Also in the picture are Captain Umio Otsuka, commander of the Escort Division 21 of the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force (on the left), the captain of the destroyer, Commader Fujita (on the far right), and two Japanese Defense Ministry officials, Mr. Kenji Mizunoya (senior deputy director of international policy planning division) and Ms. Kumiko Morino.
Escape From Reality
Brahma Chellaney
Asian Age, May 14, 2007
Having made the nuclear deal the centrepiece of their warming ties, India and the United States are discovering the hard way that the commitments they made in July 2005 are difficult to reconcile and implement. If the world’s most populous and most powerful democracies are not to be saddled with a political albatross, they will have to ensure that what they had hyped as a “historic deal” does not foster such lingering disputes as to set back bilateral relations.
The latest discord centres on the terms of a follow-up bilateral accord to define the technical rules of civil nuclear commerce. Such an accord is required not by international law but by US law — the Atomic Energy Act, Section 123 of which demands a congressionally ratified nuclear cooperation agreement (NCA) as a prerequisite. But unlike the existing Section 123 agreements with other countries, Indo-US civil nuclear cooperation will be uniquely governed by a special, India-specific US domestic law, the Hyde Act.
The deal has become such a technical subject that it is easy to loose the bigger picture by focusing on the twists and turns in a never-ending saga or on the fine print of the NCA under negotiation. Despite its ostensible rationale to aid India’s energy needs, the deal would have an important bearing on the autonomy and integrity of Indian foreign policy and security.
Although the deal has been marketed as a major favour to India, it is America that is piling up pressure on New Delhi to yield further ground, as shown by the recent telephone calls by President George W. Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, as well as by the official statements in Washington expressing frustration over New Delhi’s alleged narrow-mindedness. To rub in the point that a Section 123 agreement would emerge only if New Delhi gives in, Undersecretary Nicholas Burns claimed the US has “carried through on all its commitments” and now “the ball is in India’s court.” Contrast this truculence with the love-fest that greeted the signing of the deal.
US pressure tactics in recent weeks have included shining renewed spotlight on New Delhi’s legitimate relations with Tehran, and the April 2 indictment of an Indian national and a Singaporean for allegedly conspiring to illegally export to India some dual-use but outdated American memory chips and capacitors. This indictment not only appeared politically timed to step up pressure on New Delhi just when the NCA negotiations had hit a major snag, but it also conflicts with Washington’s avowed objective to open high-tech commerce (with the US-India High-Technology Cooperation Group meeting since 2003).
The deal constitutes a major diplomatic accomplishment for the US, opening the path to its influencing India’s strategic policies. Naturally, Bush is eager to hold on to a deal that is one of his few second-term foreign policy successes. Bush knows that like him, Dr. Singh is coming under growing political siege at home. But while Bush has another 20 months in office left, Dr. Singh’s political future is uncertain. So the haste to tie up a 123 agreement. As the White House put it bluntly last Thursday, “We are determined to make it happen.”
Another reason for such intense pressure is that once the 123 agreement is concluded, the deal would virtually go out of India’s hands. It would be then up to the 35-nation IAEA board, the 45-state Nuclear Suppliers’ Group and the US Congress — in that order, according to the revised sequence the US has laid down — to refine and expand the conditions applicable to cooperation with India.
While peaceful nuclear cooperation would nicely dovetail with a US-India strategic partnership, the deal has evolved in such a way as to attenuate the obligations Bush undertook on July 18, 2005, while enlarging (and legalizing) Indian commitments through the means of the five-month-old Hyde Act. Not surprisingly, the US effort now is to ensure that a final 123 accord is in consonance with — or at least not incompatible with — this Act.
In any event, as a subsidiary bilateral arrangement under US law, the 123 agreement cannot circumvent the Hyde Act, which has defined the “procedures and conditions” by which such an accord may be considered by Congress. In fact, to qualify for such consideration, the 123 agreement would have to be submitted to the appropriate congressional committees with the entire deal package, including “a completed IAEA-India safeguards agreement and other documents and Presidential determinations” in a report form.
The “Presidential determinations” — on 10 different conditions listed in the Act’s Section 104(c)(2) — would centre on New Delhi’s compliance. They include extraneous conditions, such as binding India to the Proliferation Security Initiative, Australia Group and Wassenaar Arrangement, and securing its full participation in “efforts to dissuade, isolate, and, if necessary, sanction and contain Iran.” That the Hyde Act represents a blend of the toughest elements from the Senate and House bills is apparent from a Congressional Research Service comparative assessment, in table form, by Sharon Squassoni and Jill Marie Parillo.
The PM had assured Parliament last August 17 that, “If in their final form, the US legislation or the adopted NSG guidelines impose extraneous conditions on India, the government will draw the necessary conclusions, consistent with the commitments I have made to Parliament.” Yet, when the Hyde Act bristling with extraneous and mortifying conditions was passed, Dr. Singh paused only to admit that some of its provisions were “a cause for concern” before sanctioning negotiations on a 123 agreement.
It has now become clear that if the 123 accord is to be in harmony with the Hyde Act and yet not rub salt on Indian wounds, there is only one way out — semantic guile on the fine print. That is exactly what is on offer from the US side to break the current deadlock and seal the accord.
The new formulations proffered by the US in the last round of talks in Washington early this month centre not on substance but on a semantic exercise that would take India round the mulberry bush and defer its day of reckoning to a time when it has no escape route. Yet Burns characterized these formulations as “extensive progress” and Foreign Secretary Shivshankar Menon hailed them as “considerable progress.”
In such hoopla, the principal fact is getting obscured — that the grating conditions against India are in the Hyde Act, and even if they did not figure in the 123 agreement, New Delhi would still be bound by them. After all, it is only after India has complied with all the Hyde Act’s preconditions that Congress would take up the final deal for approval. Indeed, even after such approval, the US is to hang the threat of re-imposition of civil nuclear sanctions to enforce India’s continuous compliance with the Act’s post-implementation conditions.
Put simply, no semantic trickery over the fine print of the123 agreement can free India from the rigours of the Hyde Act. While New Delhi, of course, would not want to compound its burden by entering into an adverse 123 accord with the US, the devil is not so much in the details of such an agreement as in the Hyde Act — a red rag to a bull.
Yet New Delhi remains fixated on the terms of the 123 agreement, to the exclusion of the onerous conditions the Hyde Act already seeks to enforce. Such a blinkered focus also raises an important question: Whatever 123 accord were to emerge, will India be able to hold the US to its terms? In other words, will India be signing on to a legally enforceable agreement?
India’s bitter experience over an earlier 123 agreement with the US, signed in 1963, is a sobering guide to this question. That accord was protective of Indian interests and free of any Hyde Act-style overarching domestic-legal framework. Yet, when the US walked out midway through that 30-year accord — cutting off fuel supply to the twin-reactor Tarapur power station, despite a guarantee to provide “timely” low-enriched uranium on demand — New Delhi could do little more than sulk. With the accord not enjoying the status of a treaty in international law, India realized it was futile to keep claiming it had the “force” of a treaty.
The truth is that the US has maintained a consistent legal position that because it enters into a 123 agreement to meet a requirement of its own internal law, it follows logically that such an accord cannot supersede American law. Indeed, the Carter administration used that very contention to rationalize the 1978 US action in changing domestic law in such a way as to unilaterally rewrite American obligations under the 1963 accord with India.
A 123 agreement, in effect, will legally bind India but not America. Nothing better illustrates this than the manner New Delhi still adheres to the terms of the 1963 agreement, despite America’s material breach long ago and the accord having itself expired in 1993. New Delhi has continued to exacerbate its spent-fuel problem at Tarapur by granting the US a right it didn’t have even if it had honoured the 123 agreement — a veto on India reprocessing the discharged reactor fuel. Nor has India ever sought compensation from the US for the large costs it continues to incur to store the highly radioactive spent fuel.
When New Delhi signed the 2005 deal, it could have asked the US to show its sincerity by beginning immediate cooperation to facilitate the reprocessing of the Tarapur spent fuel, a source of continuing storage and safety concern. Instead, even as key issues from the earlier 123 accord remain outstanding, India is seeking to enter into a new 123 agreement.
(To be continued)
© Asian Age, 2007
123
Semantic Subterfuges
Brahma Chellaney
Asian Age, May 15, 2007
The wheel has come full circle. America broke its 1963 agreement with India by enacting a new domestic law — the 1978 Nuclear
Non-Proliferation Act (NNPA) — which in
turn amended its 1954 Atomic Energy Act (AEC). Now New
Delhi is negotiating a
new Section 123 bilateral accord under the very US
legal provisions that were devised to discipline
India
for its 1974 detonation and to deter any other state from emulating its example.
One expected New
Delhi to know those clauses better than any other
state. Yet, it seems caught by surprise by the US
insistence that the new 123 accord incorporate an explicit American right to secure the
return of transferred nuclear items and materials if India (to quote the AEC Section
123a proviso) “detonates a nuclear-explosive device or terminates or abrogates an agreement providing for IAEA safeguards.”
The “right to return” is just one of nine conditions under the amended AEC Section 123a
that a bilateral agreement is required to meet. In the legislative process that
led to the Hyde Act, the four versions — the official bill, the House bill, the
Senate bill and the final product —
had only one common element: none exempted any Section 123a criteria other than
the requirement for “full-scope” or comprehensive IAEA inspections
on all nuclear facilities. Among the
eight not-exempted criteria include
the right-to-return rider and a veto-empowering
condition — “no enrichment or reprocessing
by the recipient state without prior approval.”
