 Welcome to the New America Foundation. I'm Peter Bergen, head of the National Security Studies program. It's really a great pleasure to introduce Dr. Ali, Dr. Saleem Ali, who's a distinguished geographer and environmentalist. He's written a paper about ecological cooperation in South Asia, which we're publishing today. Obviously, India and Pakistan have shared interests as well as shared disputes. And the burden of Dr. Ali's paper is to suggest ways that India and Pakistan could address some of these issues through some of the existing international bodies that exist like Sark. Dr. Ali is presently on sort of an extended sabbatical, I guess, at the University of Queensland in Australia. He's a professor at the University of Vermont. He's written on extensively on many issues, mining, ecology, environmentalism, even madrasas in Pakistan. So he's going to give us a presentation of the findings of his paper and then we'll open it up to a discussion with you. Thank you. Thank you very much, Peter, for the introduction and also for inviting me to write this paper. It's quite a bold effort on the part of the New America Foundation to consider environmental security issues. They have tended to be marginalized often among Washington think tanks or they tend to be siloed in particular areas, but the connection between their importance for national security is often quite minimal. So I'm really appreciative of that opportunity and it really shows that the New America Foundation is at that cutting edge. I want to also note that my affiliation in Australia is long-term for the time being I have taken a professional leave from University of Vermont and so I retain my tenure there, which is a luxury tenured academics can have, but I feel very much part of my Australian affiliation just as much as my Vermont one and hence all these multiple websites for you to consider. In terms of my Vermont affiliation, there's the Institute for Environmental Diplomacy and Security, which I started there a few years ago. That's the website for that. And this project initially, when Peter contacted me, was part of that initiative that we had started on environmental diplomacy. My email is there. I'm providing that since I've run out of business cards during this last two weeks I've been in the U.S. So if you need to reach me, that's my long-term email. No matter where I am, it's my lifelong email, my alumni address, so you can always find me through that email address. Now, in terms of this topic, if we think about this notion of low versus high politics, I'm very conscious of not being very particular about causality when we talk about environmental issues and the importance for cooperation leading to security. Because there's a tendency oftentimes when you talk about environmental issues, people will come to you and say, well, you know, there are much more significant and more dangerous and imminent threats which confront us. Especially if you think about the situation in the last week in Pakistan in terms of the terrorist attacks in Balochistan, you think about the line of control incidents between India and Pakistan. And immediately when you talk about the environment, there's a certain sort of glaze which comes over. So I'm very conscious of noting that in my work, I have always tried to look at the full panoply of causes. And even though my own training is in environmental planning, I'm very conscious of the fact that there are many other causes for conflict and many other rationales for cooperation. However, the connection between the environment being a low politics issue and security being a high politics issue can be made much more deliberately which I have tried to do. So for example, some of my earlier work on Madrasas on Islam and Education which is referenced there, a book which was published a few years ago, I looked at those kind of more sort of hard politics issues of security. But again, try to see are there any connections which can be made with natural resources as well. So some points to consider, territorial disputes have ecological underpinnings. If you think about the Kashmir dispute, it clearly is about an eco-region. It's about a mountainous region. It has a lot to do with water resources and so on. That's not the only factor, hence partially is capitalized. But it is a contributing factor. And while it's very compelling to present a more dominant causality in terms of op-eds and so on, I tend to approach these matters in a much more dialectical way. Trying to say, well, this could lead to that, but then there could be a feedback mechanism whereby one process becomes more dominant and so on. So please bear with me as I try to make those connections. So for example, if you think about environmental issues and you think about even the issues of sectarian conflict in Pakistan, the land rights and the division of lands as to who controls it, that leads to certain perceptions of inequality which perpetuates rifts, ethnic rifts and so on as well. How that happens with migration flows, with agricultural access, with regard to the land availability itself, those are definitely factors which we cannot neglect for providing that fertile ground for conspiratorial rhetoric and all of those very dominant forms of extremism to take root. So that's the kind of sort of more panoramic view which I try to present in my research. And I want to be very clear about that at the outset that what I'm going to say for the rest of the presentation does not preclude these. Having said that, I also want to share with you that my experience in South Asia, it's important to have a full disclosure that I am originally from Pakistan. I am a Pakistani American. I was born in the U.S. but grew up partly in Pakistan. All my higher education was in the U.S. And now I live in Australia. So I do see myself as someone who has some roots in the region but can sort of zoom out and also look at these issues from a more macro perspective. It's important to share that with you because any kind of writing around South Asia is always perceived with that lens. And at the same time, though my background is more from the Pakistani side, I have had extensive field experience across South Asia. In India, all across parts of India as well as in Bangladesh and Nepal and Sri Lanka. And so I do try my best to look at these issues regionally despite my dominance clearly being in terms of my background from Pakistan. I've also been involved in various track two processes which have looked at ways to resolve different kinds of disputes between India and Pakistan. I'm sure most of you are familiar with the term track two but it's basically informal processes not at the governmental level but which can feed into governmental level policies. Content analysis of public statements is something which I did for this report. I was very conscious of not just trying to provide my own opinions in a vacuum because it's often easy to do that but can be challenged also within the policy domain. So I tried to find as much as I could statements by public officials, by leaders in South Asia to give more context and weight to the analysis. So thanks to some of the research assistance provided by New America Foundation we actually looked at speeches, public statements of key South Asian leaders, conference proceedings from international governmental conferences and so on as part of the methodology. I also looked at international environmental treaties to which these countries are already signatories because that also provides some more weight in terms of saying look you have actually agreed to certain international legal obligations and therefore what I'm saying is not just my opinion and policy recommendations but it's something you have agreed to. So that was also part of the analysis and then where needed interviews were conducted with individual analysts and decision makers where I couldn't get information from these other sources. So the structure of the report, these are sort of the key sections and what I'll try to do in the presentation is highlight some parts of it. I won't try to do the full sort of summary of the whole report. The draft is available outside. It's literally hot off the press so it's not even on the website yet and will probably be on the website later in the week but these are the sections. I start off first of all by looking at existing regional organizations as the starting point for any means by which we can have cooperation. So my starting point there is also that even though historically there may not have been as much progress with certain organizations we should not therefore assume that those organizations cannot be reformed or changed to provide more cooperative context. So we'll talk specifically about SARC for example which has been time and again the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation has been criticized for not being as proactive but I'll try to present to you that there is still space for SARC to be reformed. So we go into those discussions around existing agreements and organizations. The second section in the report focuses on the Himalayas and I start over the question around just by reviewing the cooperative agreements that exist mountains have had particular interest from countries in