Analysis in new report from the Australian National University’s Centre for Climate & Energy Policy shows that producing hydrogen from fossil fuels carries significant risks, and is likely to be incompatible with decarbonisation objectives. These findings have big implications as Australia looks to become a ‘hydrogen superpower’.
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A new peer-reviewed study has found that the vast majority of Australian voters support climate action, but also highlights that more will need to be done to counter the fact that support for strong climate policy action may be limited by voters’ preparedness to incur personal costs, especially among older and conservative voters.
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A report from the Centre for Economics and Business Research (United Kingdom), released on 26 December 2020, has forecast that China will overtake the United States to become the world’s biggest economy in 2028, five years earlier than previously estimated, due to the contrasting recoveries of the two countries from the COVID-19 pandemic.
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Richard Armitage and Joseph Nye have led a team to produce a new “bipartisan Armitage-Nye” report on the state of the US-Japan alliance, seen as critical to addressing both regional and global challenges. On the question of China and US strategy in Asia, the report is both entirely predictable and refreshingly surprising.
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New data from SIPRI’s Arms Industry Database shows that arms sales by the world’s 25 largest arms companies totalled US$361 billion in 2019, an 8.5 per cent increase over 2018. The top five arms companies were all based in the United States: Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and General Dynamics. Outside of North America and Western Europe, the largest number of foreign arms company entities are hosted by Australia (38).
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The spotlight is back on Australia’s future submarine program, SEA1000. The Hudson Institute report Sustaining the Undersea Advantage: Disrupting Anti-Submarine Warfare Using Autonomous Systems is an excellent introduction to the history of anti-submarine warfare, and to some recent transformational developments in its conduct. It will help readers understand the long history of undersea warfare and how past experience has made older concepts hard to shift.
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An invaluable introduction to the complex and critical struggle for technological superiority which will the characterise the geopolitical environment for decades to come. This report sets out all the key issues and addresses the question of how the EU could maintain strategic autonomy in the face of this competition between China and the US.
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Future pandemics will emerge more often, spread more rapidly, do more damage to the world economy and kill more people than COVID-19 unless there is a transformative change in the global approach to dealing with infectious diseases, warns a major new report on biodiversity and pandemics by 22 leading experts from around the world.
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The annual Asia Power Index measures resources and influence to rank the relative power of states in Asia. The 2020 edition — which covers three years of data — is the most comprehensive assessment of the changing distribution of power in Asia so far. Among other things, it aims to sharpen the debate on the geopolitical consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic.
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A new UNDRR report shows that natural disasters caused by climate-related events have doubled in the past twenty years, affecting billions of people and costing trillions of dollars. The report highlights the need for governments to plan to spend more to deal with the impact and consequences of natural disasters.
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Based on the results of its 2020 Survey of American Public Opinion and US Foreign Policy, this Report from the Chicago Council on Global Affairs provides insight into the potential differences in US foreign policy settings depending on the outcome of the presidential election. The Report finds that there are profound differences between Democrats and Republicans on which foreign policy issues matter most today. And that they are even more sharply divided on how the United States should deal with these issues and engage the rest of the world.
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Discussion around defence policy and spending tends to focus on the quantum, efficiency, and economic impacts and not on the implied end use: war. The Future of Warfare in 2030 looks at what war might mean in the near to medium term for the United States. Defence policy is put clearly in the context of war, and the issues surrounding conflict are explored. The study provides valuable inputs into US allies’ considerations of the consequences of following America into major power conflicts.
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The UNHCR’s Global Trends report brings together important information about the scale and changing nature of forced displacement. The Report describes a reality that solutions for refugees are in decline, at the same time that “we are witnessing a changed reality in that forced displacement nowadays is not only vastly more widespread but is simply no longer a short-term and temporary phenomenon”.
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The Paris climate agreement seeks to limit global warming to 1.5℃ this century, a target likely to be exceeded by 2024. This first overshoot would be temporary – but it casts new doubt on whether Earth’s climate can be permanently stabilised at 1.5℃ warming. Modelling shows that if emission reductions are large and sustained, the Paris goals can still be met, and the most severe damage to the natural world, economy and people may be avoided. But worryingly, we also have time to make it far worse.
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Friends of Europe have released a comprehensive study on Arctic defence cooperation. The report examines the strategic and political context surrounding Arctic security and defence focusing on the changing Arctic environment – the resurgence of great power competition worldwide against a backdrop of accelerating global warming which is melting the polar ice cap at a record pace.
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Which is the most powerful cyber nation in the world? A recently published Belfer Center report, National Cyber Power Index 2020, is a new approach to conceptualizing and measuring cyber power at the country level – a multidimensional and disaggregated measure of national cyber power that reflects the complexity of the concept. The results provide a richly-layered and informative way of assessing the cyber capabilities of the studied countries.
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Critics of the BRI accuse China of pursuing a policy of ‘debt-trap diplomacy’: luring poor, developing countries into agreeing unsustainable loans to pursue infrastructure projects so that, when they experience financial difficulty, Beijing can seize the asset, thereby extending its strategic or military reach. This paper from the UK’s Chatham House demonstrates that the evidence for such views is limited.
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With Russia, China and the United States leading the development of operational hypersonic weapons, other Indo-Pacific states, including Australia, have indicated that they intend to do so in the intermediate future. This comprehensive Atlantic Council primer seeks to marry technological characteristics, geostrategic and military imperatives, and regional dynamics in order to provide a basis for further analysis about hypersonic development and application trajectories in the Indo-Pacific.
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The Lowy Institute authors’ objective analysis suggests China has not been engaged in such problematic debt practices in the Pacific as to justify accusations of debt trap diplomacy, at least not to date.
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Secondary sanctions are a potent form of economic coercion that allows the US to extend its jurisdiction well beyond its borders, enabling interference in other nations’ foreign policy independence and infringing other nations’ sovereignty. Knudsen argues that economic autonomy depends on displacing the US from the central role in international finance.
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