The Hyde Act not
only classifies India
as a non-nuclear-weapons state (NNWS), but also authorizes the president to
waive sanctions on Indian activities, inconsistent
with the AEC Section 129 non-proliferation conditions, that occurred only prior
to July 18, 2005. For all subsequent activities since
that date, India
is to be held to various NPT-style prohibitions for an NNWS as defined by Section 129 except one — the possession of
nuclear-explosive devices.
In the ongoing
123-agreement negotiations, the newly submitted US
formulations
seek to allay India’s
misgivings through semantic rather
than policy shifts. Where differences are irreconcilable, the formulations equivocate
or even omit a direct reference to an issue. The US
wordsmiths have fashioned a revised draft that beats about the bush on issues
of primary concern to India.
Armed with the overarching Hyde Act
and the long-term India trap
it sets, the US
has little to lose through some dissemblance in
the 123 accord.
Let us examine what is on offer.
■ Reprocessing
of spent fuel. Having branded India as an NNWS in
its new law, the US is willing to
offer not the advance-consent right it now provides its European partner-states
and Japan but an assurance of the type it has given to a single nuclear-weapons state (NWS) — that it would hold
joint consultations on any reprocessing request and attempt to reach agreement within a finite
timeframe.
That
assurance is in the 1985 US-China agreement. Article 5(2) of that agreement says
that although neither party “has any plans” to reprocess, “in the event that a party would like at some future
time to undertake such activities, the parties will promptly hold consultations
to agree on a mutually acceptable arrangement.”
It
then goes on to say that “the parties will consult immediately and will seek
agreement within six months on
long-term arrangements for such activities … If such an arrangement is not
agreed upon within that period of
time, the parties will promptly consult for the purpose of agreeing on measures … to undertake such activities on an
interim basis.”
It
is odd that the US wishes to offer New Delhi the 1985 assurance it gave China — which is unencumbered by any of the constraints being
enforced on India — rather than the post-1985 reprocessing
arrangements it has worked out with its NNWS partners, including Japan and the European Atomic Energy Community
(EURATOM), eight of whose 15 member-nations have power reactors.
To
get around the NNPA (and AEC) condition for US prior consent, the US has granted
its non-nuclear partners long-term “advance programmatic approval” to reprocess
and recycle US-origin plutonium. For
example, just over a decade ago, EURATOM states were given advance rights, with
inbuilt safeguards against arbitrary revocation by the US.
Without
at least a similar advance right, India would get into a much bigger mess than Tarapur. Even though the
US did not have any
prior-consent veto in the 1963
agreement, it still breached its terms by continuously
refusing to either exercise its first option to
buy Tarapur spent fuel in excess of India’s needs or to carry out a safeguards-related
“joint determination”
with India
of the reprocessing facility.
In the new 123 accord, the US has staked claim to an explicit double veto: India cannot ship back spent fuel to America without its prior consent, as decreed by
the Hyde Act Section 103(b)(6); nor can India start any reprocessing activity sans prior US consent. This dual right to
doubly squeeze India is to hold
even if the US
were to unilaterally terminate or
suspend all cooperation.
A
US assurance to India like that to China
would be meaningless. First, the 123
agreement with China
openly encourages collaboration on reprocessing,
in sharp contrast to the way the US
Congress has beforehand sought to dissuade reprocessing
cooperation with India.
Second, seen against the US bad faith in
rebuffing India
for decades on a “joint determination” on Tarapur, the new formulation merely proposes
“joint consultations” within a timeframe without any assurance that the US would actually allow India to reprocess.
Third,
while India
has agreed to permanent, legally irrevocable IAEA inspections
on its entire civilian programme, the Sino-American
agreement stands out for not applying
even voluntary, revocable IAEA safeguards on US nuclear exports. It is so lax
that Article 8(2) declares that even “bilateral safeguards are not required,” although
Beijing
agreed more than a decade later to some loose end-use checks under US
congressional pressure. China
has taken on no irreversible commitment and can easily walk out from the agreement,
but India will not be able to
free itself from grating legal obligations
even if the US
rejected its reprocessing request
after joint consultations.
And
fourth, the US-China arrangement
grants Washington
no leverage to deny Beijing reprocessing permission. It was only recently that Beijing signed up to buy its first US-origin power reactors — that too from the Japanese-owned
Westinghouse
company — after Westinghouse agreed
to transfer substantial technology and expend 50 per cent of the value of the
contract on goods and services produced in
China.
Because its 123 agreement permits Beijing
to terminate cooperation at will and
yet keep its spent fuel outside IAEA inspections,
it did not need a permanent or advance consent right. In
the years ahead, when the Westinghouse
reactors are commissioned and produce sufficient spent fuel for reprocessing, Beijing
would simply notify Washington of its plan and, if
the latter didn’t cooperate, unilaterally begin
to reprocess after six months and/or terminate
all cooperation. In contrast, the Indo-US deal stacks the deck against India.
The reason why the US
takes a dim view of Indian reprocessing
is that it would allow India,
as part of its long-term energy security plans, to expand its
plutonium economy and develop its fast-breeder and thorium capabilities. That conflicts with the US
aim to constrict India
from further developing its independent fuel-cycle capabilities even under IAEA
safeguards.
No wonder US negotiators
today are offering India a deceptive formulation on reprocessing, not the long-term “advance
consent” concept that America
pioneered in the early 1980s in agreements with Sweden
and Norway.
That concept comes with objective criteria for revocation of any US advance
consent so that a future American administration
does not arbitrarily withdraw it.
US
negotiators today disingenuously
cite the NNPA restriction. The fact is that ever since
1984, when a federal district court dismissed a suit by non-proliferation
activists challenging long-term
consents as violating the NNPA, American
courts have consistently held that the NNPA’s interpretation
is a political matter inappropriate
for judicial resolution.
More
importantly, the US Congress has not prohibited or limited the use of advance
consents. Indeed, the Senate defeated a 1988 resolution to reject a 123
agreement with Japan
because of its advance-consent provision. And in
1996, a new 123 agreement with EURATOM took effect after the US not only
granted advance consent, but also proclaimed “no interference”
in fuel-cycle decisions of that
Community’s member-states.
Bush
has the executive authority to “exempt” India from or otherwise skirt the
prior-consent requirement. Congress has anyway spurned his plea that the new 123
accord automatically take effect unless a disapproval
resolution was passed with a two-thirds vote. Instead, it will treat the accord
as making an “exemption,” thus requiring a
joint resolution of approval within 90 days. Bush’s problem, if any,
is the Hyde Act, which implicitly treats nuclear India’s
status as being even less than that
of America’s
NNWS allies.
■ Right to
return. This claimed right is founded on a one-sided concept that the supplier
is at liberty to terminate
cooperation retroactively. America’s
new proposal is to formulate an intricate,
drawn-out process to give effect to an explicit US right to an all-encompassing return of transferred nuclear items and
materials if it terminates
cooperation on grounds that its continuation
would jeopardize its supreme national interests. By making
the actual implementation of the “right to return” problematic, the proposal
aims to calm India.
However, such semantic
subterfuge in the draft 123 accord seeks
to obscure the key point: any
acknowledgement of the American right to seek return on account of a US-determined Indian non-compliance with non-proliferation
conditions would turn India’s voluntary test moratorium into
a binding,
irrevocable prohibition through a double instrument
— a bilateral agreement atop the Hyde Act.
The
“right-to-return” demand and the Hyde Act Section 106 prohibition on further
testing are part of the same design
that has prompted the Bush administration
to propose an NSG exemption for India
tied to a test ban. India
is being dragged through the
backdoor into the Comprehensive Test
Ban Treaty, rejected by the Senate in
1999. By going beyond the CTBT and technically
quantifying a nuclear-explosive test,
the Hyde Act actually seeks to hold India to CTBT-plus obligations.
■ Full
cooperation. To escape from its obligation to open “full civil nuclear cooperation and trade” with India, the US wants the 123-agreement text to
be neutral on that subject. The intent
is to use such undefined scope of
cooperation to create an illusion in
India that full cooperation
has not been ruled out, while allowing
the US to stay faithful to
the Hyde Act’s bar on civil enrichment, reprocessing
and heavy-water cooperation with New
Delhi.
Where the
replication of a provision from the US-China
agreement will be worthless in
relation to India, Washington
eagerly offers it. But where a provision is indeed
worth replicating — such as Article
3, which provides for unrestricted fuel-cycle cooperation — it looks the other
way.
■ Lifetime fuel reserves. While India
wants to build “lifetime” strategic fuel reserves for civilian reactors as an insurance against
supply cut-off, the US
offers only assured fuel shipments. The Hyde Act precludes “lifetime” fuel
stockpiling by allowing stocks only for “reasonable” operating needs, with reasonableness defined by the US.
And while India wants the right to take “corrective measures”
if supplies were disrupted, the US
is willing to permit such action if
it meant convening a meeting of “friendly” supplier-states, not the lifting of IAEA inspections.
Given that the Hyde Act forbids India
from breaking out of its obligations
even if supplies are discontinued,
correction can only be toothless.
There are other
core disagreements, too. All are rooted in
three factors. The first is America’s
failure to fully discharge its pledge to “adjust
US laws and policies … to achieve full civil nuclear energy cooperation with India.” There
has also been a breach of the deal’s underlying
principle that such adjustments
would not hold India
to an NNWS status.