cooperation and so I say well why is it that mountains have been a focus of environmental cooperation? I try to address that question in terms of the salience of the Himalayas. Why are the Himalayas particularly important? Both from an environmental perspective in terms of being the source of water for much of the region but being also the most capricious source of water but also because they define boundaries in many cases. Mountain ranges define boundaries at the micro level even if you look at some of the conflicts around Siachen for example, the Saltoro Ridge you often hear about the mountain being the definitive boundary. So there's a discussion around the importance of the Himalayas and particularly one organization is analyzed there which is the International Center for Integrated Mountain Development, ISSI mode and how it came about why it has had success but limited success because its mandate has been limited and then some recommendations which will follow from that. I also look at scales of analysis then in the third section where we can draw some lessons from national, regional and international approaches. So for example, there are many contested organizations in that whole region. You have to the north you have China and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. You have organizations such as agreements and organizations which have come about through India's attachment to the Far East. You have several of these smaller conferences and organizations which we can draw lessons from and then also at the local level there have been some arrangements made particularly on cooperation. The fourth section focuses on the role of engineering and technocratic approaches to fostering cooperation and here particularly what's important to consider is the Indus Waters Treaty. The Indus Waters Treaty was negotiated partly with the help of the World Bank and has a focus on technical aspects of cooperation. It's important to note that it is a distributive cooperation agreement and not an integrative one. Essentially the agreement divided up the rivers between India and Pakistan so it was never meant to be a regional cooperation agreement and hence some of the recommendations which follow around that and on that particular issue there has been previous work done. The Stimson Center is continuing to do some very interesting work in that arena but I've tried to bring it within this more regional context as well looking at the Himalayas, looking at the whole water distribution management system. Food security clearly a serious problem across the region despite all of the progress that has been made in South Asia with development particularly in India it is still worth remembering that you still have more people living in abject poverty in South Asia than all of sub-Saharan Africa combined. So you cannot ignore the desperate destitution which still pervades South Asia and given the population growth rates and especially some parts of South Asia it is particularly alarming what will happen in the next 20 to 30 years. So food security is going to be exceedingly important. Here I try to make a linkage with some of the other very admirable work that the New America Foundation is trying to do around trade and providing a much more coherent regional trade policy and there are environmental dimensions to trade which could be made in a more specific way which I try to argue for here specifically around food security and how you choose what kinds of items should be prioritized for trade. You can prioritize items for trade based on for example the embedded water that is used to produce those items because that's going to define how much water is going to be available for other resources keeping in mind that 70% of water is still used for agriculture largely for food production. So then prioritizing trade around those rather than choosing trade just based on some other happenstance criteria. Then there's a section which tries to bring in some lots of ancillary issues and I try to have sort of a convergence of these issues around what I call derivative convergence and please pardon I still have that bit of an academic cadence in my communication but I've tried to make it a little bit more user-friendly but this comes up every now and then but basically what I'm trying to say there is that whenever you're dealing with public policy you have lots of these kind of peripheral issues which come up. Someone will say well there was a dengue fever epidemic in Pakistan why shouldn't India and Pakistan cooperate on dengue fever issues because India has not had that much dengue fever prevalence as much as Pakistan. So let's bring that in oh and by the way maritime cooperation there's a dispute going on in Sir Creek in the Indus Delta which has a lot to do with very interesting aspects of regional mapping and how you consider the boundary of a creek which is constantly changing in itself because it's a delta region and so how do you provide frames of analysis which can provide some convergence around these what may seem unrelated issues. So there's a section which deals with that. There's a very small section which tries to then say that all of these different things which are going on let us not forget that there's a strong track to diplomatic effort which to a large degree the US government has supported. You know despite the US government's relative non-involvement in terms of Indo Park peace building the US government has been very reluctant to mediate in any way between India and Pakistan directly partly because both sides have been resistant to any external mediation but there have been lots of efforts at track to diplomacy which have been pushed forward by the US government especially for example the the NISA Centre at the National Defence University which has done a series of these funded several different workshops they've even funded Canadian universities to do these track to processes because they think the Canadians may actually have a little bit more of a palatable sort of packaging of track to so you have these fascinating processes which kind of often go below the radar and are not made a greater sort of track one effort and those lessons from track two are not translated to the track one level so I briefly make that connection particularly there's one track to a process which the Atlantic Council has been doing and focused on the Siachen Glacier dispute which some of you may be familiar with my earlier writings I have written quite a bit on Siachen and partly also in an advocacy capacity have tried to work on environmental peace building efforts in Siachen so then finally I have sort of a conclusions and recommendations section which ties this all together now we did commission a specific map for this report and I'm really appreciative for the map makers, patients and putting this together this map I think will have much use beyond this report because we put in things on this map which are not found in most places together so for example on this map we've got proposed dam projects which have been a source of conflict different hydroelectric projects which are often not even talked about in the mainstream media but you know you've got the NIMBO project you've got several of these dams which are already existing and have caused concern we've put also some of the other regional cooperation efforts like the routes of the pipelines that are proposed the IPI pipeline the TAPI pipeline and then you've got this other bit which is often absent from any map really except if you go to the IC mode website which is the Transboundary Conservation Corridors which have been proposed by IC mode the Mountain Development Center I mentioned which is headquartered in Kathmandu there are seven Transboundary Conservation Corridors which are mentioned but what I found interesting was that and this shows you how environment still remains low politics none of these seven involve both India and Pakistan the most acrimonious players in this group now ecologically that doesn't make sense because clearly Pakistan and India do share eco regions which are of salience so for example this one here which is the Central Karakoram National Park in Pakistan with the Chinese conservation area on the other side clearly could include the Indian side too but to avoid political conflagration India was not part of that equation now one would say that that's an area where there should be greater international engagement to say well if you really want to think ecologically that's something which you should do so you've got seven of these corridors the two which are particularly interesting I think for our purposes in terms of regional cooperation in the most difficult areas the Karakoram and the Wahan Corridor the Wahan Corridor also includes Tajikistan and Afghanistan and the interesting history to that is that USAID about five years ago was willing to support a Transboundary Conservation effort in that region George Schaller the eminent conservationist, Pulitzer Prize winning author was very much involved in that because that involves the Pamir region partly the Marco Polo sheep some of the areas of high conservation value the snow leopards and Schaller of course has worked on snow leopard conservation so but unfortunately