balochistan and ordered US personnel to vacate it, the defence minister has said.


"We have told them to leave the Shamsi airbase," Chaudhry Ahmed Mukhtar said on Wednesday night, adding that US personnel had already started to shift equipment from the base.

A US embassy spokesman declined to comment, referring queries to Washington.

Shamsi is located in a remote valley 350 miles south-west of Waziristan, where most of the CIA-directed Predator and Reaper drone strikes against al-Qaida and Taliban targets take place.

The closure of the base is a blow to a covert programme that has killed up to 2,500 people since its inception seven years ago and forms a cornerstone of President Barack Obama's strategy to flush al-Qaida from its Pakistani havens. Full Article >>>

Location:Islamabad

Water wars: 21st century conflicts?

As almost half of humanity will face water scarcity by 2030, strategists from Israel to Central Asia prepare for strife.


After droughts ravaged his parents' farmland, Sixteen-year-old Hassain and his two-year-old sister Sareye became some of the newest refugees forced from home by war scarcity.

"There was nothing to harvest," Hassain said through an interpreter during an interview at a refugee camp in Dadaab, Kenya which is housing some 160,000 Somalis displaced by a lack of water. "There had been no rain in my village for two years. We used to have crops."

As global warming alters weather patterns, and the number of people lacking access to water rises, millions, if not billions, of others are expected to face a similar fate as water shortages become more frequent.

Presently, Hassain is one of about 1.2 billion people living in areas of physical water scarcity, although the majority of cases are nowhere near as dire. By 2030, 47 per cent of the world’s population will be living in areas of high water stress, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's Environmental Outlook to 2030 report.

Some analysts worry that wars of the future will be fought over blue gold, as thirsty people, opportunistic politicians and powerful corporations battle for dwindling resources. Full Article >>>

Location: Cayman Islands

Anatomizing Non-State Threats to Pakistan's Nuclear Infrastructure: The Pakistani Neo-Taliban

The Federation of American Scientists - Terrorism Analysis Report Series


The greatest threat to Pakistan's nuclear infrastructure comes from jihadists both inside Pakistan and South and Central Asia. While there is appreciation of this danger, there are few substantive studies that identify and explore specific groups motivated and potentially capable of acquiring Pakistani nuclear weapons and/or fissile materials. This report fills that gap by exploring the Pakistani Neo-Taliban (PNT) and the groups that fill its ranks Download PDF >>>

Location: Islamabad

Nuclear suppliers tighten trade rules, may irk India

A 46-nation export control group has acted to bar states that shun a global anti-nuclear weapons pact from obtaining technology which can be used to make atomic bombs, diplomats and experts say.


Last week's decision by the Nuclear Suppliers Group to tighten guidelines for transfers of sensitive uranium enrichment and reprocessing technology may irritate nuclear-armed India, after Washington helped it win a waiver from NSG rules in 2008.

The NSG -- which includes the United States, Russia, China, European Union countries and some others -- tries to ensure that nuclear exports are not diverted for military purposes.

India already has enrichment and reprocessing capabilities and does not need more advanced equipment of this type for its nuclear industry, arms proliferation expert Daryl Kimball said. Full Article >>>

Location: Islamabad

Pakistan to build more nuclear plants to overcome energy needs

ISLAMABAD: Prime Minister Syed Yusuf Raza Gilani Monday categorically stated that country's nuclear capability was purely for peaceful purposes and it would build more power plants to meet its growing energy needs.


Addressing participants of the "36th International Nathiagali Summer College on Physics and Contemporary Needs", Gilani said Pakistan in this regard, would continue to comply with the requirements of International Atomic Energy Agency's nuclear safeguard agreements.

"Building and operating nuclear power plants is vital to country's interests because of its severe energy deficiency," Gilani said.

Gilani said Pakistan believed in a meaningful coexistence and reconciliation, and would always strive for development and prosperity in the region.

Prime Minister Gilani lauded the contributions of Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission for basic and applied sciences, adding that the expansion in the country's Civil Nuclear Power Program was commendable.

The Prime Minister recalled inaugurating the second unit at Chashma Nuclear Power Complex - C-II, that enhanced nuclear power generation to 625 Mega Watts.

He said that based upon previous performance, the Atomic Energy Commission was not only poised to achieve the 8,800 mega watts Nuclear Power production by 2030. Full Article >>>

Location: Islamabad

The Virtue-less war of the 'Nintendo bomber'

As unbridled use of drones in Afghanistan and Pakistan continues, another casualty of war may be democracy in the US



In April, the British Ministry of Defence published a study which for the first time gave serious consideration to the moral, ethical and legal aspects of the drone wars. The study advises defense planners that 'before unmanned systems become ubiquitous' they must 'ensure that, by removing some of the horror, or at least keeping it at a distance we do not risk losing our controlling humanity and make war more likely.' The report is particularly concerned that the low risks of using drones were enabling policy makers to consider military action in places where they would otherwise be hesitant: 'the use of force is totally a function of the existence of an unmanned capability', it suggest.

The conclusions of the report are sobering. So is the fact that it was produced by a British military think tank rather than a US Congressional committee. In the US, the media and political establishment are still romancing the drone, with the kind of giddy attention that sometimes borders on the inappropriate. In a May 10, 2009 segment on the Predator drone, Lara Logan of CBS's 60 Minutes was positively breathless. Two years later, at a New America Foundation conference on drones, Professor Thomas Nachbar of the University of Virginia School of Law declared drones 'fun' and argued 'against more transparency' in their use.

Drones are attractive to US militarists and their courtiers because they are politically liberating. In their battle against public opinion and institutional inertia, politicians have often found technology an ally. The drones must therefore be understood in the context of a long-standing US desire to develop the technological means for achieving global Pax Americana. And for a century, airpower has been a key component of this vision.
More >>>

Location: Islamabad

An Insecure and Reluctant Partner

The Obama administration is preparing to implement the first phase of its military drawdown in Afghanistan at a time when nuclear security inside Pakistan is at its most tenuous. That already delicate situation has only become more fragile in the weeks following the killing of Osama bin Laden in May of this year.


Since then, Pakistani officials and international security experts alike have become more concerned about the ability of the Pakistani military to safeguard and secure its nuclear weapons and related facilities from attack. The fundamental question, however, is who would mount such an assault?