And finally, while India
is ready to be a friend and partner of the US,
America
insists it become its ally. Friendship
or partnership is based on parity, reciprocity and mutual respect, while an
alliance has a leader that dictates terms. The nuclear deal, in principle,
offered India parity and
reciprocity but, in practice, the US still insists on setting
the terms.
(Concluded)
©
Asian Age, 2007
Nuclear Non-Starter
The U.S.-India civil nuke deal is doomed
By Brahma Chellaney
Wall Street Journal, May 9, 2007
The much-trumpeted 2005 civil nuclear deal between the United States and India always had one problem: the elastically worded accord itself. New Delhi, however, bears the brunt of the blame for the current deadlock. While the U.S. never hid its nonproliferation objectives, India’s policy makers embraced the political deal without fully understanding its implications. Now that the technical rules of nuclear commerce are to be defined, they find it difficult to meet the demands set by the U.S. Congress.
The root of the current stalemate over the fine print rests in the new U.S. legislation, dubbed the Hyde Act, governing the deal. The U.S. wants the right to cut off all cooperation and secure the return of transferred nuclear items if India, in Washington’s estimation, fails to live up to certain nonproliferation conditions, such as a ban on nuclear testing. The prohibition seeks to implicitly bind India to an international pact whose ratification the U.S. Senate rejected in 1999—the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. The Hyde Act also sets out conditions to block India from ending International Atomic Energy Agency inspections even if American fuel supplies are suspended or terminated.
While the political deal had promised India “full civil nuclear cooperation and trade,” what is on offer now is restrictive cooperation, tied to the threat of reimposition of sanctions if New Delhi does not adhere to the congressionally prescribed stipulations. India, however, insists that cooperation encompass uranium enrichment, reprocessing of spent fuel and heavy-water production, given that all such activities would be under International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards and for peaceful purposes.
Under the deal inked in 2005, India agreed to “assume the same responsibilities and practices and acquire the same benefits and advantages as other leading countries with advanced nuclear technology, such as the U.S.” It now complains that the Hyde Act denies it these “same benefits and advantages.” However, New Delhi itself laid the groundwork for higher standards when months earlier it agreed to place 35 Indian nuclear facilities under permanent, legally irrevocable IAEA inspections—not the token, voluntary inspections accepted by the U.S. on select facilities.
In any case, a growing perception that the U.S. was shifting the goalpost created outrage in India’s Parliament. Why the shock and horror? It’s simple: India embraced the U.S.-drafted deal hurriedly in July 2005 without fully grasping its significance. As Prime Minister Manhoman Singh admitted in Parliament on August 3, 2005, he received “the final draft from the U.S. side” only upon reaching Washington a day before signing. Until that point, India’s negotiators had only discussed submitting “power reactors” to international inspections, not all civilian nuclear facilities. And they certainly didn’t anticipate a test ban. Indeed, after signing the deal, Mr. Singh had assured Parliament that “our autonomy of decision-making will not be circumscribed in any manner.”
The current deadlock could have easily been avoided. During the nine-month legislative drafting of the Hyde Act last year, India ought to have made it clear that it wouldn’t allow its deal-related commitments to be expanded or turned into immutable legal obligations through the means of a U.S. domestic law. It was only after national outcry over the bill’s approval by the U.S. House of Representatives that Prime Minister Singh grudgingly defined India’s bottom-line: The “full” lifting of “restrictions on all aspects of cooperation” without the “introduction of extraneous” conditions. He went on warn that, “If in their final form, the U.S. legislation or the adopted Nuclear Suppliers’ Group guidelines impose extraneous conditions on India, the government will draw the necessary conclusions, consistent with the commitments I have made to Parliament.” That was too late to reverse the Congressional push for a tough law to govern the deal.
Last week, India’s top diplomat, Foreign Secretary Shiv Shankar Menon, tried to repair some of this damage by sitting down with his U.S. counterparts in Washington. But the reality is that each government finds its negotiating space severely constricted. The Bush administration is bound by the Hyde Act passed by Congress last December, and Mr. Singh is stuck with the deal-related benchmarks he defined in Parliament last August.
Even if the follow-up bilateral agreement did not incorporate the controversial conditions, it would hardly free India from the obligations the Hyde Act seeks to enforce. The U.S. has always maintained that because such a bilateral agreement is a requirement not under international law but under U.S. law—the Atomic Energy Act—it cannot supersede American law. In fact, an earlier U.S.-India bilateral nuclear cooperation accord, signed in 1963, was abandoned by Washington in 1978—four years after the first Indian nuclear test—simply by enacting a new domestic law that retroactively overrode the bilateral pact. That broke with impunity a guarantee to supply “timely” fuel “as needed” for India’s U.S.-built Tarapur nuclear power plant near Bombay, forcing India to turn to other suppliers to keep the station running to this day. India cannot get a similar lifetime fuel-supply guarantee for the new commercial nuclear power reactors it wishes to import thanks to the Hyde Act, which also bars reprocessing and enrichment cooperation even under IAEA safeguards.
Another sticking point is India’s insistence on the right—under international safeguards—to reprocess fuel discharged from imported reactors. The U.S. has granted such a reprocessing right to its European allies and Japan for decades. Given that the Tarapur spent fuel has continued to accumulate over the decades near Bombay, with the U.S. declining either to exercise its right to take it back or to allow India to reprocess it under IAEA inspection, New Delhi says it cannot get into a similar mess again. In fact, Washington has not compensated India for the large costs it continues to incur to store the highly radioactive spent fuel from Tarapur.
Faced with the Hyde Act’s grating conditions, misgivings over the deal have begun to infiltrate the Indian establishment. The U.S. currently has 23 different bilateral nuclear cooperation agreements with partner-states but none is tied to such an overarching, country-specific domestic law. Even if the present hurdle were cleared, the deal faces more challenges in securing approval from the 45-state Nuclear Suppliers’ Group and the 35-nation IAEA board.
New Delhi believes time is on its side. India’s economic and strategic influence is growing, strongly positioning New Delhi to conclude a deal on terms that are fairer and more balanced than those on offer today. Its interests also demand a deal not just restricted to civil nuclear export controls, but encompassing the full range of dual-use technology controls in force against India.
The present deal, despite the good intentions behind it, seems doomed.
Mr. Chellaney, a professor of strategic studies at the privately funded Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, is the author of “Nuclear Proliferation: The U.S.-India Conflict” (Orient Longman, 1993).
Copyright: The Wall Street Journal, 2007
© Asian Age, May 5, 2007
The Climate is Insecure
Brahma Chellaney
The new
spotlight on climate change has helped move the subject into
the international mainstream. There is now growing
recognition that climate security needs to be an important component of international security, yet the global debate on rising greenhouse-gas emissions has still to move beyond
platitudes to agreed counteraction.
The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report,
released on Friday, underscores the link
between energy and climate change but, other than emphasizing energy-efficiency measures and championing renewable energy, falls short of offering the world a politically workable mitigation
plan. Titled “Mitigation and Climate Change,” this summary report follows the
release of two other IPCC assessments earlier this year — one on “Physical
Science Basis” in February, and the
second on “Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability” last month.
Climate change is a real and serious
problem, and its effects could stress vulnerable
nations and spur civil and political unrest. Yet the creeping politicization of the subject will only make it
harder to build international
consensus and cooperation on a concrete plan of action. One way politicization is
happening is by seeking to “securitize” the risks of climate change. Take the insistence of some to add climate security to the
agenda of the United Nations Security Council.
The Security Council, at the instance of Britain,
held its first-ever debate on the security dimensions of climate change on April
17, with a number of delegates raising
doubts whether the Council was the proper forum to discuss the issue. In 2005,
as president of both the Group of Eight and European Union, British Prime Minister Tony Blair elevated global warming to the top of their agendas, and then the following year moved Secretary Margaret Beckett from the
environment to foreign portfolio. While London
needs to be commended for its new foreign-policy focus on climate change, its
effort to put the subject on the Security Council agenda could do more harm
than good to the cause it now fervently espouses.
No doubt there
is an ominous link between global warming
and security, given the spectre of resource conflicts, failed states, large-scale
migrations and higher frequency and intensity
of extreme weather events, such as cyclones, flooding
and droughts. Some developments would demand intervention
by the armed forces. Yet climate change, despite its potential to engender
greater intrastate and interstate conflict, can be tackled only through a
consensual international approach.
“Securitizing” climate change in
the context of global geopolitics may be a way to turn the issue from one
limited to eco-warriors to a subject of major international
concern. It may also be a way to facilitate the heavy-lifting needed to give the problem the urgency and financial resources it deserves. But having succeeded in
highlighting climate change as a
core international challenge, the
emphasis now has to shift to building
consensus on counteraction.
If climate
change were to become part of the agenda of the Security Council — a hotbed of
big-power politics — it would actually undercut such consensus building. With five unelected, yet permanent, members dictating the terms of the debate, we would get international divisiveness when the need is for enduring consensus on a global response to climate
change.
In
today’s world, no international
mission can succeed unless it enjoys international
coherence and consensus. In fact, this is the key lesson one can learn from the
way the global war on terror now stands derailed, even as the scourge of
transnational terrorism has spread deeper and wider in
the world.
It is not a
surprise that Britain’s
attempt during its last month’s Security
Council presidency to put climate change on the Council agenda received a
frosty response from the Group of 77 developing
countries, China
and Russia.
Even the United States
wasn’t enthused by the idea. The G-77 protested over the “ever-increasing
encroachment by the Security Council” on the role of other UN bodies, including
the General Assembly, the Commission on Sustainable
Development and the UN Environment Programme.