it has lost momentum and there was not really much done after that initial effort from Schaller and USAID about five six years ago I've heard that it may well be resurrected soon but that's one where you know clearly there should be some US government prioritization around that region because it could provide some very important opportunities for fostering greater regional cooperation so the effort with this mode largely with these conservation areas has been in this region Everest, you've got the Kanchenchunga corridor and that's where the donors have given most of their money because the European donors who have largely funded this mode they don't want to get involved too much with those contentious areas even though there is much more potential for regional cooperation so I mean part of the recommendations are well you should incentivize greater cooperation in areas where there is likely to be a greater peace dividend rather than doing so much on Everest when there has been so much done already on Everest in the conservation areas Kanchenchunga, world's third highest mountain clearly very important in this region but a lot has been done on it already and then you have also this one interesting one here with Myanmar or Burma which has some potential interest if we look more regionally and also with the Brahmaputra and the new dams which are going to be built by the Chinese there some very interesting work which could be done around that so then the other thing in this map which we also put forward is the road and rail bound crossings and you can see that's important because we want to make the linkage with trade and even though these crossings are there few of them are active so you've got clearly the Vaga crossing here which is active and then you have one on the Kashmir side which is somewhat active but there is much potential for these other crossings also being used for trade and especially incentivizing trade around renewable energy issues around what I was saying with food security choosing those, prioritizing those products which have more embedded water in areas where water is more available and those trade routes can be definitely done at low cost because that infrastructure does exist now just to give you some flavor of the kinds of arguments I talk about SARC, the critique of SARC has been that it's been an ineffective organization because it's really limited by its mandate so these are sort of the five key areas the mandate of SARC and I agree that this has been an issue but this is something which can be revisited there is no reason why it can't be revisited and there has been some hint that there could be some revisiting of SARC around particularly areas of energy cooperation which may have even potentially sensitive aspects of for example water connected to them even though water for example the Indus Water Treaty has been handled bilaterally and with World Bank mediation occasionally SARC has not been involved with that but as SARC gets more involved in energy issues it will be inevitable that there is going to be some connection there so SARC has been limited by these but that should not mean that the future of SARC is going to be constrained as well so that's part of the argument that I try to make so one example which I use then in terms of international environmental law you have in the UN Economic Commission for Europe which interestingly enough extends the definition of Europe according to this commission extends all the way to Tajikistan so that means actually our Wachan Corridor could be bordering a European Commission area a UN Economic Commission at least for Europe area that commission has this panoply of conventions around environmental cooperation which we could consider as an interesting model for South Asia as well on the Asian side you have ESCAP the United Nations Economic Commission for Asia-Pacific and there could be some greater effort made on the part of the international donor community to consider some similar regional conventions and to empower SARC to be able to operationalize such conventions also now SARC has a proposed environmental convention which may come into force when the next meeting happens because the problem with SARC has this last meeting got postponed because Nepal was not able to host it it's going to be now some months further but there has been some momentum along those lines of moving forward with that environmental treaty this whole model can provide some guidance and so we've got some analysis around this in the report the other aspect and thanks to Jennifer Rowland for putting together this table quickly for the report it lays out some of the key conventions that I think have much promise for fostering this more regional cooperative approach because if you see which countries have actually ratified these conventions the ones which we would want India and Pakistan particularly have ratified most of them so it's part of already the legislature has given approval for the mandate of these conventions and if you go into the text of a lot of these international agreements Transboundary Conservation is within the program of work I've been to many of the conferences of the parties of these conventions and each time there is a transboundary aspect which is mentioned but the challenge is then that you need leadership and I think incentives from the international donor community to actually move forward with those so especially like for example the Ramsar Convention on wetlands if you think about the Sir Creek dispute and I wrote a short article around this notion of wetland diplomacy because Ramsar is one of the very successful international environmental agreements on the Pakistani side there is already a Ramsar protected wetland site adjoining that Sir Creek area on the Indian side in Gujarat there is tremendous potential for actually generating a similar transboundary wetland site which could provide for a transboundary conservation area that could help to resolve the Sir Creek dispute similar to the way the Cordillera del Condor dispute was resolved between Ecuador and Peru through a transboundary conservation area and that was just as much an acrimonious conflict going back several decades armed conflict between both sides but with the help of international intervention Brazil and the United States NASA providing assurance in terms of potential violations of borders and so on and remote sensing imagery and all that we were able to actually resolve that dispute through a conservation area being established so similar idea for Ramsar lots of these agreements have potential for regional cooperation as well the convention on biological diversity one of the conventions coming out of the Rio summit tremendous potential there is a whole program of work around transboundary conservation as well and then actually one other quick mention is the Doha agreement, the TRIPS agreement this deals with trade so trade related aspects of intellectual property there could be cooperation around that as well which goes to the health diplomacy bit that I was mentioning the other thing we talk about in this report is the existing networks which are already there many times we look at them in isolation and one of the key findings of this report is that there needs to be much better coordination between these existing networks for example the World Bank and the Swedish Development Agency and a few other European donors have been supporting this network called Sandy how many of you have heard of Sandy? okay one person has, good so it's South Asian Network for Development and Environmental Economics which has been going on for a decade and it's actually been pretty successful in getting South Asian scholars who work on environment together to do research but they have not prioritized joint research I interviewed the director for this project and she said you know what we room Indians and Pakistanis together when they visit Kathmandu but we haven't really encouraged joint research projects so well it's good that they actually encourage interaction through that kind of more programmatic effort but to actually have joint research which is incentivized around that that's a great network it could be further developed it has many high profile people like Sir Partha Das Gupta the famed Cambridge Economist is on the board of Sandy you have a tremendous amount of donor support going into it but it needs to be reconfigured and given that specific incentive and impetus to focus on regional cooperation you have USAID SARI program which is an excellent effort it's one of the few donor efforts which is really targeted at regional cooperation it's on energy issues connecting that with some of these more intractable issues around conflict as well not necessarily making it into a huge sort of a diplomatic effort but just prioritizing and making sure that you can connect those issues in a more deliberate way this effort, the South Asian Cooperative Environment Program set up several years ago by UNEP, the United Nations Environment Program again, not really given that same impetus to move forward the most recent one, the Climate and Development Knowledge Network which has a different support or UK aid as it's called now the British government's effort very well