U.S. officials and those outside Pakistan are concerned primarily with terrorists: a situation in which a small group of militants execute a coordinated attack on a nuclear facility in Pakistan, gaining access to loosely guarded assembled warheads or weapons-grade fissile material. Those terrorists certainly would not hesitate to use their newly acquired assets to detonate a nuclear weapon over a major city, killing thousands of innocent civilians and forever altering the international security landscape. The world as we know it would never again be the same. More >>>

Location:Islamabad

Beyond a numbers game - Dr Maleeha Lodhi

President Barack Obama is about to take what some see as his most consequential foreign policy decision this year.


Later this month he will decide on how many troops to pull out from Afghanistan beginning in July and the pace of the withdrawal in coming months.

When announcing his surge strategy in December 2009, Obama had vowed to start scaling back the US military presence from July 2011. Last year he set the end of 2014 as the time when US and Nato forces will hand over all security responsibilities to Afghan forces and bring the Western combat mission to a close.

The looming drawdown decision might be shaped more by political than by strategic considerations. The war continues to be unpopular in America. The latest poll shows over 70 percent of Americans believe the US should pull out of Afghanistan. The war cost of $2 billion a week or $100 billion a year, continues to spiral. At a time of fiscal strain and deep budget cuts, Congressional leaders are questioning the need for such heavy and costly military deployments in Afghanistan. Obama’s decision about reducing force levels from the present 100,000 US troops will be influenced by these factors especially as his 2012 re-election bid looms. More >>>

The writer is a former envoy to the US and the UK

Location: Islamabad

If The Sea Is In Trouble, We Are All In Trouble

The report that the ocean is in trouble is no surprise. What is shocking is that it has taken so long for us to make the connection between the state of the ocean and everything we care about – the economy, health, security – and the existence of life itself.


If the ocean is in trouble – and it is – we are in trouble. Charles Clover pointed this out in The End of the Line, and Callum Roberts provided detailed documentation of the collapse of ocean wildlife – and the consequences – in The Unnatural History of the Sea.

Since the middle of the 20th century, more has been learned about the ocean than during all preceding human history; at the same time, more has been lost. Some 90 per cent of many fish, large and small, have been extracted. Some face extinction owing to the ocean's most voracious predator – us.

We are now appearing to wage war on life in the sea with sonars, spotter aircraft, advanced communications, factory trawlers, thousands of miles of long lines, and global marketing of creatures no one had heard of until recent years. Nothing has prepared sharks, squid, krill and other sea creatures for industrial-scale extraction that destroys entire ecosystems while targeting a few species. More >>>

Location: Cayman Islands

Why Localisation Is A Key Part Of The Answer

Last week it emerged that the Department of Energy and Climate Change, whose official position remains that "we do not have any contingency plans specific to a peak in oil production", was actually stating in internal documents released under the Freedom of Information Act that "it is not possible to predict with any accuracy exactly when or why oil production will peak".


Energy bills are going nowhere other than up, with knock-on effects across the economy. The fossil fuels of the future will be dirtier, more expensive and from less accessible places. At the same time, the need to decarbonise is urgent. The world's carbon emissions increased in 2010 by a record amount, in spite of many of the world's economies being in recession, and 19 countries recorded their hottest ever temperatures.

In March, Mervyn King, Governor Bank of England, said: "This is not like an ordinary recession where you lose output and get it back quickly. You may not get it back for many years, if ever, and that is a big, long-run loss of living standards for all people in this country." When something isn't working, it behoves us to question whether a different approach might be more appropriate.

One such approach, spreading around the world with great vigour, is the Transition movement. It suggests that within the challenges of peak oil, climate change, and our economic troubles lies a huge opportunity. In the same way that vast amounts of cheap fossil fuels made globalisation possible, the end of the age of cheap oil will inevitably put globalisation into reverse. More >>>

Location: Cayman Islands

Interesting controversy over the Fukashima incident

Very Good News” Fukushima Unit 4 Pool Never Dry


On June 15, 2011, the professional staff at the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission provided a brief to the commission. It was the second of three planned status updates on the Task Force Review of NRC Processes and Regulations Following Events in Japan. The briefing started with a report by Bill Borchardt the NRC’s Executive Director for Operations (EDO). Mr. Borchardt described the NRC’s current understanding of the condition of the reactors at Fukushima Daiichi, including the condition of the spent fuel pool for unit four. You can find the full 1 hour 45 minute video on the NRC’s public meeting archive. Here is the key segment regarding the condition of the facility.

An Associated Press reporter who watched the brief heard the Executive Director of Operations state that recently released video and water samples indicate that the spent fuel pool at Unit 4 never went completely dry despite all previous words to the contrary. He stated that this contradicted previously released statements. The reporter, who has obviously been following the story or at least doing up to date research put the restrained language of the technical staff into perspective. He reminded readers of the context and the history that made the statement more interesting that it might appear to anyone who has not been paying much attention.

U.S. officials, most notably Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairman Gregory Jaczko, had warned that all the water was gone from one of the


spent fuel pools at Japan’s troubled nuclear plant, raising the possibility of widespread nuclear fallout. Loss of cooling water in the reactor core could have exposed highly radioactive spent fuel rods, increasing the threat of a complete fuel meltdown and a catastrophic release of radiation.

Japanese officials denied the pool was dry and reported that the plant’s condition was stable.

On Wednesday, U.S. officials said newly obtained video shows that the spent fuel pool at Unit 4 at the Fukushima Dai-ichi complex probably did not go dry, as Jaczko had insisted in March.

Bill Borchardt, the NRC’s executive director for operations, said U.S. officials welcomed the video evidence as “good news” and one indication that the meltdown at the Fukushima plant’s Unit 4 reactor “may not have been as serious as was believed.”

Though I have no way of knowing exactly what the people who were manning the NRC’s emergency response center thought they had heard or seen to indicate that the Japanese report was wrong, I have been questioning the statements that the Chairman has made, claiming special information from that staff, since the day they were made. There were many indications available that the team in the response center, which had been personally approved by the Chairman to be in that center, were operating without any sources of information that were better than those available to the rest of the world. More >>>

Location: Islamabad

US nuke regulators weaken safety rules

US Federal regulators have been working closely with the nuclear power industry to keep the nation’s aging reactors operating within safety standards by repeatedly weakening those standards, or simply failing to enforce them, an investigation by The Associated Press has found.


Time after time, officials at the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission have decided that original regulations were too strict, arguing that safety margins could be eased without peril, according to records and interviews.

The result? Rising fears that these accommodations by the NRC are significantly undermining safety — and inching the reactors closer to an accident that could harm the public and jeopardize the future of nuclear power in the United States.