Another invidious way politicization is happening is through exaggeration and embellishment of the
technical evidence on global warming.
Take the reports of the IPCC, a joint
body of the World Meteorological Organization and UN Environment Programme.
Ever since the IPCC in 1990 began releasing
its assessments every five or six years, the panel has become gradually wiser,
with its projected ocean-level increases
due to global warming on a continuing downward
slide.
From projecting in
the 1990s a 67-centimetre rise in
sea levels by the year 2100, the IPCC has progressively whittled down that
projection by nearly half to 38.5 centimetres now. Should the world be worried
by the potential rise of the oceans by 38.5 centimetres within the next 100 years? You bet. We need to slow down
such a rise. But if a rise of 38.5 centimetres does occur, will it mean catastrophe?
Not really.
If the world
didn’t even notice a nearly 20-centimetre rise of sea levels in the past century, a slow 38.5-centimetre ascent of
the oceans cannot be worse than the tsunami that struck the Indian
Ocean region in late
2004. Yet the climate-change scaremongering
has picked up steam — “the Maldives
would be wiped out,” “the Netherlands
would be under water,” “millions would have to flee Shanghai.”
Politicizing technical data only distorts reality. It also
makes it harder to work out a realistic response to a serious challenge. This
is especially so as the world has swung from one extreme to the other over
global warming: from indifference, if not neglect, to such unease among
some that conjuring up worst-case
scenarios has become a rage. Even as dire predictions proliferate, the IPCC’s
own 2007 estimates of the likely temperature increases
and heat waves owing to climate
change have changed little from its previous calculations in 2001.
Yet another facet
of the current geopolitics is that the term, climate change, is being stretched to embrace environmental degradation
unrelated to the effects of the build-up of greenhouse gases and aerosol concentrations in the atmosphere. What has climate change to do
with reckless land use, overgrazing,
contamination of water resources, overuse
of groundwater, inefficient or
environmentally unsustainable
irrigation systems, waste mismanagement or the destruction of forests,
mangroves and other natural habitats? Some of these actions, of course, may
contribute to climate variation but they do not arise from global warming.
Climate
change is being turned into a convenient, blame-all phenomenon. As if to
exculpate governments for reckless development and feign helplessness, all
environmental degradation is being
expediently hitched to climate change.
There
is danger that like the once-fashionable concept of human security, climate
change could become too diffused in
its meaning and thereby deflect international focus from tackling
growing fossil-fuel combustion, the
main source of man-made greenhouse
gases. Just as Britain
is now pushing the climate-change issue,
Canada
put human security on the Security Council agenda during
its Council presidency in February
1999. But by the time that concept was fleshed out by the UNDP, Human Security
Commission and UN Secretary-General in
succession, human security had become so broad and inclusive
as to loose its focus.
There is need
for greater clarity not only on the human causation of climate change, but also
on what we mean by “green.” There are countries that environmentally protect
their national territories in a good
way, only to treat the atmosphere as a municipal dump. In fact, states that
boast of high environmental standards, sadly, tend also to be high per-capita
emitters of greenhouse gases. Environmental-protection standards have to include respect for the atmosphere.
Jumping on the
green bandwagon may be becoming
politically chic, but often it entails little more than lip service to climate
security. Even the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), set up under the 1997
Kyoto Protocol, has accomplished little more than providing
a greener reputation to some states and their greenhouse gases-spewing enterprises.
Under this mechanism, rich countries install
climate-friendly technology in poor
countries in return for securing carbon credits to exceed their own emission
targets. Such credits are traded in
an open cross-border secondary market where polluting
industries can buy them to offset
their emission levels or sell them when prices move up. The result has been the
emergence of a network transferring
to rich countries the emission rights of poor states in
a system of carbon colonialism.
Environmental grandstanding in the form of “cap and trade” only belittles the grim
challenge of climate change. What is needed is not a CDM-style re-jiggering of emission rights, but an across-the-board global
reduction in carbon-dioxide emissions.
If counteraction, however, is turned into
a burden-sharing drill among states,
we will fail because distributing
“burden” is a doomed exercise. Neither citizens in
rich states are going to lower their
living standards by cutting energy use, nor will poor nations sacrifice
economic growth, especially because their per-capita C0² emissions
are still just one-fifth the level of the developed world.
Instead of expending
political capital to securitize climate change, we need to find ways to address the energy dilemma. Given that global
warming is a natural corollary to
how we produce or use energy, climate change is actually the wrong end of the
problem to look at. About 80 per cent of the world’s energy still comes from
fossil fuels.
What is needed is a new political dynamic that is not about burden-sharing but about opportunity centred on radically
different energy policies. This means not only a focus on renewable energy and
greater efficiency, but also a more-urgent programme of research and
development on alternative fuels and carbon-sequestration
technologies. Technology may offer salvation.
© Asian Age, 2007
Nuclear Winter
India should blame itself for its dashed
expectations
Brahma
Chellaney
The Times of India, May 2, 2007
With the
vaunted Indo-US nuclear deal floundering,
the world’s two biggest democracies have begun to blame each other. While the still-continuing
negotiations, as symbolized by Foreign Secretary Shivshankar Menon’s Washington visit this week, outwardly suggest the deal
can still be salvaged, New Delhi now admits it will not get in practice what the original
accord had promised in principle — the
rights of “a responsible state with advanced nuclear technology”, and “full
civil nuclear cooperation”. Indeed, America’s message has become plain: like it or lump it.
If the deal has shaped up in
a way that it condemns India
to second-class status and links
restrictive civil cooperation to assorted good-behaviour conditions in perpetuity, New Delhi
bears more blame than Washington. While America never hid its non-proliferation aim to see
India’s nuclear-weapons
capability crimped, New Delhi entered the deal
with remarkable naiveté, with Parliament being
assured that the nation would get the “same benefits and advantages as the US”.
India actually slipped at the very
outset, when it hurriedly embraced the US-drafted deal on July 18, 2005 without
fully grasping the significance of
its phraseology. For one, the accord committed India to identify and separate
civilian “nuclear facilities and programmes” for external inspection, when the only issue discussed until then
was about “power reactors”. For another, it held New Delhi
to a “unilateral” nuclear-test moratorium, when India’s commitment had been to a
“voluntary” suspension.
As a result of these boo-boos, India was
forced to identify not only 14 power reactors for permanent inspection, but also 21 heavy-water,
fuel-fabrication and research facilities, besides agreeing
to shut down its Cirus plutonium-production reactor. The US, citing its domestic law, such as the Arms Export
Control Act where “unilateral” commitment is defined,
now insists that India, on the pain of punishment, lose its right to resume testing and that it adhere to the Missile Technology
Control Regime (MTCR) “unilaterally” while remaining a prime target of MTCR.
India slipped again
when the US
began legalizing its demands. Instead
of making it loud and clear that India
won’t allow its pledges to be expanded or stripped of their voluntary quality and turned into irrevocable obligations through the means of US
legislation, the deal-pushers in New
Delhi elatedly cheered
on every congressional move, to the extent that special envoy Shyam Saran joined US Undersecretary Nick Burns in Paris to hail the House committee bill as “a
great job” done. When the conditions-laden Hyde Act was finally
enacted, the same cheerleaders spun reality to meretriciously claim that Indian obligations
would flow only from the bilateral “123 agreement”.
Now the chickens have come home to roost. With the US insisting on incorporating some of the Hyde Act’s egregious provisions in the 123 accord, New Delhi has had to drop its blinkers. The US
wants the right to cut off all cooperation and secure the return of transferred
items if India, in Washington’s estimation, fails
to live up to the prescribed non-proliferation conditions. It also wishes to expressly
block India
from breaking out of safeguards
obligations even if fuel supplies were suspended or terminated.
Had the US not sought such terms,
New Delhi would
still have pretended that the Hyde Act provisions didn’t matter.
While India
cannot allow itself to be railroaded into
accepting an adverse 123 accord, the
legal sanctity of such an agreement has to be seen against
the fact that it won’t have the status of an international
treaty under the Vienna Convention. Yet, from the American standpoint, the 123 agreement — a requirement under US law
— has to be consistent with the Hyde Act and Atomic Energy Act, especially
because it has to go before Congress for ratification. When India ought to
have spoken up, it snuggled into a
hallucinatory loop of delusion. Now when the US seeks to follow up on the Hyde Act, India cries
foul.
Think of an opposite
scenario: a 123 agreement that incorporates
none of the Hyde Act provisions. Would that really free India from the Act’s
oppressive demands? Not really. The Hyde Act lays down conditions independent of and in
relation to the 123 accord. The Act also defines the conditions for India in
the other processes with the International Atomic Energy Agency and Nuclear
Suppliers’ Group.
As an auxiliary arrangement under US law defining the technical rules of nuclear commerce, no 123
agreement — however diplomatically worded — can release India from the Hyde Act’s obligations.
An earlier 123 accord over Tarapur, signed in
1963, was abandoned by Washington in 1978 simply by enacting
a new domestic law that retroactively overrode the bilateral pact. That broke with
impunity a guarantee to provide “timely” fuel “as needed” for Tarapur. Today, India can’t get
a similar lifetime fuel-supply guarantee even on paper, thanks to the Hyde Act,
which also bars reprocessing and
enrichment cooperation. The US currently
has 23 different 123 agreements with partner-states but none is tied to such an
overarching, country-specific
domestic law.
Instead of blaming Washington, New Delhi ought to reflect
on its own mistakes. And consider itself lucky that it can still disentangle
itself with little damage to its interests.
