Small Island States will be facing dramatically higher adaptation costs to build resilience against the kind of impacts the IPCC projects in its most recent Special Report. Thoriq Imbrahim, former Environment and Energy Minister of the Maldives, urges the international community to attend to the political demands of countries particularly exposed to the impacts of climate change and also confront loss and damage with renewed urgency.
The surge in the frequency and intensity of climate change impacts has raised the alarm about how this could hamper coastal activities. Several critical ports in the Indo-Pacific region are hubs of international trade and commerce and at the same time vulnerable to typhoons, taller waves and erosion. India’s climate diplomacy at the regional level could activate climate-resilient pathways for port development and management.
On November 17, adelphi hosted a high-level panel discussion on “How to prevent climate security risks?” at the German Pavilion at COP23. The panel discussion was an opportunity to take stock of what has been achieved and to deepen the discussion on how to prevent climate-related risks and incorporate them into policy planning.
In this report, various challenges faced by Asia-Pacific's most vulnerable areas to disasters attributed to climate change are specified, and a qualitative analysis is made on the instability of public security, politics and social climate observed in the region. The purpose of these two exercises is to gain insight into the situation through the overlapping of natural science and social science perspectives.
The exhibition “Environment, Conflict, Cooperation” (ECC), co-organised by The University of Queensland and adelphi, supported by the German Federal Foreign Office, is shown in Brisbane during 18th July and 4th August. The exhibition is accompanied by a public talk as well as a closing panel discussion:
On 12 May 2016, the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) through its Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) launched its annual publication “The Global Report on Internal Displacement (GRID)”, identifying climate change and related natural hazards, such as droughts, sea-level rise and desertification as increasingly important factors causing internal displacement.
Most people in Australia may not think of climate change as a national security issue but the US has been issuing reports about the national security impact of climate change since 2008.
As the United States reorients its foreign policy approach to the Asia-Pacific region, it must seriously consider the impacts of climate change, argues a new report from the Center for Climate and Security. How can the United States help improve the region’s climate resilience, and at the same time, strategically adapt to a rapidly changing security environment?
As China continues to expand into a superpower large enough to one day rival the United States, the support and cooperation of Southeast Asian countries is imperative. Since 2000 China’s trade with the 10 ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) member countries rose from $32 billion to $350 billion in 2014, with estimates for 2015 reaching as high as $500 billion.
The president of Kiribati, one of the world’s most climate vulnerable countries, has written to fellow world leaders asking them to support to global moratorium on new coal mines.
In my tiny, half-an-island country of Timor-Leste, cemeteries smell of jasmine and come to life on All Saints’ Day. Families have picnics and kids roam wild over the tombstones.