Examples abound. When valves leaked, more leakage was allowed — up to 20 times the original limit. When rampant cracking caused radioactive leaks from steam generator tubing, an easier test of the tubes was devised, so plants could meet standards.

Failed cables. Busted seals. Broken nozzles, clogged screens, cracked concrete, dented containers, corroded metals and rusty underground pipes — all of these and thousands of other problems linked to aging were uncovered in the AP’s yearlong investigation. And all of them could escalate dangers in the event of an accident.

Yet despite the many problems linked to aging, not a single official body in government or industry has studied the overall frequency and potential impact on safety of such breakdowns in recent years, even as the NRC has extended the licenses of dozens of reactors. More >>>

Location: Islamabad

Moving forward on China, Pakistan and the NSG

Mark Hibbs via Arms Control Wonk


Just a couple of weeks after I joined the Carnegie Endowment at the beginning of March last year, I found myself in a musty agricultural exhibition hall in east Beijing, across Dongsanhuan Beilu from the Sanlitun diplo quarter. In the corner of one wing of that Mao-flavoured building, an engineering subsidiary of China’s leading nuclear state-owned enterprise, China National Nuclear Corp, displayed on a panel all the nuclear facility construction projects it had on its plate through 2015.

One of these listed projects was construction of two new PWRs at the Chashma site in Pakistan. That was interesting because until then there had been only rumors and unconfirmed assertions by officials in Islamabad that this deal was in the bag. Here in a drafty corner of a Chinese nuclear industry exhibition, where bussed-in Chinese reactor engineers took their furtive cigarette breaks, we had something in black and white which looked like an official Chinese confirmation that CNNC was in fact about to build more power reactors in Pakistan.

During the rest of 2010 I raised this issue in a modest spate of articles and media interventions, before, during, and after the Nuclear Suppliers Group held its annual meeting, in Christchurch last June. Carnegie flagged this because, of course, in 2008, the U.S. persuaded the NSG to award India an exemption to its nuclear trade sanctions, which were in fact triggered by India’s post-1968 nuclear explosive test and subsequent absence of full-scope safeguards on all its nuclear activities. By 2010, China, which had acquiesced at the NSG to the US request for the India exemption—while making known to the group it favored this to happen on the principle of “non-discrimination”—had joined the US, Russia, and France in preparing to export nuclear reactors to non-NPT states on behalf of its ally Pakistan.

The problem at hand was, however, that under NSG guidelines which China pledged to adhere to when it joined the group in 2004, China agreed not to export nuclear reactors to Pakistan. Before China joined the NSG, it signed contracts to set up two PWRs at Pakistan’s Chashma site, as provided by a pre-NSG Sino-Pak cooperation agreement. According to people who were on hand when China joined the NSG in 2004, Beijing then even spelled out to NSG participating governments that it had no intention to sell any more power reactors to Pakistan beyond Chashma-1 and -2, and that China enumerated what was on its list of goods that it had committed itself to export to Pakistan under that old trade agreement. More >>>

Location: Islamabad

Groundwater Depletion Rate Accelerating Worldwide

ScienceDaily — In recent decades, the rate at which humans worldwide are pumping dry the vast underground stores of water that billions depend on has more than doubled, say scientists who have conducted an unusual, global assessment of groundwater use.


These fast-shrinking subterranean reservoirs are essential to daily life and agriculture in many regions, while also sustaining streams, wetlands, and ecosystems and resisting land subsidence and salt water intrusion into fresh water supplies. Today, people are drawing so much water from below that they are adding enough of it to the oceans (mainly by evaporation, then precipitation) to account for about 25 percent of the annual sea level rise across the planet, the researchers find.

Soaring global groundwater depletion bodes a potential disaster for an increasingly globalized agricultural system, says Marc Bierkens of Utrecht University in Utrecht, the Netherlands, and leader of the new study.
More >>>

Location: Cayman Islands

Drone warfare: cost and challenge

The repositioning of the United States’s military strategy includes a great expansion in the use of armed-drones to attack targets in Pakistan and Yemen. But this development raises profound legal and ethical questions that are now entering the public arena.


The announcement by President Obama on 22 June 2011 of substantial withdrawals of United States troops from Afghanistan by September 2012 marks an important moment in the almost decade-long war in the country. The impact of the decision will be felt on the current diplomatic calculations over the nature of a settlement that will bring the war to an end. It may also impinge on the presidential-election campaign in the US that reaches a climax in November 2012. But whatever the diplomatic or political consequences of the drawdown will be, the Afghanistan war is still far from over - and indeed, in one significant way it has in its tenth year been intensifying rather than winding down (see “Afghanistan: mapping the endgame”, 16 June 2011).

This is the use of pilotless armed drones. These are employed under CIA command - a procedure chosen because the CIA's rules of engagement are less restrictive then those of the military. The continuous drone-attacks across the border in Pakistan have very destructive human effects that often reach beyond the presumed insurgent targets; the agency claims to have killed around 1,400 suspected al-Qaida and Taliban paramilitaries, but Pakistan sources also (amid a scarcity of precise details) estimate that hundreds of civilians have also died in these operations. More >>>

Location:Islamabad

A Criteria-Based Approach to Nuclear Cooperation With Pakistan

In the wake of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, Beijing decided to review its plans for expanding nuclear power in China. It appears likely that China will shift its ambitious nuclear construction program away from older designs to modern technology provided by foreign vendors.


Although there are no indications that China is reconsidering its decision to build two additional nuclear power reactors in Pakistan—which are based on technology Beijing will probably abandon domestically—the accident in Japan provides Beijing with an opportunity to pause and contemplate conditioning its cooperation with Pakistan on improvements in nuclear safety and security. During such a pause, Beijing could consider the possibility of developing within the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) a criteria-based approach to nuclear cooperation with states lacking full-scope safeguards (FSS). This strategy would be invoked irrespective of other discussions about future NSG membership and criteria that might be considered in that context.

A criteria-based approach would provide a roadmap for states without FSS, including Pakistan, to qualify for civil nuclear cooperation, thus placing China’s current and future nuclear cooperation with Pakistan in an NSG process. The lynchpin in this approach is incentivizing China through the licensing of foreign reactor technology, so that China sees greater economic potential in achieving its longer-term ambition of becoming a nuclear exporter than in its shorter-term deals with Pakistan. Such an approach could help resolve persistent questions about the NSG’s future, which were raised by the U.S.-India nuclear deal and by Russia’s previous nuclear commerce with India. This strategy thus has the potential to resolve this issue in a way that strengthens the NSG, provides China with incentives to reconsider its cooperation with Pakistan, and gives Pakistan the international legitimacy it desperately seeks. More >>>

Location: Islamabad

Al Gore Blasts Obama On Climate Change For Failing To Take 'Bold Action'

Former Vice President Al Gore is going where few environmentalists – and fellow Democrats – have gone before: criticizing President Barack Obama's record on global warming.