Now both sides ought to ensure that what was hyped as an epoch-making deal does not unravel in
a way to embitter bilateral ties.
The writer is a security affairs
analyst.
The Drag of a Dragon
Brahma Chellaney
© Asian Age, April 21, 2007
Coonoor, Tamil Nadu, India
Yet another round of India-China border talks begins today in what is a 26-year saga of unending negotiations that of late are acquiring an even more laid-back spirit. Breaking the monotony of alternate meetings in New Delhi and Beijing, the two countries’ “special representatives” now confer in holiday hideaways, which have ranged from Kumarakom and Khajuraho in India to Xian in China. The latest meeting is in the hill station of Coonoor, in the Nilgiris.
As if to publicize that India offers more exotic retreats than China, the Indian government is generously hosting a second consecutive round of talks. It will be remarkable if the Coonoor talks conclude in any way different from the houseboat diplomacy on the Kerala backwaters of Kumarakom — with warm handshakes, a statement applauding the “open, friendly, cooperative and constructive atmosphere,” and a promise to meet again. If stunning Khajuraho, Xian and Kumarakom failed to lift the talks to a higher plane, rugged Coonoor is unlikely to invigorate a wilting process.
It has been almost 45 years since Mao Zedong’s regime launched a military invasion of India that led Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru — the world’s best-known panda-hugger until then — to make a national broadcast denouncing China as a “powerful and unscrupulous opponent.” That surprise aggression, and the ignominy it inflicted on the Indian state, followed the consolidation of Chinese hold over Tibet and three years of calculated efforts by Beijing to dispute the Tibetan frontier with India.
When the People’s Liberation Army had marched hundreds of miles south to annex independent Tibet and nibble at Indian areas, this, in Beijing’s eyes, was neither an expansionist nor forward policy. But when the outgunned and outmanned Indian army belatedly sought to set up posts along the mountain frontier to discourage further Chinese encroachments, Beijing and its friends dubbed it a provocative “forward policy” and proceeded to employ it as a rationalization for the attack.
Decades later, the Himalayan frontier is peaceful, but India and China are still not separated by a mutually defined frontline. Worse, the wounds of that war have been kept open by China’s publicly assertive claims to Indian territories, including some areas it overran in 1962, only to move back quickly so as not to overstretch its tenuous logistic and communication lines.
The invasion established firm Chinese control over the Aksai Chin plateau, with the ejection of Indian forces from the area of the Karakoram Pass, Pangong and Spanggur Lakes and Demchok. In NEFA (now Arunachal Pradesh), Beijing’s first offer, after the PLA advanced up to 65 kilometres into India, was for both sides to pull back 20 kilometres from the “line of actual control,” which it had refused to define — and which to this day it remains averse to delimit. While the PLA ultimately moved back to the McMahon Line in 1962, Beijing is still loath to exchange maps with India of the main sectors — the eastern and the western — so that the ambiguities plaguing the line of control are purged. In the western sector, China actually maintains an outer and inner line of control.
All in all, the ongoing process of border negotiations since 1981 redounds to China’s credit but not to India’s. There are three main reasons for this.
● First, a long, barren but continuing process chimes with the Chinese interest to keep India under strategic pressure. In assiduously seeking to drag out the negotiations indefinitely, Beijing is following the principle, “negotiate to engage the other side, not to reach accord.” This principle dovetails with China’s broader two-pronged strategy to present a friendly face while building up its power-projection force capability through military, economic and diplomatic means.
Rich in symbolism, the talks continue to be woefully short of progress on specific issues. Not only has there been little movement on reaching a settlement on the large chunks of territories in dispute, but also India and China remain the world’s only neighbours without a defined frontline. Their 4,057-kilometre frontier represents neither a line of “actual” control nor even a mutually agreed line in maps.
The Manmohan Singh-Hu Jintao joint declaration of last November committed India and China to pursue a “10-pronged strategy.” But in accordance with Beijing’s wishes, the declaration merely cited the need for an “early settlement of outstanding issues,” including “the boundary question,” without putting it among the strategy’s top five prongs. Instead of good fences making good neighbours, China believes that disputed fences help keep India in check.
● Second, China persuaded India in 2003 to shift from the practical task of clarifying the frontline to the abstract mission of developing “principles,” “concepts” and “framework” for a border settlement. This shift was designed to release Beijing from its commitment in 2001 to exchange maps with India of first the western sector and then of the eastern sector — a pledge it had already breached by missing the mutually agreed deadlines.
The fact is that the contours of a possible settlement have been known for long — a simple trade-off involving India foregoing its claims to territories it has lost to China, in return for Beijing’s abandonment of its claims to Indian-held areas. It was clear at the outset that an exercise to define “principles” and “concepts” would, at best, be academic — contributing little to settlement prospects — and, at worst, diversionary, holding up progress.
As Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee admitted at the Japan Institute of International Affairs in Tokyo last month, India and China have yet to reach agreement on “substantive” issues. Indeed, no sooner had the two countries identified six “guiding principles” in 2005 for a border settlement, including “due consideration to each other’s strategic and reasonable interests” and “safeguard due interests of settled populations in the border areas,” than Beijing scoffed at those very principles by publicly renewing its claim to Arunachal Pradesh, including Tawang.
Given its vantage point, China in unwilling to settle on the basis of the status quo. It knows no Indian government can cede even a slice of Arunachal, yet it persists with its egregious territorial claims with a twofold objective: to up the ante against India, and to keep progress at bay. By redirecting the process from frontline clarification to the enunciation of principles, and then cynically reinterpreting the agreed principles, Beijing, however, has laid bare its intentions.
● Third, India has sadly retreated to a more and more defensive position, bringing itself under greater Chinese pressure. Nobody is suggesting India adopt an aggressive posture. But if New Delhi is to engage Beijing on equal terms, the latter cannot have a monopoly on outrageous territorial claims that it pitchforks into the negotiations agenda to put the ball in India’s court and stall progress.
Far from adopting a nuanced position on the core issue, Tibet, to gain leverage, India continues to be excessively cautious and obliging in its diplomacy, arming Beijing with an open licence to demand more. It is bad enough that the Indian public is discovering after more than a quarter-century of border talks that China is unwilling to settle on the basis of the status quo. It is worse when India countenances such intransigence by opening negotiations on Chinese claims, however preposterous.
Nothing better illustrates this than the separate statements earlier this year of two capable and level-headed officials — Pranab Mukherjee and National Security Adviser M.K. Narayanan — that because China lays claim to Tawang, that issue is on the agenda to find a final border resolution. The truth is that the Chinese claims epitomize a classical pursuit of incremental territorial expansion, with Beijing citing not any Han connection to Arunachal/Tawang but purported Tibetan ecclesiastical ties. India today militarily is a far cry from 1962, when the Chinese invaders poured through the mountain passes in a three-pronged drive that decimated the Indian brigade in Tawang. Yet it is no small irony today that Tibet’s exiled god-king says Tawang is part of India while New Delhi discusses Tawang with China in the border talks.
World history testifies that a border settlement has rarely been arrived at on the basis of the status quo when the more powerful party is overtly revisionist. It is only when both sides seek to alter the existing territorial control that a resolution respecting the status quo becomes possible.
Pitted against status quoist India are two irredentist regional adversaries. And because India has not sought to build and exploit counter-leverage, the advantage in negotiations tends to lie with these neighbours. The Sino-Indian negotiations have brought out in sharp relief that New Delhi’s acquiescence to China’s annexation of Tibet has come to haunt it, as Chinese claims on Indian territories are predicated on their alleged links with Tibet.
As the special representatives meet amidst tea plantations in Coonoor, their dialogue has gone from the agreed-but-now-contested guiding principles to another ethereal task — “finalizing an appropriate framework for a final package settlement.” Given that they are still discussing conceptual, not concrete, issues, the special envoys are likely to run out of new exotic retreats for their meetings even before they get to negotiate any real settlement package.
A periodic treat for the special representatives, in any event, cannot substitute for progress. Indeed such stagecraft hardly honours the memory of the 3,270 Indian army men killed by the Chinese invaders in 1962. What India needs is high-quality statecraft to ensure that no prime minister will tell the nation what Nehru did in 1962 — that China returned “evil for good.” The 32-day invasion in 1962 lasted longer than the 1965 and 1971 wars with Pakistan and claimed the lives of more Indian soldiers than any other aggression faced by India since independence, with the exception of 1971.
The border-talks process has yielded what it could — an agreement to maintain peace, tranquillity and stability along the Indo-Tibetan frontier, and the initiation of modest military-to-military cooperation. The process offers little more. Staying put in a sterile, everlasting process cannot become an end in itself for India. Indeed it only emboldens China to be publicly intractable and pugnaciously revanchist. Indira Gandhi, who initiated the process, would be turning in her grave over the way the negotiations have lost their direction, with India playing into China’s game plan.
Copyright: Asian Age, 2007
By Brahma Chellaney
RUSI Journal, April 2007, Vol. 152, No. 2
Encompassing the area from Afghanistan to the Indo-Burma frontiers and from Tibet to Sri Lanka, southern Asia is home to more than one-fifth of the human race, many of whom reside in low-lying areas. Three broad conclusions can be drawn: water issues are likely to aggravate intra- and inter-state tensions; rising sea levels are likely to spur intra- and inter-state migration; and human security is likely to be a casualty of climate change.
