A fascinating and potentially game-changing geopolitical pas-de-deux unfolded in Copenhagen. The international media and punditocracy christened the United States and China the new G2 in reference to the expected preeminent leadership roles the two hold among their respective developed and developing country contingents. What increasingly became clear, however, was that a different G2 was influencing the agenda: China and India.

India demonstrated that, while it wants an alliance with the United States and its Western allies, a subservient allegiance is not an option.

This was clear in the way India approached a key Copenhagen sticking point—verification. India had been down this road before with the U.S.-India nuclear deal, where Washington’s insistence on external verification was seen by some Indian strategists as undermining India’s sovereignty and security, and as a potential excuse to impose costly sanctions.

Indian concerns about verification created an opportunity for China which, despite the vastly different mix of emissions in both countries, was able to entice India into an alliance. India brought along its IBSA partners, South Africa and Brazil, and it was this expanded group, meeting in conclave, that President Obama gatecrashed in his search for solutions.

Two very important messages were delivered in Copenhagen. First, India told the West it could no longer be taken for granted—it had options. Second, China told India it would be open to a new relationship based on mutual interest.

Going in to Copenhagen, visions for the conference were more varied than many realized. The West primarily thought it was negotiating a trade deal (as evidenced by the drop in EU carbon trading prices after the talks failed to deliver a climate market deal). China, too, was negotiating a trade deal, but remained open to opportunities to gain larger strategic advantages. India, on the other hand, sought a stage to drive home its major geopolitical positions.

Coming out of Copenhagen, the conference’s narrative is clearer: This was geopolitics pure and simple.

India—home to the world’s most populous democracy, a thriving economy, and one of the world’s largest English-speaking populations—is a natural U.S. ally. Its recent experience with the United States on nuclear cooperation, however, has made it wary. Such paranoia gave Beijing an opportunity to entice Delhi into an alliance at Copenhagen. Despite China’s development of Pakistan as a nuclear client state, ongoing border disputes and skirmishes, and other conflicts between the two emerging powers, Beijing succeeded.

If the United States and its Western allies are to coax India (and by extension, a substantial portion of the developing world) into going along with an ambitious emissions reduction program, or indeed any other trade regime, they will need to desist from seeking to impose measures that Delhi regards as protectionist and self-serving.

For the West, moving the world’s most populous democracy to its side, and not China’s, is worth certain concessions. Not just for the sake of a climate deal, but also for larger strategic purposes. At Copenhagen, the West incorrectly lumped India with China, and this mistaken assement proved to be self-fulfilling.

Analysis of India has long suffered from “hyphenation.” First it was India-Pakistan, now India-China. At the beginning the India-China link was competitive, but Copenhagen has shown it has the potential to become cooperative. India should be assessed on its own terms. If geopolitics abhors a stand alone, however, then the time has come to rehyphenate democratic, economically strong, English-speaking India. It would be in the United States and its allies’ benefit to create a new cooperative link: India-U.S.

A longer version of this article was originally published by UPI-Asia.com.

Cleo Paskal is a fellow at Chatham House in London and author of Global Warring: How Environmental, Economic, and Political Crises Will Redraw the World Map (Palgrave). Scott Savitt, a former Beijing-based correspondent for United Press International, is the author of the forthcoming memoir Crashing the Party (Atlas). ©Copyright Cleo Paskal and Scott Savitt.

Photo: Prime Minister of India Manmohan Singh. Courtesy World Economic Forum.

The Copenhagen COP-15 was not a stand-alone event. It was a product of years of ongoing work around the globe, from the trenches of climate research laboratories to the highest levels of government. As a result, apart from anything else, it gave valuable insight into the current state of two of the most dynamic and overarching issues of the coming decades: the science of environmental change (and in particular the potential impacts) and dynamics of shifting geopolitics.

In both cases, based on what was seen in Copenhagen, the situation is disconcerting.