In a 7,000-word essay for Rolling Stone magazine that will be published Friday, Gore says Obama has failed to stand up for "bold action" on global warming and has made little progress on the problem since the days of Republican President George W. Bush. Bush infuriated environmentalists for resisting mandatory controls on the pollution blamed for climate change, despite overwhelming scientific evidence that the burning of fossil fuels is responsible.

While Gore credits Obama's political appointees with making hundreds of changes that have helped move the country "forward slightly" on the climate issue, and acknowledges Obama has been dealing with many other problems, he says the president "has simply not made the case for action."
More >>>

Location: Cayman Islands

Syria tops Maplecroft’s Displacement Index, while refugees from Libya’s civil war see the country rated ‘extreme risk’

New research, ranking 185 countries on the risks posed to their economies by large populations of refugees and internally displaced persons, has rated Syria as the nation most at risk, whilst the human impacts of the civil war in Libya have seen it categorised as ‘extreme risk.’


The Displacement Index, produced by risk analysis and mapping firm Maplecroft, measures the potential impact internally displaced peoples (IDPs) and refugees have on the economies, societies and business environments of countries worldwide. The index is calculated using five indicators, including displaced people and refugees per 100,000 population, overall numbers and refugees per US$1bn GDP. Sources include the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, UN OCHA and the Global Trends Report 2010 from the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), released on June 20th.

The index rates 24 countries as ‘extreme risk,’ with Africa and the Middle East home to 19 of them. At the top of the ranking are Syria (1), Sudan (2), Yemen (3), Rwanda (4), Serbia (5), Chad (6), DR Congo (7), Kenya (8), Pakistan (9), and Algeria (10). Other countries of note in the ‘extreme risk’ category include Côte d'Ivoire (14), Iraq (16) and Libya (22). More >>>

Location: Cayman Islands

The Shrinking Pie: Post-Growth Geopolitics

Post-Growth Geopolitics


As nations compete for currency advantages, they are also eyeing the world’s diminishing resources—fossil fuels, minerals, agricultural land, and water. Resource wars have been fought since the dawn of history, but today the competition is entering a new phase.

Nations need increasing amounts of energy and materials to produce economic growth, but—as we have seen—the costs of supplying new increments of energy and materials are increasing. In many cases all that remains are lower-quality resources that have high extraction costs. In some instances, securing access to these resources requires military expenditures as well. Meanwhile the struggle for the control of resources is re-aligning political power balances throughout the world.

The U.S., as the world’s superpower, has the most to lose from a reshuffling of alliances and resource flows. The nation’s leaders continue to play the game of geopolitics by 20th century rules: They are still obsessed with the Carter Doctrine and focused on petroleum as the world’s foremost resource prize (a situation largely necessitated by the country’s continuing overwhelming dependence on oil imports, due in turn to a series of short-sighted political decisions stretching back at least to the 1970s). The ongoing war in Afghanistan exemplifies U.S. inertia: Most experts agree that there is little to be gained from the conflict, but withdrawal of forces is politically unfeasible. More >>>

This article is the part 6 from Chapter 5 of Richard Heinberg's new book 'The End of Growth', which is set for publication by New Society Publishers in August 2011. This chapter 'Shrinking Pie: Competition and Relative Growth in a Finite World' looks in greater depth at the prospects for further development in in an increasingly resource strained environment.

Location: Cayman Islands

A Perfect Storm for Hunger: New Oxfam report tackles broken food system

The global food system is broken,” reads a new report from Oxfam International.


While much of Growing a Better Future: Food Justice in a Resource-Constrained World essentially reviews the major factors that contribute to food insecurity, Oxfam’s call to transform the food system is certainly timely, given this year’s high food prices (blamed in part for inflaming popular revolts in the Middle East) and fears of another global food crisis.

Despite producing enough food for everyone, one in seven people globally face chronic under-nutrition and almost one billion people are food insecure. Hunger is concentrated within rural areas in developing countries, and within families, women are often disproportionally affected, having serious implications for maternal and child health.

“We face three interlinked challenges in an age of growing crisis: feeding nine billion without wrecking the planet; finding equitable solutions to end disempowerment and injustice; and increasing our collective resilience to shocks and volatility,” write the authors of the report. More >>>

Location: Cayman Islands

Afghanistan: The Impossible Transition

A combination of two critical problems threatens to undermine the mission of the United States–led coalition in Afghanistan: the failure of the counterinsurgency strategy and a disconnect between political objectives and military operations.


If anything, the current strategy is making a political solution less likely, notably because it is antagonizing Pakistan without containing the rise of the armed opposition. That has put the coalition in a paradoxical situation, in which it is being weakened militarily by a non-negotiated and inevitable withdrawal while at the same time alienating potential negotiating partners.

The Obama administration has made new appointments to head the defense and intelligence agencies, and, in Afghanistan, has installed a new leadership to oversee U.S. military forces and named a new ambassador. The U.S. administration must take advantage of these appointments to establish greater coherence in both policy and operations: More >>>

Location: Islamabad

Joint Efforts to Map Water Levels Across Arab Countries

June 9, 2011—Across and within Jordan, Tunisia, Morocco and Lebanon, water levels in reservoirs and rivers, rainfall patterns and soil moisture will be mapped by satellites high overhead.


This new view of water systems will allow leaders to monitor local and regional drought and flood conditions, track evaporation from lakes and reservoirs, and even estimate future water supplies and crop yields.
This new project, financed by the World Bank’s Global Environmental Facility, is the first in a series of investments under the Arab World Initiative approved by the World Bank Board of Directors.

In the past, information on water has come from people and equipment on the ground. But collecting data in the field is often expensive and difficult to gather and verify. Satellite images can provide a unique view, across mountains and borders, and provide it almost instantly.

Not Enough Water-20% Less
Water supplies have a major impact on agriculture and the environment. A steady water supply is also essential for city life. Cities are growing in size and population throughout the region. And, because of climate change, experts predict an increasingly dry future. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that rainfall in many parts of the region will decrease by over 20% during the next century. More >>>

Location: Cayman Islands

Conditions on Indian NSG Membership

The question of Indian membership in the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) is reportedly on the agenda for the Group’s annual plenary next week in the Netherlands.