funded effort and the regional coordination is being done by a lead Pakistan leadership in environment and development which is an NGO originally it was started by the Rockefeller Foundation but now the lead network is fairly independent and the Pakistan lead office is coordinating this for the whole region tremendous potential again to prioritize regional cooperation within this kind of an effort but again it is still not on the radar I interviewed the director there and he also admitted the same that has not been the incentive from the donors even though it could very well be and then you have this APN network which is interesting because this Asia-Pacific network it stands all the way to my current home in Australia, Australia and New Zealand are part of this network as well and the Australian aid agencies have tremendous potential to move forward with that and when I am back in Australia in a couple of weeks one of my targets is to go to Canberra and advocate for that that there should be more support for these kinds of efforts targeted at regional cooperation as well crisis communication has been an important part of the findings of this report clearly as was advertised about this event more people have been killed as a result of natural disasters by several fold compared to by terrorism not all of that is preventable but some of it is very much preventable in terms of regional cooperation so if it is just the value of life itself if you want to prioritize on that basis there is tremendous incentive to do it on that basis as well so crisis communication this is a diagram which is in the report it comes from a recent world meteorological organization ICMODE effort which came about after these recent floods on how regionally we can have a system which fastest cooperation so this has been moving forward and we have got considerable this is one area where there is considerable momentum and so crisis communication efforts national hazard warning systems coordinating among themselves has much potential for further effort and then finally as I said track to connectivity has been a major finding of this report with that we need to make these connections so let me just quickly go through a few of these with Siachen we have included some reference and we may have a website which has more material on this but feel free to get in touch with me if you need more material on Siachen and some of the efforts along that Sandia National Labs has twice had retired US military officials but also Indian and Pakistani retired military officials working together on cooperative monitoring plans for trying to resolve the Siachen dispute and you have had very senior level people like the Air Marshal of the Indian Air Force retired Air Marshal Nanda Karyapa I had the good fortune of being able to interview him also not for this report but for some of my earlier writings and the military strategists will tell you clearly that there is tremendous potential for environmental peace building in this region so Siachen Track 2 diplomacy you have most recently the Atlantic Council report which I mentioned the Track 2 effort where they just had a meeting in Lahore in September and they have come forward with a particular set of recommendations on Siachen on how to move forward with conflict resolution and the environmental aspects are very much salient in there and we were hoping that after this terrible tragedy of the Avalanche and Siachen in March of last year that there would have been some momentum but unfortunately that momentum never came to be and that's despite the fact that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in 2006 had himself said that when he visited Siachen he said some day I hope this will be a peace mountain so the peace park narrative had reached him there but it's not just the vision of peace it's pragmatic peace it's trying to figure out a very carefully militarily strategically argued vision of peace which is possible and has been argued through these Track 2 efforts Sir Creek, same way we've had retired Indian admirals retired Pakistani admirals who have worked together on these efforts around Sir Creek how do you come up with a mechanism whereby you can resolve a very small minor dispute in many ways and it's also de-coupled from the Kashmir conflict which has much more emotional overtones Sir Creek is a relatively uninhabited area usually this is the area where you have all these fishermen who get arrested every year and then there's on the independence days there's an exchange of goodwill and the fishermen get released by both sides and that whole dynamic around fisheries tremendous opportunity to make that connection between Track 2 diplomacy for trade purposes too fisheries can be an important trade issue if you can figure out the right mechanism for cooperative management of these resources and there are amazing examples of cooperative maritime management you have for mineral resources which is what I do now much more so in Australia my work is much more in the mining mineral sector there are some examples of cooperation on maritime mineral resources Qatar and Iran cooperate on one of the world's largest gas fields in the Persian Gulf there's a very convenient arrangement around that so there are ways possible if you can have the leadership in the way of it all to move forward whether it is around maritime minerals maritime fishing a wide array of these issues the Indus there's potential here the Stimson Centre's Track 2 efforts on the Indus deserve to be congratulated and I hope that there will be further movement on that there are lots of other initiatives within India and Pakistan that are trying to at a more local level exchange best practices but again it is not often raised from Track 2 to Track 1 which is unfortunate but many times you lose the opportunity and there is also less resilience in the process if it isn't done trade environment linkages I've already mentioned but one specific example for Track 2 that I would note here is that this is where the private sector can get involved so we have had visits from several Pakistani business people to India and vice versa and the business connection on trade needs to be made much more so I was in Davos last year the World Economic Forum and we had a special session which was done informally among Pakistani and Indian business people who were there and there was a lot of interest in moving forward perhaps through the auspices of the World Economic Forum which is actually having its annual meeting is happening next week there could be tremendous opportunities for these efforts through the business community as well which is often underappreciated health diplomacy we already have a lot in terms of medical treatment but you do not have often the same level going on when it comes to epidemics and public health issues so you have Indian visas are granted somewhat limited but fairly fast for Pakistani patients to go to India for cardiovascular surgery for certain kinds of ailments like that but when it comes to regional cooperation around epidemiology of diseases such as dengue as I was saying very limited which is where the regional cooperation bit is more likely because if you just have you know individuals going for treatment that becomes a very sort of specific philanthropic gesture it does not give you the full regional context which you need to be able to move that way forward as we are trying to say in this report finally universities which are clearly very near and dear to me I find it really regrettable that it is much more difficult for academics to get visas for India and Pakistan than it is for music or dance troops or cultural activities organized conferences about five years ago the National Science Foundation we tried to hold a joint research effort on glaciology to get Indian and Pakistani glaciologists to cooperate with each other it was impossible to get visas either way so it is for scientists regrettably both countries have made it more difficult to cooperate whereas science you know if you think about the larger vision of science for peace and Linus Pauling and the peace prize and all it should be an objective effort to promote peace building but it is again framed unfortunately in the context that the scientists will somehow steal our secrets and this is where perhaps some of the work with the plowshares fund that New America is doing potentially other things may be of interest because the whole understanding of science as objective rather than as being somehow very strategic and manipulative is one where within the environmental context can be changed because environmentally you do not have to deal with the same kind of thing like a nuclear scientist I mean you're talking about something which can be synergistic which can really help both countries or the region in cooperating but it can be done perhaps through the South Asian University this is one achievement of Sark which I should note it will be starting middle of next year to have formal classes and so on there are two programs right now in economics and in computer science this was started as an effort by Sark it's largely funded by the Indian government but it's kind of like a track to effort but with a bigger footprint India has committed