The world is headed towards greater climate change during the twenty-first century unless greenhouse gas emissions decrease substantially from present levels of increase and unless the general environmental degradation decelerates significantly. The degree and pace of future climate change flowing from human causation will naturally hinge on:
(i) The extent of the increase of greenhouse gases and aerosol concentrations;
(ii) The impact of deforestation, land use, animal agriculture and other anthropogenic or human-driven factors on climate variation;
(iii) The impact of natural influences (including from volcanic activity and changes in the sun’s intensity) on climate variation; and
(iv) The extent to which temperature, precipitation, sea level and other climatic features react to changes in greenhouse-gas emissions, aerosol concentrations and other elements in the atmosphere.
Climate change is a worldwide phenomenon, and its ramifications cannot be analyzed in isolation in the context of any one region. Climate change, however, will carry varied security implications for different regions, depending on their geography, population density and state capacity, as well as the extent to which environmental degradation has occurred. It is in this context that the security-related implications of climate change for southern Asia are sought to be examined.
Climate Change in Southern Asia
Encompassing the area from Afghanistan to the Indo-Burma frontiers and from Tibet to Sri Lanka, southern Asia is home to more than one-fifth of the human race. Not only is it one of the most densely-populated regions of the world, but it also has low-lying countries like Bangladesh and the Maldives, whose survival could be threatened by a rise in sea levels resulting from an increase in the Earth’s average temperature. It faces scorching summer heat, and a rise of even two degrees Celsius average temperature could cause environmental harm to human, plant and animal habitat.
The smallest country in Asia in terms of population, the Maldives, has the distinction of being the flattest state in the world – except where the level has been raised through construction, the ground level in the Maldives rises up to only 2.3 metres above sea level. When the Christmas of 2004 brought the tsunami to the Indian Ocean region, unfolding a disaster of epic proportions, the Maldives, although located far from the epicentre, suffered extensive damage. Many of its twenty-six atolls were savagely pummelled by the tsunami, which inundated parts of the archipelago. The tsunami altered the contours of some of the 1,192 Maldivian islets, less than a tenth of which are populated. Actually, the Maldives had already lost some territory over the past century earlier due to the slow increase in sea levels by as much as twenty centimetres.
In sharp contrast to the Maldives in southern Asia is the large, densely-populated Bangladesh, still struggling on the margins of globalization. Bangladesh is double the size of Germany in terms of population. In fact, it has overtaken Russia as the seventh most populous state in the world. Excluding island nations and city states, Bangladesh ranks as the world’s most densely-peopled country. Even in terms of its landmass, Bangladesh, with its 144,000-square-kilometre area, is anything but a small country. Essentially a delta state through which two of Asia’s great rivers — the Ganges and Brahmaputra — flow into the Bay of Bengal, Bangladesh is ravaged every year by monsoon floods and, from time to time, by cyclones.
There are also other parts of southern Asia that are low-lying. They include coastal Sri Lanka, the Andaman and Nicobar Island chain of India and parts of the southern Indian coast. Next-door Indonesia has hundreds of vulnerable, low-lying islands.
Environmental degradation has continued unchecked in southern Asia, creating major problems relating to water resources, for example. Coupled with rapid urbanization, such degradation has already contributed to raising summer temperatures in major cities. While the magnitude of future climatic changes is difficult to predict, higher greenhouse gas concentrations are likely to influence precipitation and temperature patterns in southern Asia, as well as potentially raise sea levels.
The challenges that confront southern Asia mirror the larger environmental issues that face Asia as a whole. Other than Japan, Asian states in general are doing poorly in reconciling development with environmental protection. In China, for example, ever-rising sand squalls not only blanket Beijing and other northern Chinese cities, but also threaten to speed up the spread of barren wasteland to the heartland. The desert’s advance from the arid northwest has been aided by government-led irrigated farming that has diverted water resources from the region’s ecological lifeline — the Shiyang River and its offshoots — and thereby left other land open to desertification. Respect for the environment and better management of natural resources are notions still not embraced actively by governments in Asia.
Asia is already facing a fresh-water crisis, with several hundred million Asians lacking ready access to drinking water. The geopolitical importance of Tibet, whose forcible absorption brought the new Chinese state to the borders of India, can be seen from the fact that most of the great Asian rivers originate there. If the demand for water in Asia continues to grow at the current rate, the inter-state and intra-state disputes over water resources could potentially turn into conflicts in the years ahead.
Deforestation, overgrazing, poor management of river basins and inefficient irrigation systems have aggravated fresh-water scarcity, with contamination also limiting access to clean water. To fight poverty, disease and pollution, southern Asia needs both to augment its water supplies through better distribution and management of resources and to improve its sanitation services. After all, clean water is the key to good health. However, the growing use of subterranean supplies of groundwater in southern and south-eastern Asia as well as China, due to inadequate availability of surface water, threatens to accelerate environmental degradation.
Large rapidly-developing economies like India and China, with their growing demands for resources, including energy and water, are bound to add pressure to the global ecosystems. Their growth trajectories will impact on efforts to slow down environmental degradation and global climate change. According to a 2005 estimate by China’s State Environment Protection Agency, 70 per cent of the water in five of the country’s seven major river systems is too contaminated for human use. Pollution of rivers is also a major problem in India, Bangladesh, Nepal and Pakistan. Drinking-water supply in major southern Asian cities tends to be unfit for human consumption. Additionally, most cities report scarcity of water supply.
One key anthropogenic factor in Asia altering the environment and causing climate change is the increase in carbon dioxide levels due to emissions from fossil-fuel combustion. Coal will remain for the foreseeable future the dominant fuel for generating electricity in India and China. That is no different from the United States, which already has more than 600 coal-fired electric plants in operation and another 140 under planned or actual construction. Coal makes up 64 per cent of China’s primary energy consumption, with that country being the largest producer and consumer of coal in the world. In India, coal accounts for nearly 50 per cent of primary energy consumption.
China, which is currently completing one new coal-fired electric plant every month, has already emerged as the world’s second largest emitter of greenhouse gases, after the United States. China, however, remains far behind America, which, with just over 4.5 per cent of the world’s population, discharges nearly a quarter — 24 per cent — of all emissions of carbon dioxide, according to the World Bank’s Little Green Data Book 2006.[1] According to the US Environmental Protection Agency, about 6.6 metric tonnes of greenhouse gases are emitted per person in America, placing that country number one in the world in terms of per capita emissions.
China and India at present rank much lower as per capita emitters of greenhouse gases. Yet such is their growing fossil-fu combustion that the International Energy Agency reported in November 2006 that China could surpass the United States as the world’s largest emitter of carbon dioxide by 2009, more than a full decade earlier than anticipated. Despite the emerging accent on renewable sources of energy as well as on commercial nuclear power, there is little prospect, however, of the world coming out of the fossil-fuel age.
A pressing imperative in southern Asia and China is to raise environmental standards through state support and enforcement. The environmental problems have been underscored by the growing air pollution, contamination of water, waste mismanagement, and the destruction of forests, mangroves and other natural habitats. Tellingly, the tsunami wreaked destruction with a vengeance on beaches that had been cleared of mangroves for development.
The November 2006 Stern report, commissioned by the British government, has rightly pointed to the need for the rapidly developing countries, such as China and India, to be part of a global effort to tackle the problem of climate change, even though the main responsibility (as it admits) lies with rich nations that must act now to start reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. Researchers from the US Department of Energy have reported in the Geophysical Research Letters that China’s skies have darkened over the past fifty years, possibly due to haze resulting from a nine-fold increase in fossil-fuel emissions, and that the amount of solar radiation measured at more than 500 stations in China actually fell between 1954 and 2001, despite a decrease in cloud cover.[2]
The magnitude of future climate change, however, is uncertain and is likely to vary from area to area, and from coastal region to the hinterland. That makes it difficult to reach general conclusions on climate changes and their likely security implications in southern Asia. For example, several studies on the regional impact of climate change have shown that warming will be the least in the islands and coastal areas of the Indian subcontinent and the greatest in the inland continental areas of the subcontinent, except during the June to August monsoon period when reduced warming is likely to occur in the hinterland. The table below illustrates such a scenario:
| Temperature Change Scenarios for 2010 and 2070 (°Celsius) |
|
Year |
Region |
2010 |
2070 |
|
Coastal southern Asia | 0.1-0.5 | 0.4-3.0 | Inland southern Asia, but not in the summer monsoon months of June, July & August | 0.3-0.7 | 1.1-4.5 | Hinterland southern Asia from June to August | 0.1-0.3 | 0.4-2.0 |
|
Source: Whetton, 1994 | ||||||||||||
In examining rainfall scenarios, the impact of climate change has to be assessed on the two main rainfall seasons — the South-West Monsoon in the summer and the North-East Monsoon in the winter. Several studies, including by the Climate Impact Group (1992) and R. Suppiah (1994), report the likelihood that global warming could actually strengthen monsoon circulation and bring increased rainfall in both monsoon seasons.[3] Changes in non-monsoon, or dry-season, rainfall have been more difficult to assess.