As the NSG participating governments consider adding new members, the question of conditions for membership becomes paramount. This is particularly true for states that are not parties to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), namely India, Pakistan and Israel. These three non-NPT states in particular should be demonstrably “like-minded” in supporting the broader aims of the nonproliferation regime, of which the NSG is a critical component. To demonstrate this likemindedness, they should be expected to meet objective nonproliferation criteria for membership that ensure their behaviour is consistent with the objectives of the Group.

Positive feedback from some experts in India, Pakistan, and Israel suggests broad agreement with this approach, if not specific agreement with all of the fourteen conditions suggested in an earlier essay. More >>>

Location:Islamabad

Editorial: Mr. President - Are you insane or just blind.

With the greatest respect I would like to ask all world leaders "Are you insane or just blind?"


The world is beset by a perfect storm of peak oil, climate change and an out of control population. all of which are potential conflict triggers.

The high cost and apparently constrained supplies of petroleum are causing blackouts, rolling brownouts and falling productivity in over fifty countries around the globe as I write this.

Climate change has the potential, given the expected rise in average global temperatures, to raise sea level by one metre by the end of the century, inundating islands, coastal plains and deltas around the globe.

Changes in rainfall patterns along with the melting of glaciers could disrupt food production in many of the worlds most populous countries causing famine. Droughts are now evident in states around the world. China is building canal over 1700 kilometers long in an attempt to bring water to water stressed northern areas of the country. Agriculture accounts for at least 70% of a countries water usage. South Asia which is home to well over one fifth of the world's population, is dependent on the seasonal monsoon rains for much of their food production as well as glacial melt water which is the source of the major rivers in the region. As temperatures rise the glaciers will melt, and if the rainfall patterns change millions may perish.

We could see refugee flows the likes of which have never been seen in recorded history, caused by any or all of the above scenarios. Climate Change Refugees will flow from areas of famine to areas where there is food. They will do so legally or illegally and they will be forced to do so even if it costs them their life.

No country can mitigate or adapt to the coming changes on its own. The only way that the human race can survive with a reasonably tolerable level of civilization is by working together. We no longer have time for political bickering, posturing or arguing within states or between states.

The time is now. We have to protect the major portions of the global commons, the atmosphere, the oceans, the biosphere. Humans need these to survive, we need the plants, the animals, the insects. We are dependent on all of it, we cannot survive without a healthy planet.

We are today, more than at any time in the history of the human race, our brothers and sisters keepers.

The Editor

Location: The Cayman Islands

Out of Pakistan

Outgoing CIA Director Leon Panetta made a surprise visit to Pakistan on Friday. It was his first visit since the death of Osama bin Laden.


The word on the street is that Panetta was trying to convince Islamabad to retract its call for U.S. military trainers to leave Pakistan. CBS News reports that an unnamed Pakistani government official said, “Mr. Panetta was told point blank, there will be no U.S. boots on the ground.” Afghan President Hamid Karzai was also in Pakistan over the weekend to speak with officials there about reconciliation with the Taliban.

Elsewhere in the region, outgoing Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen joined outgoing Defense Secretary Robert Gates in sounding a note of caution about the Afghanistan troop withdrawal. He said progress made in the country is not guaranteed. NATO’s “the job is by no means done – the gains that have been generated are fragile and reversible,” Mullen commented in London on Friday. General David Petraeus, commander of forces in Afghanistan, is expected to submit his recommendations about how many troops to withdrawal soon. More >>>

Location: Islamabad

Head of Saudi Electric Company Says "Oil Runs Out in 2030 if Current Consumption Maintained"

Head of Saudi Electric Company Says "Oil Runs Out in 2030 if Current Consumption Maintained"



Mishandle at Global Economic Trend Analysis has a look at a Saudi report that rising oil consumption for power generation may lead to their oil running out by 2030 - Head of Saudi Electric Company Says “Oil Runs Out in 2030 if Current Consumption Maintained”.

In light of Saudi Arabia wanting to step up production only to be rebuffed by the rest of OPEC, this story from elEconomista.es is rather interesting. Courtesy of Google Translate please consider Saudi Arabia fears that the oil runs out in 2030 if current consumption is maintained
Note: I am rewording some awkward translations so they read better.
The electricity company of Saudi Arabia warns that oil in this country could be depleted by 2030 if left unchecked domestic consumption. According to a report of Saudi Electric, domestic consumption is estimated to be between 2.5 and 3.4 million barrels a day. The report, published in the magazine Al Mashka says that the increase in domestic consumption of oil is one of the main challenges facing the country, mainly because oil accounts for 80% of national income.

Abdel Salam al-Yamani, head of the Saudi Electricity Company also warned of the consequences for citizens to ignore the calls to save electricity and water, and has advised that they depend more on solar energy. More >>>

Location: Cayman Islands

The Karma of Electric Vehicles

MALIBU, California, June 9, 2011 (ENS) - Large environmental problems like the ongoing Fukushima nuclear catastrophe and the effects of the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill in the Gulf of Mexico still occupy center stage, but an even bigger solution to the planet's environmental woes is rapidly approaching.


Vehicle electrification can ease dependence on polluting petroleum that is heating up the planet, yet many people are not fully informed on how electric vehicles will fit into their lives. One information gap is public understanding of the important fit between electric vehicles and the smart grid.

A game-changing research paper that addresses this gap, "Vehicle Electrification: Status and Issues," has just been published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in the special Smart Grid issue of the Proceedings of the IEEE. It shows how to change the energy equation and serves as a reference source to understand electric vehicles from a whole systems perspective. More >>>

Location: Cayman Islands

Indian Military’s Space Program: Implications For Pakistan – Analysis

The military role of space satellites has increased incessantly in last three decades.


In the early 1960s, the first reconnaissance and surveillance satellites were launched by the United States, and the Soviet Union followed within a few years. In addition, military communications, navigation, meteorology and other satellites were developed during this period. By the 1980s, systems such as the Navstar Global Positioning System (GPS), as well as reconnaissance satellites were of major importance in the military affairs.