that not more than 50% of the students will be Indian so they have to have 50% of students from the Sark region so they'll have to give them visas for that because it's in New Delhi the university is physically in New Delhi it's fine it's good because you know India is the largest country in the region and it's fine that it has a certain level of prestige and influence so how do we leverage this very important initiative like the South Asian University to raise these issues to that higher level an important effort and one worth watching in the next couple of years especially as it starts off so keep policy prescriptions summarized we've got these were the sort of the six key policy prescriptions out of the report first of all salience of Sark let's get beyond the cynicism of the past in efficacy you know there is much potential in this organization if we can empower it reconfigure its mandate appropriately without being a strategic threat and so that needs to be further looked into and I'm hoping that also there is more donor interest in that kind of an effort because it does need that impetus often to really get off the ground beyond the Indus Waters Treaty and here I agree with some of the work with which the Wilson Center has done like Michael Kugelman has written about not trying to necessarily renegotiate the Indus Waters Treaty because the Indus Waters Treaty was a distributive agreement rather let's think about keep the Indus Waters Treaty keep the dispute resolution mechanism it's working let it work but let's think about integrative approaches to planning let's think about ways by which we can actually look at water conservation and efficiency strategies and so on which are likely to increase cooperation and also make water more available so that distributive conflicts are less likely to occur right and we know for a fact how much wastage there is in the system and that's not just an issue for South Asia it's the same problem across much of the world so let's think about integrative planning cooperation and use that as a means of moving forward third recommendation policy prescription is mountains do matter and we should not feel shy from that you know it's going Aldo Leopold's famous essay thinking like a mountain it's not just a romanticized version of why mountains are important it's because mountains define boundaries ecological boundaries and hence sometimes political boundaries they're contested terrain they're ecologically very important as sources of water as communities which have very unique cultural identities that is why you have often times many distinct cultures between valleys the reason why Papua New Guinea has the highest number of languages of any country in the world is because of its mountainous terrain and how isolation leads to that so there are many reasons why mountains are significant empowering an organization like Isimod is important and is one of the recommendations made as well especially with reference to those seven trans boundary areas that they have invoking environmental treaties let's not be shy about it let's get the treaties which the countries have been already agreed to there is a legal mandate we can actually invoke those legal mandates move forward and see what is so at any time there is a convention of the conference of the parties they can be a trans boundary program of work is prioritized and given more emphasis and countries are asked to display what have they done in that regard existing knowledge networks academics collaborating facilitation this is related to the recommendation around I would say as India and Pakistan negotiating this new visa policy they need to focus on knowledge networks as one of the key factors in their visa policy to facilitate that I for example as an American citizen but born in America but because I have a Pakistani lineage for me to get an Indian visa minimum time usually is going to be three months it's still very difficult same is true on the other side this has to change for academics especially it's again easier for the cultural exchange efforts but it's more difficult and there are ways in which this can be done very effectively we have excellent models for visa management which we can look at which would still make sure that the security concerns are there but you can still have access this is done time and again you have even countries where I mean China has an amazing system of hybridity when it comes to visa access and different territories and where you go and so on there are many lessons which can be learned from there lessons actually which can be learned from in terms of how they keep their security concerns but they do not constrain people from traveling so as an American citizen it is easier for me as a Muslim American to go to Israel than it is for me to go to India I still do not there's no separate process for a Pakistani American to go to Israel yes they'll interview me for 45 minutes at the airport but that's okay I don't mind that I'd rather have that than to wait three months and then still be denied an Indian visa it's the same for my Indian friends coming to Pakistan it's not to just blame India it's the same as it's a reciprocal problem so there are ways to do it and there are lots of creative models which we should look into and then finally crisis communication climate and food key issues which we need to prioritize in terms of how communication occurs right and there is tremendous opportunity here because donors are prioritizing that for climate change right in terms of adaptation and mitigation strategies that is a hell of a lot of money for any kind of environmental issues and yet there has not been much prioritized around cooperation where you could actually get peace dividends food security same way so those are the key sort of policy prescriptions and I'll end there with this map just to give you a map without political boundaries to give you a sentence it was really hard to find a map on Google images which didn't have political boundaries but this just gives you a sense of some of my recommendations which I'm giving and why look at the salience of the mountains it's just the eco region itself the flood plains the topography and how it is defined I mean this is of course the Balochistan region and that area that Peter is very familiar with and how that really makes us then think of ecological cooperation so thank you and I look forward to discussion Thank you that was a really thorough and really interesting presentation and before I open it up to the audience I wanted to ask you just some more general questions you know it seems to me and tell me if I'm wrong there's less sort of in a sense climate change denialism in South Asia in Pakistan and India than there is perhaps in the United States I mean I think the 2010 floods I recall President Zidari for instance talking about am I right talking about climate change afterwards and saying we need to so it seems that there is a sort of opportunity that exists in South Asia because you know people are really seeing the evidence is that true I mean is that is there is it less of a I mean in this country there seems to be something I mean certainly the Obama administration has sort of taken a punt on the whole issue do you think there's more opportunity in South Asia Yes regarding climate change if you go out into the villages and you talk to the community members there there is tremendous acceptance that the climate has changed so if you talk to the NGOs like lead Pakistan I'm on the board of Governors of that one so I know particularly the work that they have done they get very positive sort of reception from on climate change from the communities but within the security establishment you're absolutely right there's a sense of well you know we don't want to deal with this this is very small issue and we can work around it and now the floods of 2010 did change that to some degree there was a realization that this is more than just an aberration but what we are seeing is now that the donor interest is driving it so there is a lot of donor interest to give money around climate change adaptation because Pakistan has been especially considered the most vulnerable country in terms of climate change regionally overall Bangladesh is particularly vulnerable because of sea level rise but they have already got a lot of cultural adaptations around it so Pakistan does not have as many so I think that is changing but it's still an area which deserves attention particularly when it comes to issues of connecting food and water to climate change because we still do not have those connections made so the most of the connections which are made with climate change are around flooding but it's not as much around well what will happen in terms of desertification in some areas and whether you will be able to grow enough food your people and so on and so that is the area where connections need to be made more three years ago if we had had this conversation it would have seemed improbable that Pakistan was going to grant India most favored nation MFN on trade and clearly there has been an exponential kind of move between particularly on the Pakistani side to normalize the trade process as a long way to go and in fact we are publishing