Nautilus Peace and Security Weekly – 16 August 2012

Recommended Citation

Saleem Janjua- Climate Change Adaptation Contributor, "Nautilus Peace and Security Weekly – 16 August 2012", NAPSNet Weekly Report, August 16, 2012, https://nautilus.org/napsnet/napsnet-weekly/nautilus-peace-and-security-weekly-16-august-2012/

CONTENTS

See this week’s blog: Rio+20 – The Future We Want, from our Climate Change Adaptation contributor, Saleem Janjua.



DETERRENCE:  How defense austerity will test U.S. strategy in Asia, Michael C. Horowitz, NBR Research (7 August 2012) [PDF, 0.2MB]

Air-Sea Battle aims to integrate US Air Force and Navy operations in the West Pacific. It requires investment in F-35 aircraft, Virginia attack submarines, and R&D into robotics, and systems such as the X-47B drone based on aircraft carriers. Equal budget shares to the services must be traded off against the costs of “rebalancing.”


DPRK: DPRK delegation visits Beijing, Ding Qingfen and Li Xiaokun, People’s Daily online (14 August 2012)

South Korea and Japan remain unable to resolve historic issues thus hampering discussions of strategic importance. North Korea broadens economic and diplomatic outreach with high-level visits to China, Vietnam and Laos.  Japan and North Korea also seem to have a nascent rapprochement with the first official talks between them in 4 years, holding talks between the Red Cross societies, and allowing Kim Jong Il’s former sushi chef to come and go.


Energy Security: Climate change is here – and worse than we thought, James E. Hansen, The Washington Post (3 August 2012)

Jim Hansen helped Al Gore launch the global warming scare with his Senate testimony in 1988. He is now more pessimistic and calls for “gradually rising fee on carbon … with 100 percent of the money rebated to all legal residents on a per capita basis.” This could become a part of a new “consensus” Fred Krupp of ED calls for, in light of changing views on climate change. But no Gore any more; the Special Envoy on Climate Change is asking for “flexibility”, leaving the Copenhagen flexible trap of “2 degrees Celsius” target aside.


GOVERNANCE AND CIVIL SOCIETY: S. Korea’s Lee tells Japan to settle grievances, Agence France Presse (13 August 2012)

Korean and Japanese sovereignty issues over the Dokdo Islets (Takeshima in Japan) flared up after ROK President Lee made an unprecedented visit to the islands, calling on Japan to settle historical grievances, and a ROK Olympian held a sign reading “Dokdo is our land” after defeating Japan. Japan recalled its envoy and may postpone talks that were to be held on the sidelines of next month’s APEC summit. The ROK announced it would not build a planned research base on Dokdo, citing environmental concerns.


CLIMATE CHANGE ADAPTATION: Community-based climate adaptation planning: case study of Oakland, California, California Natural Resources Agency (July 2012) [1.79 MB, PDF]

The local, state, and federal governments are beginning to take action through the development of action plans and regulatory initiatives to prevent climate change from exacting its worst toll (mitigation) and to prepare for its unavoidable impacts (adaptation). As communities become aware of distinct vulnerabilities to environmental hazards, they need information about the types of policies and plans to put into place.


Rio+20 – The Future We Want

by Saleem Janjua– Climate Change Adaptation Contributor

The Rio+20 UN conference on sustainable development ended with an ineffectual and hollow document, titled ‘The Future We Want’……


CLIMATE CHANGE AND SECURITY: The hunger wars in our future, Michael Klare, Al Jazeera (11 August 2012)

At this point, the focus is on the immediate consequences of the still ongoing Great Drought: dying crops, shrunken harvests, and rising food prices. But keep an eye out for the social and political effects that undoubtedly won’t begin to show up here or globally until later this year or 2013. Better than any academic study, these will offer us a hint of what we can expect in the coming decades from a hunger-games world of rising temperatures, persistent droughts, recurring food shortages and billions of famished, desperate people.


The Nautilus Peace and Security Weekly Report presents articles and full length reports each week in six categories: Austral security, nuclear deterrence, energy security, climate change and security, the DPRK, climate change adaptation and governance and civil society. Our team of contributors carefully select items that highlight the links between these themes and the three regions in which our offices are found—North America, Northeast Asia, and the Austral-Asia region. Each week, one of our authors also provides a short blog that explores these inter-relationships.

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