Projections of regionally averaged changes in rainfall for the years 2010 and 2070 are given in this table:
| Rainfall Scenarios for 2010 and 2070 (% change) |
|
Region |
2010 |
2010 |
2070 |
2070 |
|
South-West Monsoon Region India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Philippines (western part), and Vietnam (except east coast) |
0 |
0 |
0 to 10 |
-10 to +10 |
North-East Monsoon Region Sri Lanka, India’s Tamil Nadu state, Indonesia, Philippines (east part), Vietnam (east coast) and Malaysia |
0 to -5 |
0 |
-5 to +15 |
0 to +10 |
South Asian Subregion (15-30°N; 65-95°E) |
0 to +10 |
-5 to +5 |
+5 to +50 |
-5 to +20 |
|
Source: Whetton, 1994 | ||||||||||||||||||||
The impact of climate change, however, can already be seen today. Winter 2006-07, for instance, was unusually mild in Tibet, ‘the roof of the world’, raising concerns about the accelerated melting of glaciers in the Himalayan region. Most major rivers of Asia originate in Tibet, including the Indus, the Brahmaputra, the Yangtze, the Yellow, the Mekong, the Salween, the Karnali and the Sutlej. China’s state press reported record high temperatures in Tibet in early January 2007. For example, in the Amdo area, in the north-east of traditional Tibet, the temperature on 5 January 2007 reached 21.8°C – 1.7 degrees higher than the record set for the same day in 1996. Meteorological data in Tibet began to be collected only in 1970.
The Tibetan plateau, seen as a barometer of climate conditions in southern and central Asia and in China, is experiencing, according to a January 2007 scientific survey quoted by the state-run People’s Daily, faster glacial melt and other ecological change. The survey, conducted by the Remote Sensing Department of the China Aero Geophysical Survey, warned that the Himalayan glaciers could be reduced by nearly a third by 2050 and up to half by 2090 at the current rate. The glacial melt, the survey reportedly went on to caution, would further deplete Tibet’s water resources — a lifeline for the peoples of southern Asia and China.
Part II of paper published in
RUSI Journal, April 2007, Vol. 152, No. 2
Larger Security Implications
Despite its grave long-term implications, climate change has aroused more international political passion than a concrete global response to meet the threat it poses. Whatever the form and content of the Kyoto Protocol’s successor, climate change needs to be tackled at multiple levels — international, regional and national. However, no region, in whatever way defined, can constitute a sufficient unit to tackle climate change. For example, given Tibet’s role as the central water source for southern Asia and China, the destinies of the Indian subcontinent and the People’s Republic are inextricably linked.
The potential impact of climate change on the availability of water resources is a critical component of the challenge that stares at Asia, which, as a whole, has less fresh water — 3,920 cubic metres per person — than any other continent outside of Antarctica, according to a 2006 United Nations report.[4] This report states, when the estimated reserves of lakes, rivers and groundwater are added up, Asia has marginally less water per person than Europe or Africa, one-quarter that of North America, nearly one-tenth that of South America and twenty times less than Australia and Pacific islands. Yet Asia is home to more than half of the human population.
The Himalayan glaciers that feed Asia’s largest rivers — the Ganges, Indus, Brahmaputra (Yarlung Tsampo), Mekong, Yangtze, Yellow and Sutlej — are clearly beginning to melt at a faster pace due to global warming. Glaciers are a natural storage system, releasing maximum water when it is most required — the hot summer months. The shrinking ice sheets, however, could threaten to seriously aggravate water imbalances and shortages in southern Asia and China. Additionally, as the melting accelerates, this phenomenon also threatens to cause extensive flooding in India and Bangladesh, followed by a reduction in river flows.
In southern Asia, climate changes are likely to bring about important shifts in temperature and rainfall patterns, a rise in sea levels, and a rise in the frequency and intensity of anomalous weather events, such as cyclones, flooding and droughts. These trends, cumulatively, would play havoc with agriculture (on which a majority of the national populations subsist) and also impact on hydropower generation and conservation strategies. The weaker the economic and social base and higher the reliance on natural resources, the more a community will be adversely affected by climate change. In other words, the poorer parts of southern Asia, including Bangladesh, Nepal and Indian states like Assam and Bihar, are likely to bear the brunt.
While it is scientifically not possible to predict future events with any degree of certainty, a linear projection of ongoing climate changes can help us to draw some reasonable conclusions, with the aim of controlling anthropogenic factors contributing to climate change and to examine possible new practices and strategies whereby communities could be helped to adapt to the changes in ways that minimize the impact of climate change. In southern Asia, three broad conclusions can be drawn on the security implications of climate change:
(1) Given the region’s heavy dependence both on the glacially sourced water reserves of the Himalayas and on monsoon precipitation, climate changes are likely to intensify inter-state and intra-state conflicts in southern Asia over water issues. That, in turn, could exacerbate or re-open disputes over territories that are either the original source of water or through which major rivers flow, such as Tibet and Jammu and Kashmir.
(2) Sea-level rise and frequency of extreme weather events like hurricanes, droughts and monsoonal or cyclonic flooding are likely to spur greater inter-state and intra-state migration — especially of the poor and the vulnerable — from delta and coastal regions to the hinterland. Such an influx of outsiders would socially swamp inland areas, upsetting the existing fragile ethnic balance and provoking a backlash that strains internal and regional security. For example, India, officially home to sixteen million illegal Bangladeshi settlers, could see an influx of tens of millions of more Bangladeshis crossing over an international border too porous to patrol effectively. More broadly, the political stability and internal cohesion of nations could be undermined.
(3) Human security probably would be the main casualty of climate change. Social and economic disparities are likely to intensify within the nation states of southern Asia as climatic change delivers a bigger blow to certain sectors of the economy, particularly agriculture, and to low-lying coastal and delta areas. That will make the tasks of good governance and sustainable development more onerous.
Conflicts over Water Resources
Hundreds of millions of people in southern and south-eastern Asia and China are without access to safe drinking water. This situation would aggravate markedly if current projections of climate change come true. Loss of meltwater from rapidly thawing glaciers could drive, for example, large numbers of subsistence farmers into Indian and Chinese cities.
Inter-state and intra-state disputes over water resources are already an observable fact in southern Asia. While the Baglihar Dam epitomizes the latest India-Pakistan river water-sharing disagreement — which resulted in World Bank arbitration and the appointment of a neutral expert, who gave his final report in February 2007 largely in New Delhi’s favour — the intra-state disputes are illustrated by the row within Pakistan over Punjab’s appropriation of water resources to the detriment of downstream Sindh and Baluchistan, and by the various wrangles in India — between the states of Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Kerala, Punjab and Haryana, Punjab and Rajasthan, and Uttar Pradesh and Delhi.
Southern Asia’s vulnerability to climate changes has been highlighted by its heavy dependence on the precipitation of an unpredictable monsoon and on river waters sourced from the glacier thaw in the mighty Himalayas. Climate change is bound to impact both on monsoon precipitation and on the availability of Himalayan water resources. As a result, profound socio-economic changes are likely to be triggered, for which the region is ill-prepared.
If water becomes both an underlying factor in inter-state tensions and increasingly a scarce and precious commodity domestically, water wars will inevitably follow in southern Asia. Pakistan depends on rivers flowing in from Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir, although none originate there. Today, India controls only 45 per cent of the original state of Jammu and Kashmir, with Pakistan holding 35 per cent of it and China the remaining 20 per cent. But the part India holds has the Indus and its tributaries flowing into Pakistani-administered territories. Hard-line forces in Pakistan — the Islamists and the ruling military — have sought to keep the Kashmir issue alive by linking Islamabad’s desire to change the territorial status quo to the control of rivers that are the lifeblood of Pakistan.
The 1960 Indus Waters Treaty — a generous pact on India’s part — reserves 56 per cent of the catchment flow for Pakistan, with India getting the remainder flow. The treaty gives India the right to build hydroelectric plants on the three rivers reserved for Pakistan so long as they do not change the water flow downstream into Pakistan. The treaty has not only survived wars and crises, but also has enabled both countries to build extensive canal systems for irrigation. Although the treaty is open-ended, India could be tempted to seek its re-negotiation on less generous terms, if climate changes exacerbate its own water and power shortages. Unilateral abrogation, of course, would trigger political turmoil.
Water resources also remain the crux of the spotlight on Tibet. China has created unease in India over persistent reports that it plans to divert the fast-flowing Brahmaputra River northwards to feed the arid areas in the Chinese heartland and to generate power. Beijing, however, has acknowledged that it is damming the Sutlej River in Tibet, but claimed that the dam is intended not to divert water northwards but to generate electricity. The Chinese project has been blamed for causing flash floods downstream in India’s Himachal Pradesh state.
The Tibetan plateau’s geopolitical importance is evident from the fact that Tibet, in the shape and size it existed independently up to 1950, comprises approximately one fourth of China’s land mass today, and has given Han China, for the first time in history, a contiguous border with Burma, India, Bhutan, Nepal and Kashmir. Just twelve years after the Sino-Indian military frontiers met for the first time in history, China invaded India after consolidating its hold over the Tibetan plateau.
Tibet’s annexation also gave China access to the vast mineral wealth and water resources there. As China’s hunger for primary commodities has grown, so too has its exploitation of Tibet’s resources. The $6.2 billion China-Tibet railway from Gormu to Lhasa, while making more vulnerable the fragile ecology of Tibet, aids the mineral exploitation of the Tibetan plateau, besides strengthening China’s hold on Tibet. With more Han settlers coming into Tibet, the trend towards Tibet’s Sinicization and the economic marginalization of its native people has only accelerated. Yet China has failed to win over the Tibetan people, whose struggle for self-rule remains a model non-violent resistance movement. Climate change will only add to Tibet’s geopolitical weight, and help focus more international attention on that high plateau where the average altitude is more than 13,000 feet.