Military space satellites are used both for peacetime collection of intelligence of the enemy, as well as the location of targets, troops deployment and to support combat operations in modern warfare. Therefore India is heading towards development of space capabilities; such capabilities would revamp their overall surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities which is an essential element in the modern Warfare. More >>>

Location: Islamabad

Civil forces don’t have funds to fight terror

ISLAMABAD: Urban centres in the country have witnessed increased terrorist attacks in recent weeks but paramilitary and police forces look as ill-equipped to meet the situation as they were before America’s ‘Get Osama’ operation in Abbottabad that made the militant groups revengeful.


Even the higher allocations announced for the two forces in the national budget for the new fiscal year, beginning on July 1, are unlikely to increase their capacity sufficiently to check the danger the militants pose to civilian population.

Budget documents promise 22 per cent more ‘operating expenditure’ to the Frontier Constabulary – Rs183 million compared to Rs150 million allocated in 2008-09 budget.

The Frontier Corps has been meted a more generous treatment. The operating expenditure of the Frontier Corps in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa has gone up 53.8 per cent to Rs769 million from Rs500 million but a miserly 12 per cent increase for the corps units in Balochistan — Rs952 million for 2011-12 against Rs850 million in 2008-09.

On paper the increases look substantial but much of the gloss vanishes when inflation is factored in. The fuel prices alone witnessed a big hike. Petrol price rose by 25.9 per cent while diesel went up by a whooping 88.22 percent. More >>>

Location:Islamabad

A National Strategic Narative

The United States needs a national strategic narrative.


We have a national security strategy, which sets forth four core national interests and outlines a number of dimensions of an overarching strategy to advance those interests in the 21 st century world.
But that is a document written by specialists for specialists. It does not answer a fundamental question that more and more Americans are asking. Where is the United States going in the world? How can we get there? What are the guiding stars that will illuminate the path along the way?

We need a story with a beginning, middle, and projected happy ending that will transcend our political divisions, orient us as a nation, and give us both a common direction and the confidence and commitment to get to our destination.

These questions require new answers because of the universal awareness that we are living through a time of rapid and universal change. The assumptions of the 20 th century, of the U.S. as a bulwark first against fascism and then against communism, make little sense in a world in which World War II and its aftermath is as distant to young generations today as the War of 1870 was to the men who designed the United Nations and the international order in the late 1940s. Consider the description of the U.S. president as “the leader of the free world,” a phrase that encapsulated U.S. power and the structure of the global order for decades. Yet anyone under thirty today, a majority of the world's population, likely has no idea what it means. More >>> PDF Document

Location:Islamabad

Climate change, nuclear risks and nuclear disarmament: from security threats to sustainable peace.

On 17 May the World Future Council released its latest report entitled Climate Change, Nuclear Risks and Nuclear Disarmament: From Security Threats to Sustainable Peace.


It is the outcome of groundbreaking research by Prof. Dr. Jürgen Scheffran of the University of Hamburg.

The report examines the linkages between nuclear and climate risks, noting that these two clear threats may interfere with each other in a mutually re-enforcing way. It also acknowledges that finding solutions to one problem area could lead to solutions in the other: "Preventing the dangers of climate change and nuclear war requires an integrated set of strategies that address the causes as well as the impacts on the natural and social environment.” Prof. Dr. Scheffran offers an approach to move away from these security threats to building sustainable peace.

The study brings to light the multidimensional interplay between climate change, nuclear risks and nuclear disarmament, and its critical implications for the strategic security environment. In addition, it explores prospects and openings to tackle these key challenges, stressing the role played by institutions to “strengthen common ecological and human security, build and reinforce conflict-resolution mechanisms and low-carbon energy alternatives, and create sustainable lifecycles that respect the capabilities of the living world."

Read the full report here.

Location: Cayman Islands

Climate change: major impacts on water for farming

New FAO survey sums up current scientific understanding of impacts, highlights knowledge gaps and areas for attention


Rome - Climate change will have major impacts on the availability of water for growing food and on crop productivity in the decades to come, warns a new FAO report.

Climate Change, Water, and Food Security is a comprehensive survey of existing scientific knowledge on the anticipated consequences of climate change for water use in agriculture.

These include reductions in river runoff and aquifer recharges in the Mediterranean and the semi-arid areas of the Americas, Australia and southern Africa -- regions that are already water-stressed. In Asia, large areas of irrigated land that rely on snowmelt and mountain glaciers for water will also be affected, while heavily populated river deltas are at risk from a combination of reduced water flows, increased salinity, and rising sea levels.

Additional impacts described in the report:

An acceleration of the world’s hydrological cycle is anticipated as rising temperatures increase the rate of evaporation from land and sea. Rainfall will increase in the tropics and higher latitudes, but decrease in already dry semi-arid to mid-arid latitudes and in the interior of large continents. A greater frequency in droughts and floods will need to be planned for but already, water scarce areas of the world are expected to become drier and hotter.

Even though estimates of groundwater recharge under climate change cannot be made with any certainty, the increasing frequency of drought can be expected to encourage further development of available groundwater to buffer the production risk for farmers.

And the loss of glaciers - which support around 40 percent of the world’s irrigation -- will eventually impact the amount of surface water available for agriculture in key producing basins

Increased temperatures will lengthen the growing season in northern temperate zones but will reduce the length almost everywhere else. Coupled with increased rates of evapotranspiration this will cause the yield potential and water productivity of crops to decline.

"Both the livelihoods of rural communities as well as the food security of city populations are at risk" said FAO Assistant Director General for Natural Resources, Alexander Mueller. "But the rural poor, who are the most vulnerable, are likely to be disproportionately affected". More >>>

Location: Cayman Islands

Sustainable development must be as much blue as it is green

Seychelles' Permanent Representative to the United Nations, Ambassador Ronny Jumeau, has reminded a United Nations debate on the pathway to sustainable development that the world's oceans, coasts, and small island countries must be included in the concept of a green economy.


Speaking at the informal debate in the UN General Assembly on the challenges of the green economy held on June 2, Amb. Jumeau stressed that what the small island developing states (SIDS) described as a "blue economy" must be part and parcel of the concept, definition, and development of a climate- and environment-friendly green economy.

"This is something we in the small islands talk about a lot but do not hear about enough," Ambassador Jumeau said, “We cannot build a new eco-friendly and sustainable world economy without factoring in and caring for the oceans, which would require integrating the SIDS.”

He later explained that the push by the SIDS for the "blue" economy to be incorporated within the concept of the global green economy is essentially to ensure that the oceans and marine resources, and consequently the small islands as large ocean territories, are not forgotten or left behind. More >>>

Location: Cayman Islands

When the Nile runs dry

A new scramble for Africa is under way. As global food prices rise and exporters reduce shipments of commodities, countries that rely on imported grain are panicking.