this week on this issue by Mohsin Khan and Isha Tnajer one Indian economist, one Pakistani economist so I mean as a model for I guess two questions one is what concrete project would make sense for India and Pakistan for instance to cooperate on and is there other lessons from this rapprochement on trade obviously that was driven by the business community and must have also got the green light from the military and the Pakistani side are the lessons to be learned from what happened on the trade side? Yes, I think there are some specific areas like the conventions I mentioned which the Europeans have if we were to use a similar convention on trans boundary pollution for South Asia you have like the Ravi river which flows from India into Pakistan and flows along Lahore most you know it's very important for Lahore it was one of the rivers that is largely assigned to India for water usage according to the Indus Waters Treaty but the Ravi's pollution problem not the quantity but the quality is having a huge health impact the Pakistani side and this could be a very small tangible area where India and Pakistan could have cooperation around trans boundary pollution issues you could have with regard to Sir Creek as I mentioned a very tangible Ramsar trans boundary wetland site initiative which could be first developed on the Indian side to have a Ramsar site and then make that part of a trans boundary effort where you have the Sir Creek dispute is resolved partly through that initiative so I think there are some of these very specific areas where we could have cooperation that could be just as tangible as some of the trade efforts but it comes down to a matter of leadership really because anytime you know you can have dismissive approaches on a particular effort but I remain hopeful that now we have Pakistan election is coming up as well and on the Indian side too there may be some more momentum that comes to the next question which is you know essentially the resolution for the Sir Creek dispute as far as I understand it is sort of you've mentioned one there is a potential resolution it's not it's relatively low hanging fruit and Siachen similarly so has the hold up on these basic I mean obviously it's political but has it been to do with the elections and people not wanting to make a decision so it's sort of a lame duck you know kind of I mean obviously the Pakistani election is going to be in the spring of next year so would that it would a new civilian government be more likely to take these issues up or not well I'm you know I think the problem is that there is a kind of a status quo syndrome where people say you know I've spoken to Indian and Pakistani military officials and for example which is a low hanging fruit in one way and I say you're spending half a million dollars a day keeping troops there all that and there's a sense well we've done it since 1986 why do you think we can't continue to do that so there is this rather than saying well that money could be spent in this way so my own feeling is without mediation of some kind and that mediation doesn't have to be very pronounced it can be sort of behind the scenes incentives like business incentives you know actually on the Gujarat side the Gujarat government even though it is very conservative on the Indian side they are very pragmatic when it comes to business interests so if it was packaged more in terms of well you know think about the ecotourism potential think about what kind of levels of development you could have if there was not this tension in that in this delta region perhaps that may help so I think the connections haven't been made the case hasn't been made in those very pragmatic terms so people still think of these as somewhat romanticized visions or solutions whereas they are very practical solutions give us a sense of the extent to which there is an environmental movement in both Pakistan and India that sort of talks to each other and then what forums and what are they have they achieved anything or is it basically just talking at this point there is a very vibrant movement on both sides there have been some specific efforts particularly Terry the energy and research institute which was the founding director Rajinder Pachori is also very prominent international diplomat he's been the head of the IPCC intergovernmental panel on climate change he has made an effort to come to Pakistan several times on an environmental sort of lesson drawing comparing effort between India and Pakistan so Terry has made that effort through WWF the World Wildlife Fund both in India and Pakistan so the international environmental NGOs which have offices in both countries they get to cooperate because they may have their general meeting in Switzerland and they actually get to physically meet each other and think about but because of this other problem of access there is very little in terms of joint projects there is less in drawing across but very little joint projects and the lums Lahore what is this? they've actually had sort of Indian politicians and scientists come to discuss environmental issues in Lahore that's probably new that's right I was involved in this process last year with the help of the World Economic Forum we tried to get Indian parliamentarians for the first time to give a public sort of discussion lecture in Lahore to students they of course visited many times you've had parliamentarians come and visit both ways but this was the first time that students were able to engage with them and it was focused on climate change and environmental cooperation and they felt that this was a safe topic to consider and so they did it in a public forum which was heartening and it was moderated by an Indian TV host who is very prominent in Lahore so that was the first time we were able to do that but again the follow up is not possible because then you don't have the access for research opportunities what I would have liked is after that they said okay Indian and Pakistani students let's then now think about a joint project which involves a trans boundary issue and let's try to get resources to work forward on it that has not happened that may happen maybe with the south asian university or those kinds of efforts great let's throw it open to questions if you have a question just identify yourself and wait for the microphone the gentleman behind you good afternoon David Mechel with the Stimson Center thanks very much for that Salim let me ask you to talk a little bit about how do we move track 2 initiatives up to the track 1 level particularly in the context with which you've talked about developing knowledge networks academic cooperation discussions which by definition would be taking place outside of formal diplomatic circles but which may gather in retired diplomats or people with governmental affiliations but still not track 1 efforts but where the objective of integrating this information whether it be scientific research or best practices or the knowledge of indigenous peoples etc how do we move that information those recommendations up to the track 1 level yes thank you David a lot of it is dependent on the specific track 1 diplomats being willing to engage on this so one example I'll mention is Myanmar and Burma asia society had a long-standing track 2 process going on between the US and Burma, Myanmar for several years and when there was an effort made on the track 1 level as well there was leadership to engage that there was a very good interface between the two and you could see that that track 2 process was then harnessed by track 1 so because track 2 is just simply not empowered to do more the initiative has to come from track 1 to say okay yes let's capitalize on it and make that connection in the case of Burma, Myanmar it happened same asia society group have worked Suzan, Dimajio has done admirable work also on the Iran side track 2 but that has not been harnessed because the same state department initiative was not on there on that side but I guess if the track 2 doesn't exist there's nothing to when you finally decide to do something there's nothing to draw on so even if it's not going anywhere it's still worth eventually somebody hopefully will realize exactly the repertoire is there let me ask you on the visas because my understanding is that part of the MFN trade negotiations are to make it easier for Indian and Pakistani businessmen to the visa regime is going to change why wouldn't scientists be part of that or people with technical backgrounds because obviously business is somewhat reliant on technical advice and maybe also particularly in the IT space I mean the people in the IT on both sides of the border don't care about Kashmir very much they care about so that seems like a sort of fruitful area I just wanted to see what you thought about I mean I totally agree with you but unfortunately that is not how the visa regime has been framed right now it's very specific to particular kinds of business people so it would be most likely CEOs and management people who will be granted those fast visas and so you could get you know the industrialists being able to go very easily now it so happens that in some cases the industrialists also have environmental proclivities like the Tata's and the Indian side