India and China’s much-publicised agreement last week claims to strengthen cooperation on shared rivers, supposedly allaying Indian fears over new dams.
Under the deal, China has also agreed to extend the flood data they provide to India on the Brahmaputra – the most controversial of the Himalayan rivers flowing between India and China – from May to October instead of June to October in the previous agreements.
From its source in Tibet, where it is known as the Yarlung Zangbo, the Brahmaputra meanders 2,900 kilometres and passes through India and Bangladesh. With devastating annual floods and potentially hazardous hydroelectricity projects in the pipeline, improved cross-border cooperation is urgently needed.
China’s plans to construct more dams on the Brahmaputra in Tibet have caused increasing alarm in India about the downstream impacts. The most contentious project is a massive 48,000-megawatt dam slated for the “great bend” in China, before the river swings round into India (over twice the size of the Three Gorges dam).
China’s repeated assurances that the projects will not reduce water flow in the Brahmaputra, as they are run-of-the-river hydropower projects not designed to hold water, have failed to quell fears.
Hopes that the new agreement will mark a turning point in relations on water may be premature. Looking at the actual language of the most recent agreement, signed last week, there is no mention of dams, river projects or India’s water rights. What’s more, it transpires that India is paying China for the hydrological data and not making it publically available afterwards, according to the South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers and People (SANDRP).
For the complete article, please see The Third Pole.
The impact of climate change is posing a growing threat to peace and security. Germany is therefore putting climate and security on the Security Council’s agenda.
Russia’s economic development minister warned last week that the EU’s plans to deploy a carbon tax at the bloc’s borders will not be in line with World Trade Organisation (WTO) rules, just as Brussels doubled down on the idea of green tariffs.
Few places have suffered more from the COVID-19 pandemic than southern China, the region where the novel coronavirus was first detected in the city of Wuhan. But it turned out that the pandemic is not the only calamity to befall south China this year. The region has been inundated by heavy rainfall since late May, creating a risk of catastrophic flooding.
Natural resources-based conflicts are sometimes made complex by non-climate push and pull factors, like unemployment and political tension. These factors should be taken into account when developing and implementing a peacebuilding strategy, making sure all stakeholders are at the table – including those fueling the conflict. The online workshop ‘Integrating peacebuilding and climate change mitigation efforts in natural resource management’, organised by the European Peacebuilding Liaison Office (EPLO) and adelphi, looked into this complex issue.