In terms of the science, the COP-15 had a dangerously narrow focus. Carbon emission-related issues, the main topic of the COP, are just one component of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions (GHG). Other include, for example, livestock-related methane emissions and the release of exponentially potent industrial GHGs.

Due to feedback loops and other factors now in play, anthropogenic GHG emissions themselves are just one component of changing atmospheric GHG concentrations. Others include, for example, methane released from thawing permafrost and CO2 saturation in the oceans.

Meanwhile, GHG concentrations in the atmosphere are themselves just one potential component of major environmental change. Others include, for example, massive changes in consumption patterns, soil exhaustion, and groundwater depletion. Even without climate change, those factors alone are destabilizing.

While unquestionably important, from a scientific point of view, what was on the table at Copenhagen was severely limited. This was acknowledged by those involved, many of who talk in terms of a 2 degree C temperature rise as being a win.

The implications are staggering. Already, critical energy infrastructure, for instance, is feeling the effects of environmental changes. In some cases, such as French nuclear power stations, U.S. Gulf Coast infrastructure, and Indian hydroelectric installations, environmental change periodically severely affects production.

If an infrastructure that is as well-designed and funded as the energy sector is starting to feel the effects, it is hard to imagine the potential for disruption that the science now tells us is inevitable.

Meanwhile, geopolitically, the conference quickly took on the developed-versus-developing world framing that has increasingly paralyzed other global negotiations. As one Zambian delegate told me, “This is even worse than the WTO.”

While the Financial Times called Lumumba Di-Aping, the Sudanese head of the G-77 group of developing countries, “belligerent,” the largest circulation English language newspaper in the world, the Times of India, ran a headline reading: “India suspects foul play on draft declaration.”

In some cases the day-to-day management of the COP incited and inflamed the feeling of fragmentation. The location itself was criticized from the start: Copenhagen is lovely, but very expensive. Many stakeholders from the developing world could not afford to attend, assuming they could get visas.

Once they did arrive, the long registration lines in the cold took a toll on those just off long flights from the tropics, and some just gave up as coughs set in. It is worth noting that on several key days, members of negotiating parties had to wait in line with the NGOs, severely limiting their ability to contribute to the work going on inside.

Some of those who braved the lines, including an Indian journalist colleague, got inside and to the registration desk after hours only to find that their accreditation had been unilaterally cancelled.

The restrictions on NGOs hit the developing world particularly hard, as many of the government negotiating teams were actively supported by think tanks and others who were registered as NGOs.

In an atmosphere already rife with distrust, those sort of organizational issues were not helpful, to say the least, and they fed into conspiracy theories about a deliberate concerted effort by the developed world to bulldoze through secret drafts. It doesn’t matter if it is not true, what matters is that it is now widely believed – and on the front page of the Times of India.

The implications are troublesome. The government officials and negotiators involved will be sitting across the table from each other in a wide range of other treaties and agreements. The distrust resulting from COP15 will feed into existing geopolitical tensions and will be carried in the hearts and minds of those involved for years.

This is not good. When we combine the two trends – a failure to manage (or even acknowledge) the scientific importance of non-carbon environmental change factors and increasingly polarized geopolitics – it is easy to see some very unsettling times on the near horizon.

As we start to experience accelerating problems with everything from water scarcity (including in the United States and Europe) to infrastructure failure (including along the U.S. coasts), we are all going to need as many friends as we can get. If the Titanic is going down, it doesn’t help to compete over who can steal the most silverware.

The sort of behavior on show in Copenhagen may suit some narrow interests, but unless the full complexity of environmental change is addressed, those interests will lose out—as will we all.

Cleo Paskal is a fellow at Chatham House, a consultant to the Department of Energy’s Global Energy and Environment Strategic Ecosystem (GlobalEESE) and author of Global Warring: How Environmental, Economic, and Political Crises Will Redraw the World Map.