you have Syed Babur Ali on the Pakistani side who's an industrialist but he's also the founding director of WWF Pakistan so you may get some hopefully overlap but the scientists bit you know to get an academic university professor coming and going the same way unfortunately there is still this sense of suspicion that somehow they're going to you know steal the secrets to develop especially IT because computers they think are particularly vulnerable for you know hacking and so on and so forth so that has become an even more of a you know kind of a security concern and I think it's fine to vet them and do have a process but there should be a track so I hope that you know one of the sort of if there can be any impact of the report like this and your other efforts should be that both governments consider that and they should be encouraged and given assurance by experiences from places like China or Israel or wherever that it's possible to do it without compromising security great any other questions the lady here sorry with Virginia Tech Urban and regional planning you talked about beyond the Indus Waters treaty and you talked a little bit about integrative planning could you please elaborate on that actually tell us what the Indus Waters treaty basically does so that everybody understands the discussion and it was negotiated in 62 right so and what I mean how if it was going to be updated how might it look so the Indus Waters treaty came about part as a reactive solution to an ongoing dispute which was going on around water sharing in India and Pakistan so the solution initially the initiative came from David Lillianthol who was the head of the Tennessee Valley Authority in the US so this is also important to note that the US played a very interesting mediating role in this even though now the US is a kind of hands off on many of these mediation efforts but the Tennessee Valley Authority provided a lot of the kind of technical background around it but Lillianthol's original view was that let's think about the whole river basin and consider mechanisms by which water can be most efficiently and optimally used and energy generated but the World Bank's view was the World Bank was to provide funding for this project so Lillianthol was kind of advising the bank World Bank's view was you know let's try to take the path of least resistance to solve this problem path of least resistance was distributive meaning dividing up so you've got six rivers you give three to India three to Pakistan and you build infrastructure which will be able to store water during times of hydro you know hydrological variation so World Bank said okay we will build two dams on the Pakistani side Terbala and Mangla with other donor assistance as well like Mangla Dam on Jailam the US gave considerable amount of money for it too and so three rivers to India three rivers to Pakistan dams constructed problem solved and then we have a dispute resolution mechanism if there is a dispute World Bank will hire an engineer who will come in and arbitrate the dispute that was the solution it was not what Lillianthol had originally wanted was to see well where does it make sense to have water conservation where does it make sense to grow these kinds of crops here there have trade no there was no so integrative planning means just dividing it up but you are thinking about how is water used so agriculture in those context rather than what the treaty did was basically divide up the rivers so it solved the problem but it was approximate solution not an ultimate solution but you're saying it shouldn't be renegotiated or what are you saying what I'm saying is that we should let that mechanism exist because that's you know worked when you've got like a dam was being constructed by India every Pakistan complains you get an engineer there's arbitrate and this all but if you want to actually improve the resource availability don't try to renegotiate it but rather say ok India Pakistan let's have a separate regional agreement on water efficiency on cooperating over technologies around water usage on figuring out what kind of crops to grow and trade those crops because those crops are the which are using 70% of the water so if it makes more sense that India is able to grow tomatoes with less water used and less in efficiency grow the tomatoes in India trade them with Pakistan give Pakistan assurance that tomatoes are ok to trade you know and that will solve the water problem in an integrative way rather than saying well Pakistan you have promised this much water we don't care what you do with it if you're wasting it that's ok because it's your water you know and down the road there's scarcity still in the country that seems like a very sensible idea is there anybody who's doing anything about it and well there is some movement now to consider that this you know this notion of virtual water which is comes from the Middle East that water is actually imported and exported through commodities should be applied to North Asia the Punjab government in Pakistan has considered that prospect and Punjab is sort of the bread basket of Pakistan but it requires I think still much more at the international level between the two so what sort of crops are very water intensive and what sort of and don't make sense as it were but rice, rice is one particularly and rice is very much staple so that sounds like it would be difficult but is there an example of kind of crop that is water intensive but not that useful in the wide I mean rice is not going to be abolished from the South Asian diet? No not to abolish it but to let it be grown and traded where it makes more sense to grow it and trade it and that may require it to be also more regional you know it could involve China it could involve other countries where it is you know you have Southeast Asian countries as well so but then there are other crops which can be certainly less water intensive their cash crops also which we can consider like cotton is important clearly for the textile sector you know you could have the wheat clearly is another one which has been growing in prominence so you know I'm not saying they need to change the diet or anything it's just looking at where is it that you're going like for example I mean in Sindh parts of Sindh you have a very dry climate but there has been irrigation allowing them to grow crops there a lot of the water is basically lost in evaporation during that period so it may not make sense to be you know growing crops in those parts of Sindh it may make sense to be growing those crops in parts of Uttar Pradesh in India and being able to actually import them and there's a lot of strange of them where it may be Any other questions? Mr. Chairman here? Thank you I'm Leon I'm wondering if external funding let's say in the area of health from an organization like the Gates Foundation or the National Academy of Sciences from the US might be applicable in certain areas that to try to set a spark for interregional type of cooperation that is not being available right now I think so absolutely the Gates Foundation has a particular interest in health and I think that this dengue situation as well as the polio situation in Pakistan has potential for Gates engagement now that ties into like the polio issue is very much tied to education we cannot extricate the two because of the same I mentioned the conspiratorial rhetoric and so on so some of the efforts which I have done externally is around environmental education in like Islamic schools and other schools also across the region to make sure people do not have a conspiratorial view of health care which has sadly been the case with polio and so the Gates Foundation can potentially help I think they would be considered more neutral than US government funding definitely and you know Gates in India is very well regarded of course and they have invested enormously in India in Pakistan also he is actually quite well regarded because of some of the efforts and over chores which he has done in there was a Pakistani young student who was the youngest Microsoft employee and she sadly died not because of any you know terrorist activity she just had a natural death and because of that there was a lot of engagement from Bill Gates in Pakistan and I was hoping at that point this was just last year that there would be some momentum from Gates Foundation it has not transpired yet but I think that's a great idea and if you have I think access there you should certainly support that it's interesting this epidemiology issue because this is sort of like trade it's very kind of concrete it's affects both countries rather directly and yet there's almost no kind of discussion between Indian epidemiologists and Pakistani epidemiologists very limited yes it's unfortunate I mean there is the World Health Organization has you know staff in both countries but apart from that the collaboration between governmental agencies on public health has been very limited if anything there's more of this kind of fortress mentality okay well if there's an epidemic here don't let people in and all but rather than saying let's try to cooperate and in Lahore when this dengue epidemic happened Shabash Sharif the chief minister of Punjab said that you know this is an