Affluent countries like Saudi Arabia, South Korea, China and India have descended on fertile plains across the African continent, acquiring huge tracts of land to produce wheat, rice and corn for consumption back home.

Some of these land acquisitions are enormous. South Korea, which imports 70 percent of its grain, has acquired 1.7 million acres in Sudan to grow wheat—an area twice the size of Rhode Island. In Ethiopia, a Saudi firm has leased 25,000 acres to grow rice, with the option of expanding this to 750,000 acres. And India has leased several hundred thousand acres there to grow corn, rice and other crops.

These land grabs shrink the food supply in famine-prone African nations and anger local farmers, who see their governments selling their ancestral lands to foreigners. They also pose a grave threat to Africa’s newest democracy: Egypt.

Egypt is a nation of bread eaters. Its citizens consume 18 million tons of wheat annually, more than half of which comes from abroad. (See data.) Egypt is now the world’s leading wheat importer, and subsidized bread—for which the government doles out approximately $2 billion per year—is seen as an entitlement by the 60 percent or so of Egyptian families who depend on it.

As Egypt tries to fashion a functioning democracy after President Hosni Mubarak’s departure, land grabs to the south are threatening its ability to put bread on the table because all of Egypt’s grain is either imported or produced with water from the Nile River, which flows north through Ethiopia and Sudan before reaching Egypt. (Since rainfall in Egypt is negligible to nonexistent, its agriculture is totally dependent on the Nile.)

Unfortunately for Egypt, two of the favorite targets for land acquisitions are Ethiopia and Sudan, which together occupy three-fourths of the Nile River Basin. Today’s demands for water are such that there is little left of the river when it eventually empties into the Mediterranean.

The Nile Waters Agreement, which Egypt and Sudan signed in 1959, gave Egypt 75 percent of the river’s flow, 25 percent to Sudan and none to Ethiopia. This situation is changing abruptly as wealthy foreign governments and international agribusiness firms snatch up large swaths of arable land in the upper Basin. While these deals are typically described as land acquisitions, they are also, in effect, water acquisitions.

Now, when competing for Nile water, Cairo must deal with several governments and commercial interests that were not party to the 1959 agreement. Moreover, Ethiopia — never enamored of the agreement — has announced plans to build a huge hydroelectric dam on its branch of the Nile that would reduce the water flow to Egypt even more.

Because Egypt’s wheat yields are already among the world’s highest, it has little potential to raise its land productivity further. With its population of 81 million projected to reach 101 million by 2025, finding enough food and water is a daunting challenge. More >>>

Location:Cayman Islands

Desertification, global warming major challenges to SARRC

Peshawar—Provincial Minister for Environment and Forests, Wajid Ali Khan on Sunday said that desertification, global warming and climatic change was major challenges to SAARC countries as it directly affect economy and environment, which could only be combated by formulating a joint mechanism to cope with this alarming issue on scientific and modern lines.


“Combating desertification in SAARC countries including Pakistan remains one of the enduring challenges of the 21st century because it directly affects our economy, environment and leads to poverty,” he told APP on Sunday.

Due to desertification, global warming and climatic change, he said, fertile lands of SAARC countries are being gradually converted into barren and arid lands, which are not only affecting our agriculture growth, industrialization and economy but enhances the chances of natural disasters in forms of floods and cyclones in future.

The global warming, climatic change and desertification are a very complex issue and is a multidimensional phenomenon and all range states should joined hands to provide healthy environment to future generations, he added.

The Minister said these issues caused repaid change in climates and decrease in rainfalls. Glaciers are melting fast, which are causing floods, sighting 2010 floods, he added.

The populations, who are living close to sea are being migrated to move safer places due to upward increase in sea level. According to environmentalists, 80 percent land of our country is arid and semi-arid, therefore is vulnerable to desertification.

About two-thirds of our population depends on dry land areas prone to desertification, drought and flash floods. More >>>

Location: Islamabad

Climate to wreak havoc on food supply, predicts repor

Some areas in the tropics face famine because of failing food production, an international research group says.



The Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) predicts large parts of South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa will be worst affected.

Its report points out that hundreds of millions of people in these regions are already experiencing a food crisis.

"We are starting to see much more clearly where the effects of climate change on agriculture could intensify hunger and poverty," said Patti Kristjanson, an agricultural economist with the CCAFS initiative that produced the report.

A leading climatologist told BBC News that agriculturalists had been slow to use global climate models to pinpoint regions most affected by rising temperatures.

This report is the first foray into the field by the CCAFS initiative. To assess how climate change will affect the world's ability to feed itself, CCAFS set about finding hotspots of climate change and food insecurity.

Focusing their search on the tropics, the researchers identified regions where populations are chronically malnourished and highly dependent on local food supplies.

Then, basing their analysis on the climate data amassed by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the team predicted which of these food-insecure regions are likely to experience the greatest shifts in temperature and precipitation over the next 40 years.
More >>>

Location: Cayman Islands

Ex-Mossad chief warns against attacking Iran

Meir Dagan, a former chief of Israel's vaunted Mossad intelligence agency, has issued a stinging rebuke of Israeli policies on Iran and the Palestinians, warning that Israel risks sliding headlong into a major regional conflict.



That such a wake-up call should come from Mr Dagan, a hardliner credited with masterminding some of Israel's most daring operations, reflects a deep unease felt by some of the security elite over Israel's growing isolation.

Better known for his discretion than for speaking out, Mr Dagan made a rare appeal to the country's hawkish Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, to take the initiative in reaching a peace deal with the Palestinians, and warned him against launching an attack on Iran that would encourage Tehran to press forward with its atomic programme.

"The war won't be against Iran, but will be a regional war," Mr Dagan said in an address to students at Tel Aviv University. "I recommend that the Prime Minister decide not to attack." More >>>

Location: Islamabad

The Peak Oil Crisis: An Announcement

With little fanfare, a press release appeared last week on the website of the UK Industry Taskforce on Peak Oil and Energy Security (ITPOES).



The release said that during a meeting between Chris Huhne, the UK's Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, and representatives of ITPOES, an agreement had been reached that Her Majesty's Department for Energy and Climate will collaborate with ITPOES on a joint examination of concerns that global oil supply will begin to fall behind demand within as little as five years. This collaboration is seen by the British government as the first step in the development of a national peak oil contingency plan.
There are many implications buried in this seemingly innocuous announcement.