While it is now widely acknowledged that environmental change, including climate change, could severely undermine security in the developing world, the implications for the developed world are just starting to be discussed. A sort of “developed-country complacency syndrome” has led many to assume that the main security problems for a country like the United States, such as waves of refugees or the need to intervene when other nations face disasters or conflicts, would be imported from abroad. Unfortunately, the United States is likely to face some fairly severe “Made in the USA” problems, as well.

For instance, as the economic stimulus package is rolled out, the United States is entering a historic period of new infrastructure construction. From a security perspective, this could help maintain stability, or it could be a disaster. What might make the difference is assessing how potential sites could be affected by environmental change. Transportation systems, defensive capabilities, agriculture, power generation, water supply, and more are all designed for the specific parameters of their physical environments—or, more often, the physical environments of the Victorian, Depression-era, or post-WWII periods in which they were originally built. That is why unplanned environmental change almost always has negative impacts.

In the case of a change in precipitation patterns, for example, drainage systems, reservoirs, and hydrological installations can all fail not because they were poorly engineered, but because they were engineered for different conditions. We are literally not designed for environmental change.
Current environmental impact assessments look almost exclusively at a structure’s impact on the environment. These assessments must now be expanded to include the other half of the equation: the impact of a changing environment on the structure. These sorts of “dual” assessments are essential. To put it bluntly, there is no point in building a zero-emissions house in a current or soon-to-be flood zone. However, this is exactly the sort of thing that is being proposed in areas of the U.S. Gulf Coast. We can avoid this by requiring these “dual” assessments when applying for insurance, planning permission, and/or government support.

Just as physical infrastructure is poorly prepared to deal with environmental change, so, too, is legal infrastructure. Very few regulations, international laws, and subsidies incorporate the effects of environmental change. At best, this renders them inadequate; at worst, it can create new vulnerabilities.

For instance, the U.S. government’s National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) can inadvertently contribute to putting people and infrastructure in harm’s way. When private insurers deem areas too risky to be eligible for coverage, the NFIP can step in and insure them, making it possible to build in areas that are current flood zones, as well as areas that may become ones as climate change causes sea levels to rise and storm surges to increase. Already in some areas the same homes have had to be rebuilt multiple times, in part with cash infusions from the NFIP.

There are other examples of developed-world agreements that may cause more damage than they prevent:

• Water-sharing agreements, especially those based on a set amount of water, rather than percentage of actual flow, will become problematic as water levels alter dramatically.
• Fisheries-sharing agreements will be thrown into chaos as fish shift to other regions due to climate change and overfishing.
• Hydropower-sharing agreements will be a major problem, both for precipitation-fed systems and glacier regions, where there will be above-average flows as the glaciers melt, followed by droughts once the glaciers disappear.

Legislation, agreements, and subsidies that do not account for environmental change can create artificial and unnecessary vulnerabilities at a time when the world is facing real physical challenges. It is imperative to assess existing and new legal frameworks in order to determine whether they create strengths or vulnerabilities. If they are found to create vulnerabilities, they must be adapted or abandoned.

Two of the things the developed world prides itself on—its physical and legal infrastructures—are both highly vulnerable to environmental change. However, the stimulus packages and the reassessment of global, regional, and national agreements caused by the financial crisis offer a valuable opportunity to ensure that the structures and mechanisms we are counting on to maintain our security do not end up undermining it.

Photo: Members of the Coast Guard Sector Ohio Valley Disaster Response Team and the Miami-Dade Urban Search and Rescue Team mark a house to show it has been searched for survivors of Hurricane Katrina. Hurricane Katrina, which devastated the U.S. Gulf Coast in 2005, revealed the vulnerability of U.S. infrastructure to natural disasters. Climate change could make hurricanes and other natural disasters more frequent and severe. Photo courtesy of Flickr user Tidewater Muse and Petty Officer Robert M. Reed.

Cleo Paskal is an associate fellow in Chatham House’s Energy, Environment, and Development Programme. She is the author of UK National Security and Environmental Change.

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