The water resource-related changes in southern Asia will necessitate the region’s adaptation to alternatives based on newer technologies and methods. Given that the region will inescapably have to reduce its reliance on the natural bounty of the Himalayas as temperatures rise and the glacier melt accelerates, efficient rain-water harvesting will have to be embraced. The silver lining for the region is that the rise in temperatures under enhanced greenhouse conditions will actually bring more rainfall through the South-West and South-East Monsoon in the summer and the North-East Monsoon in the winter. The monsoonal bounty thus would need to be tapped through cost-effective technologies to provide a practical answer to the challenges arising from dwindling Himalayan river waters.
The Potential Threat from Mass Migration
The economically disruptive effects of sea-level rise and extreme weather events are likely to lead to stepped-up inter-state and intra-state migration, as those displaced are forced to relocate inland. The rise of temperature, coupled with potential greater water scarcity in the non-monsoonal seasons, would hit agriculture, irrespective of the farmland’s proximity to or distance from the sea. Given that the agricultural sector is the major source of employment, jobs in the countryside will not be easy to come by for migrants who are compelled to move into the hinterland due to loss of their agricultural land and production. That might only encourage mass influx into the already-crowded cities in southern Asia.
The threat to Bangladesh’s survival that climate change poses has serious implications for India’s security. After all, India’s own well-being depends on Bangladesh’s well-being. If Bangladeshis are compelled to migrate in increasingly larger numbers to India, the latter’s national security will take a severe beating. Existing refugee flows from an ever-more Islamized and radicalized Bangladesh are already beginning to seriously undermine social stability in India, making it more difficult for the government to consolidate internal cohesion and safeguard security.
Not many outsiders realize that Bangladesh, without expanding its political borders, has expanded ethnically. As brought out by the 2001 Indian census figures, the Indian districts all round Bangladesh have become Bangladeshi-majority areas. The demographic and social features of the entire western part of India’s Assam state, for example, have changed as a consequence of the influx of Bengali-speaking, predominantly Muslim refugees from Bangladesh. It is perhaps the first time in modern history that a country has expanded its ethnic frontiers without expanding its political borders. In contrast, Han China’s demographic onslaught on Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang and Tibet was a consequence of the expansion of its political frontiers.
For India, the ethnic expansion of Bangladesh beyond its political borders not only sets up enduring trans-border links, but also makes New Delhi’s already-complex task of border management more burdensome at a time when Bangladesh is emerging as a haven for jihadist groups. Given the artificial borders between India and Bangladesh, even half a million Indian troops deployed along those frontiers cannot plug every porous line bringing refugees or terrorists into India. Now, with ethnically and even religiously similar populations on both sides of the borders, it has become more arduous for border troops to stop the illicit smuggling of human beings, narcotics, etc.
As a country surrounded by the Indian landmass on three sides, Bangladesh has a unique geography. To help advance its own interests, India needs to become a major stakeholder in Bangladesh’s economic well-being and security. This imperative has been underlined by the way Islamist forces and extremist groups have continued to gain ground in Bangladesh. The growth of extremism in Bangladesh is a complex phenomenon, and a dysfunctional democracy made matters worse. India cannot shape developments within Bangladesh, but it can try to be a positive influence. India has to deal with the situation in Bangladesh in strategic terms, with a long-term approach.
If Bangladesh’s radicalization and political turmoil were to continue, India’s security will be very seriously undermined by hostile elements operating out of Bangladesh. A Bangladesh that sinks deeper in extremism and fundamentalism will be a serious geopolitical headache for India. But a Bangladesh from where the refugee flows become a torrent will be a geopolitical nightmare for India.
Intra-state migration in India resulting from climate change could itself weaken internal cohesion and undermine security.
Human Insecurity Arising from Climate Change
The biggest threat from climate change is to human security, with the poorest being the most vulnerable. The national security of no state can endure growing human insecurity. The impact of climate variability on society will mean change in the social-economic-political environments on which the security of individuals, communities and states rest. Climate change thus needs to be elevated beyond the scientific discourse to a national security issue in India and the other states of southern Asia.
As it is, disparities are widening in southern Asia, despite high GDP growth rates. The growing inequity in southern Asia, and Asia as a whole, has been shown by the United Nations Development Programme’s annual Human Development Report. The report measures inequality on the basis of the ‘gini index’ instead of the ‘gini coefficient’. A gini-index value of 0 represents perfect equality and a value of 100 perfect inequality.
What the report brings out is that, with perhaps the sole exception of Japan, Asian states are becoming increasingly inequitable in terms of distribution of income. Such states even include the three Asian nations still under communist rule — China, Vietnam and Laos. These three one-party states, where income inequalities were narrow not long ago, now measure 44.7, 37.0 and 37.0 respectively on the gini index. With a score of 32.5, India, surprisingly, comes out better than all the three communist-ruled states and even Singapore.[5]
Yet the spreading Maoist rural insurgency in the poorest districts of India at a time when the country is economically booming is a testament to the costs of growing inequalities. The ragtag bands of rebels wish to supplant Indian parliamentary democracy with a proletariat dictatorship inspired by Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book. In fact, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has gone to the extent of declaring Maoist violence as the ‘single biggest security challenge ever faced by our country’. The high incidence of malnutrition among children in some Indian states, particularly Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh, illustrates why India needs to focus on inclusive growth.
A nation can ignore the need for inclusive growth only at its own peril, given the likely climate change scenarios. Climate change will impact on human vulnerability, and thus on human security. Disruption arising from climate change will seriously intensify human security challenges and affect broader national security. Therefore, postponing difficult choices to a more difficult future is not prudent policy.
States and communities will need to innovate and manage under a new, climate change driven paradigm. Building greater institutional and organizational capacity will become necessary, along with developing efficient water-resource management in the dry seasons, early warning systems and preparedness, and new farm varieties.
Concluding Observation
Rising sea levels, increasing weather extremes, change in rainfall pattern, disruption of safe-drinking water sources and water scarcities in non-monsoonal months pose serious risks to social and political harmony in southern Asia. Such trends are also likely to influence the vector of disease control and potentially create major public health challenges in this region and beyond. But, as even hurricane Katrina highlighted in New Orleans, it will be the poor who will be the hit the hardest. Furthermore, the impact of climate change will extend beyond human civilization to southern Asia’s exceptionally rich plant and animal world. Today’s endangered species could become extinct tomorrow.
Meeting the challenges posed by climate change, therefore, demands that sustained efforts begin now. That, in turn, means switching to a more climate-friendly path in development and energy needs. The only sure path to energy security, in any event, lies through renewable sources of energy. Renewables also offer clean energy.
For the foreseeable future, however, coal will continue to play a major role in meeting the electricity needs in southern Asia and China. However, India, China and other states need to embrace cleaner technologies, like coal gasification, that hold immense promise to cut down emissions of carbon dioxide and other pollutants contributing to acid rain, smog and respiratory illness. These newer technologies focus on carbon-capture methods, whether in pulverized coal plants (which grind coal into a dust before burning it to make electricity) or in ‘integrated gasification combined cycle’, or IGCC, plants (which convert coal into a gas that is burned to produce energy). High oil and gas prices are also making the clean coal-to-liquids (CTL) technology attractive.
The clean-coal technologies raise the possibility of Asia satisfying its growing energy needs without accelerating climate change. The newer technologies, of course, are more expensive than conventional coal-burning methods. However, as companies adopt the clean-coal technologies, these newer methods will mature and their economics will cease to be an inhibiting factor for commercialization. Improved techniques will also make carbon sequestration commercially viable.
Given that at best it can be slowed but not stopped, climate change needs to be embraced as a national security issue — but not in the way the Pentagon has toyed with the development of weather-modification technologies for military applications. Large states like India and China need to start seriously looking at ways they can innovate and get along in a climate change-driven paradigm. It will become imperative to build greater institutional and organizational capacity, along with efficient water management, early warning systems and new farm varieties.
NOTES
[1] World Bank, Little Green Data Book 2006 (Washington, DC: The World Bank, 2006).
[2]Yun Qian, Dale P. Kaiser, L. Ruby Leung and Ming Xu, ‘More Frequent Cloud-Free Sky and Less Surface Solar Radiation in China From 1955 to 2000’, Geophysical Research Letters (Vol.33, No.1, L01812), 11 January 2006.
[3] P. Whetton, A.B. Pittock and R. Suppiah, ‘Implications of Climate Change for Water Resources in South and Southeast Asia’, in Climate Change in Asia: Thematic Overview (Manila: Asian Development Bank, 1994); Robert T. Watson, Marufu C. Zinyowera Richard H. Moss, David J. Dokken (Eds.), Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Special Report on The Regional Impacts of Climate Change An Assessment of Vulnerability (1997); R. Suppiah, ‘The Asian Monsoons: Simulations From Four GCMs and Likely Changes Under Enhanced Greenhouse Conditions’, A.J. Jakeman and B. Pittock (eds.) Climate Impact Assessment Methods for Asia and the Pacific, Proceedings of a regional symposium, organized by ANUTECH Pty. Ltd. on behalf of the Australian International Development Assistance Bureau 10-12 March 1993, Canberra, Australia (1994); Climate Impact Group, Climate Change Scenarios for South and Southeast Asia (Aspendale, Australia: Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, 1992).
[4] United Nations, The State of the Environment in Asia and the Pacific (New York: United Nations, October 2006).
[5] The full gini-index table measuring inequality in income or distribution is available at:
http://hdr.undp.org/statistics/data/indicators.cfm?x=148&y=2&z=1
Or at: http://hdr.undp.org/reports/global/2005/pdf/HDR05_HDI.pdf
Stagecraft and Statecraft 