First, American readers should note that the British government recognizes that energy policy and climate change are inextricably linked so that you cannot formulate policies for one without the other. The major step forward, however, is the official and semi-public recognition by a major government that global oil supplies will fall behind demand in as little as five years. After years of official denial this is indeed a breakthrough worthy of note.


Gone is the rhetoric about the billions of barrels of oil remaining that will last for so many decades that nobody alive today needs to worry. Official recognition has been given to the concept that the remaining oil will be so expensive to extract or will be locked into the earth by intractable political disputes, so that it simply will not be available in the unlimited quantities or at the prices we have known for the last 100 years.
Also implicit in the announcement is that ever-rising real energy costs will destabilize nearly all of the world's economies and that economic growth in the form we have come to know it will no longer be possible.

Location: Lawrence Bl, Cayman Islands

Squaring Asia's nuclear triangle

Just before the fourth trilateral summit between Japan, China, and South Korea began on May 21, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, South Korean President Lee Myung-bak, and Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan jointly visited the areas affected by the Great East Japan Earthquake, offering encouragement to the disaster's victims living in evacuation centers.



Since the accident at Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in March, Kan has aimed at lifting the bans that many countries have imposed on imports of Japanese agricultural products, and so offered the two heads of state cherries from Fukushima in a bid to highlight their safety.

At the summit, the three countries issued a joint statement outlining cooperation on a wide range of issues, including nuclear safety, disaster prevention, economic growth, and the environment. The lessons learned from Japan's earthquake and nuclear accident would be shared with China, South Korea, and the wider international community, and, in an addendum, the Japanese authorities promised to "continue to provide information ... with the greatest transparency possible".

In fact, the Kan administration - which loathes the involvement of bureaucrats, who are professionals in managing public affairs - delayed notifying neighbouring countries when it was forced to order the release of water containing low concentrations of radioactive material. For Kan, the real priority was his government's effort to maintain its grip on power, not reassuring Japan's neighbours of the actions it was taking to contain a potential threat to their citizens.

The codicil to the summit communique was created to address these concerns. It emphasised the importance of sharing information about nuclear safety, and incorporated specific measures, including the creation of a framework for rapid notification in the event of an emergency and exchanges of experts to assist in managing future nuclear crises and ensuring that regional concerns are taken into account. More >>>

Location: Islamabad

Editorial: Global Energy Shortages

I have just looked at my RSS News Feed under the heading of Energy Shortages and noticed that there are fifty-eight articles from around the world this morning.



These range from utilities in China that are financially struggling to rolling blackouts in Venezuela and Pakistan, to South Africa seeking to cut power consumption by thirteen percent.
This is a world-wide problem, Russia has banned the export of gasoline, which prompted Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to ban exports of refined petroleum products late last month, especially as the country gears up for State Duma elections in December and Presidential elections in the spring of 2011. In Karachi, Pakistan a protester was killed demonstrating against load shedding.


It may just be my imagination but I detect a global trend in all these reports which only reinforces the theory of Peak Oil.

In the Cayman Islands households are billed monthly, with a breakdown between electricity consumed and the cost of fuel used to generate the consumed amount of electricity shown on the invoice. I have people telling me on a daily basis that their fuel charge is more than the electrical charge.

If oil is abundant as OPEC claims why are so many stares globally having these overwhelming energy shortages? One could argue that it is the financial aspect of obtaining petroleum products that is to blame. However, one must ask why the price is escalating. Could it possible be a supply and demand situation?
It really does not matter wether it is unaffordable or unattainable it still leads to a shortage of electricity for all of us. It is therefore time to push of governments and legislators to take the necessary steps to enable the introduction of renewable sources of energy such as solar, wind and ocean thermal conversion.

Location: Cayman Islands

Prospect of limiting the global increase in temperature to 2ºC is getting bleaker

CO2 emissions reach a record high in 2010; 80% of projected 2020 emissions from the power sector are already locked in.

Energy-related carbon-dioxide (CO2) emissions in 2010 were the highest in history, according to the latest estimates by the International Energy Agency (IEA).



After a dip in 2009 caused by the global financial crisis, emissions are estimated to have climbed to a record 30.6 Gigatonnes (Gt), a 5% jump from the previous record year in 2008, when levels reached 29.3 Gt.

In addition, the IEA has estimated that 80% of projected emissions from the power sector in 2020 are already locked in, as they will come from power plants that are currently in place or under construction today.

“This significant increase in CO2 emissions and the locking in of future emissions due to infrastructure investments represent a serious setback to our hopes of limiting the global rise in temperature to no more than 2ºC,” said Dr Fatih Birol, Chief Economist at the IEA who oversees the annual World Energy Outlook, the Agency’s flagship publication.

Global leaders agreed a target of limiting temperature increase to 2°C at the UN climate change talks in Cancun in 2010. For this goal to be achieved, the long-term concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere must be limited to around 450 parts per million of CO2-equivalent, only a 5% increase compared to an estimated 430 parts per million in 2000. More >>>

Location: Cayman Islands

Energy Security and the Spectrum of Engagement Between China and India in the Indian Ocean

The redistribution of global power resulting from the rise of India and China has increased the strategic importance of the Indian Ocean.



Its sea lanes supply both countries with the majority of their imported natural resources and, as a consequence, determine their energy security. While maritime security for these sea lanes therefore serves as an overlapping interest, the scarcity of energy resources, especially for energy consumers, is driving intense global economic competition between the two powers for long-term energy supplies. This in turn introduces great complexity into projections of the nature of their long-term relationship. The result is a full spectrum of analyses, ranging from deep coordination on one end to full-scale confrontation on the other. Since systemic factors strongly disincentive the extremes, the future of the relationship almost certainly lies somewhere in the range of limited cooperation to limited confrontation. However, the erosion of American unipolarity has made this calculation difficult at best. In such a complex environment, a survey of the full spectrum of possibilities proves especially useful as aspects of each likely will influence the evolution of the rising powers’ engagement.

Revisionist collaboration
Intensive cooperation between India and China could be realized through the coordination of state actions to promote their shared interests. This coordination likely would be the result of formal contract and enforcement through international treaties and organizations or new norms and conventions that provide informal guides for state conduct specifically in regions that affect the actors’ energy security.

As China remains uncomfortable with international energy markets and institutions, it is unlikely that this coordination would arise within the status quo. Instead, new institutions or norms almost certainly would be the result of revisionist action by both actors to reshape a regional system that fails to properly accommodate their rising power interests. More >>>

Location: Islamabad