area he would like to support so maybe this year we've had less of a dengue problem this past year because Lahore is so close to India in a sense a lot of the sort of impetus for somebody's shed seems to be coming out of Lahore whether it's a trade or whether it's the environmentalists or that's right it's the second largest city in Pakistan it's right on the border there's much potential I mean there is already regular bus service there's a train service to India so Lahore can be you know a focal point for more Indo park efforts and so I think and also the the provincial government is being more responsive than in the past so I'm hopeful let's see what happens now the next election any other questions this gentleman here hello I'm Sarath I'm from Nepal I have been your student my question is you talked about environment has been in low politics and if I speak from experience of Nepal that environment policymaking has been always top down and when we talk about environmental conservation we hardly talk about people's life and livelihoods in policymaking level therefore how can we connect that discussion about this ecological cooperation with people's life and livelihood and so that it generate discussion debates at the public level yes absolutely thank you yes so job creation which is the main aspect of livelihoods often because most of the people in South Asia are connected to a market economy and so subsistence lifestyles are very rare I mean you have in some mountainous areas actually have subsistence but most of it is still connected to a market economy there is potential for job creation around environmental issues first of all I mean peace would create more job opportunities I think overall because you would get you know economic growth would allow for that to happen and especially in Pakistan economic growth has been stifled because of insecurity so I would say that if you had environmental cooperation with peace dividends you would get more livelihood creation as a result but even beyond that if you focus on certain kinds of industries where there is what we may call comparative advantage for these countries you could generate a lot of livelihoods so for example with regard to renewable energy sector there is potential to create a lot of jobs and livelihoods cooperation between India and Pakistan you have got good IT sector you have you know cheaper labor in Pakistan I mean this is the argument for greater trade also which Pakistan is fair that you know India will become more dominant but the reality is because labor is cheaper in Pakistan and the currency is far more devalued it is more likely that you will actually get Indians investing in Pakistan and setting up factories and so on to encourage I mean we have seen that actually interestingly enough with Pakistanis investing in Bangladesh the textile sector in Bangladesh large parts of it is controlled by Pakistanis who invested in Bangladesh because the labor was cheaper and there was more energy access so you see there will be job creation opportunities around and I think green technologies especially has tremendous potential in that arena for manufacturing Pakistan has you know very sound textile sector you have probably seen the HSBC ads and airports would say Pakistan is the world's second largest exporter of textiles so you know there is tremendous potential in those areas to create jobs but do it in an ecologically efficient way so I mean if you do like energy conservation if you can improve the profile in Pakistan through better greener approaches to energy you will lift the whole industrial sector right now the biggest crisis in Pakistan from an economic perspective is the shortage of energy whether it is gas or hydroelectric and so on and so if you are able to improve the efficiency through environmental cooperation you would raise that my understanding is that the Pakistan generates enough energy to satisfy all its needs but it it has been lost somewhere along the way is that because people are stealing it or is it because of inefficiencies or what is that well there are different perspectives on the supply demand situation I would say Pakistan with its current forecast for population growth and development does not have I think enough energy for and it depends what it is like for example for heating you don't want to use electricity for heating you want to use natural gas for heating and natural gas is a huge shortage so I mean if you go to Pakistan right now in Islam the biggest complaint is people just don't have even the most affluent homes they cannot get gas they have to buy cylinders of gas so I mean there is the clear energy shortage there because you want to use the right kind of energy for the right thing now if you have enough energy for the industrial sector from like hydropower and all probably yes there is a lot of inefficiency in the system but you know the whole but you've got the problem as you've got some industries which are linked to gas they built the whole infrastructure around gas now you don't have gas so then what do you do then you have to you get a pipeline from Iran right yes well that's I am a supporter of the two pipelines too because I think in the long run for natural gas because you know the other forms of electricity have potential like certainly hydroelectric but you need a mobile energy source as well so gas is the most versatile that way because you can use it for cars for CNG in cars you can use it for electricity generation you can use it for direct heating so you don't so it has a carbon footprint yes it's much lower than coal and oil but it has much more versatility and so and the the pipeline infrastructure in Pakistan especially for gas is very good so if you could actually get the supply you could have most of the cities immediately have access to gas you have after Argentina Pakistan until recently because of this crisis had the highest CNG prevalence of any country in the world which will compress natural gas in cars you had 60 70% of all the cars using gas cylinders in the back of the car and you had reduced pollution and so on but now because the supply constraint is there you don't have so I think the pipeline as well as LNG the liquefied natural gas terminals both are important any other questions well because we don't have we've run out of our indigenous gas generation capacity to a large degree there's also been a lot of terrorist activity around gas infrastructure especially in Balochistan which has been a problem but overall the supply is much less too so a lot of the region gas has been depleted there isn't that much left so Pakistan then has to get either gas through tankers through liquefied natural gas or through pipeline and the demand is going to be so much that you probably need both so the pipelines make a lot of sense for that reason that they will provide I think also they could have peace dividends I mean if you frame them properly and you provide enough security and so on both of them and just so we're clear that one of them would come from Iran through Pakistan to India which the United States is blocking would like to block but Pakistan is basically saying you don't really have a vote on this issue on the Iranian side it's been built on the Pakistani side they're trying to figure out the funding and I've argued in some earlier work I did for Brookings around pipelines that the U.S. government has actually given a waiver to Turkey, Turkey imports gas from Iran and you know there are no sanctions on Turkey for importing it so it is very much within the U.S. government's ability to wave Pakistan's importing of gas from Iran so this is clearly an opportunity I think for double peace building both with Iran and with Pakistan and there is enough demand that it wouldn't undermine the TAPI project because initially there was that okay if we have this then the TAPI project would just take Pakistan through Afghanistan to Pakistan and then to India but do you think this will ever be built I mean there's been a discussion of this for a long time but I mean Afghanistan is still in it personally. Well I mean you know if there can be more security provided along the pipeline it can be done I mean if you think about the argument often the naysayers say well that region is so volatile they'll blow up the pipeline but there are ways to provide security it would raise the cost of the gas but it can be done one example is the you know the Baku Tbilisi Chehan pipeline from Azerbaijan through Georgia to Turkey goes through the most volatile part of Turkey the Kurdish separatist areas many times there have been attempts at attacks but they have a very sound security system British Petroleum was the main corporate investor in that IFC provided financing and it's working it's been working for 10 years now initially it was a very controversial project but it's done fine I would have hoped they would have actually built it partly through Armenia where you could get more peace divisions between Azerbaijan and Armenia they didn't do that they actually bypassed Armenia but it's okay at least it's improved relations between Azerbaijan and Turkey and Georgia well Selim thank you very much for this very interesting presentation thank you for the paper thank you very much