 My name is Charles Freeman. I am the Freeman Chair in China Studies here at CSIS. It's a great pleasure to be here and to see so many people interested in something that for us has been a bit of a labor of love for the past little bit. This is a project, look at Asia's response to climate change and natural disasters. This is a project which we've been working on with the very generous support of the MacArthur Foundation and I want to acknowledge them up front, both in terms of their putting their faith in us to do the project but as well as the interaction that we've had over the course of the past year or so with them and trying to define and make sure that this is a useful and relevant exercise. The point of this really has been to try to look at Asian integration and see how that's coming together. We started from the premise that Asia is not Europe and the factors that led to the European Union are not present in the case of Asia but there certainly is an integration in Asia and economic and other areas and looking at how those play out and what the current setup is in a range of key areas is really kind of critical to determine what the pathway forward is. So what we did is we looked at some areas where there has been some issues where there has been efforts by Asian countries to work together. Part of this and specifically in areas of natural disaster relief which Stacey will talk about areas with respect to finding secure low carbon pathways which Dave Pumper will talk about and then we had some focus on broader climate change issues which we covered sort of in a separate area. If you haven't seen it, this is the masterwork that we've come out with. It not only represents a lot of hard work by a lot of people in this room it represents really a collaboration with some very sound scholars and for CSIS which is known as a place which internally we don't play well with others we actually played pretty well with others here and getting this project to come together working with multiple disciplinary sections within the institution. With that let me stop my bladder and ask Dave Pumper to talk about secure low carbon pathways we'll turn it over to Ambassador Schaefer to focus on regional institutions and climate change and then turn to Stacey White for a discussion of disaster management. Victor Cha who eventually will show up. I have it on good authority. Our career chair will talk about the geometry of Asia's regional security architecture which is pretty interesting and last but not least by any means we have Kurt Tong who's the APEC ambassador come in and tell us why everything we've done has been useless. Hardly, does that let me turn it over to Dave Pumper. Was that word useless? Thanks Charles. And thanks everyone for coming out this afternoon. This has certainly been a very interesting project. I'm with the Energy and National Security Program here at CSIS and we've been spending a lot of time on this question about how do you get from the high fossil world in which we live into a low carbon one and done a lot of work around the US but this gave us an opportunity to start looking at this question on a much broader basis and taking it to Asia. And I want to thank Sarah Ladislaw who I think was coming down and the other parts of the energy program team that helped pull this chapter together because even though it's relatively short there was quite a bit of work that had to go on to try to distill down a lot of complicated modeling work that others had done. First what the concept on a secure low carbon pathway really derives from the idea that when you look at energy policy you can't just look at one aspect of that policy. So the climate change discussion going on currently in international debate usually focuses on the question of how do you reduce your carbon emissions? How do you get there? But in reality countries need to be looking at how they balance their economic concerns, their energy security and reliability concerns with this question of how do you reduce your emissions over time. So we wanted to really look at in this set of countries and we took a subset of the Asia region just because it made it more manageable. What are the issues that different countries face? What are the opportunities? What are the options to move forward? And also what are the differences between the concerns of the countries and then what are the differences potentially in the options that they face? And then finally what some recommendations on what might be done on a regional basis to try to get to the secure low carbon pathways. To do this we brought together some leading researchers from institutes in China, India, Japan, Korea, Taiwan and the US to present the results of their modeling work. Now we didn't have time and money basically to run a whole bunch of new models. We tried to take and digest the work that they had done and put it on a more common basis and that's what the result was in this chapter in the book that you have in front of you. The reason this group of countries is so important is that currently there are well over half of global emissions occur in the six economies that we are examining. But even more important is that it's expected that about three-quarters or more of the growth in emissions out through 2035 will take place in this group of countries. So this is a key set of countries to understand from their perspective what the opportunities are, what the pathways are that make sense and how they might get there because if you're going to enter into international negotiations and keep those going you need to understand where the concerns are of your other partners in the negotiations. The results, not things here that I think are surprising but it was good to actually lay them side by side is that each of the countries we looked at and do I have to use economies here? Am I going to get shot if I? Okay, there we go. For those of you familiar with the APEC process you'll understand my realizing I'm maybe speaking out of turn but each economy has its own set of concerns and drivers and that's not surprising. If you look at a country like China which is in the news all the time now around energy and climate change, China's got an economy that has been built around heavy industry, very energy intensive industry that has basically become a concern for how their future growth will go having that structure of industry. They also have an energy system that's been built around coal, indigenous coal that has been able to be mined and delivered. Now for China in many ways I think the biggest energy security concern they have is this reliance on coal. That delivering coal has strained their internal infrastructure, they are basically having to look to foreign markets now for coal for their future. So when you have an economy that's 70% dependent on coal you need to begin thinking about how you move away from that. So when you look at the options that they've taken on their options have been how do you improve efficiency and change your economic structure into one that will be less energy intensive and then secondly how do you deploy technologies, energy production technologies that are either lower carbon or zero carbon. So in many ways there's an alignment in the economic energy and environmental concerns for China that are driving it towards a much less carbon intensive world. Now they're starting from a base that's extremely intensive so when you look at that you have to understand that it is not going to be an instantaneous change. If you look at a country like India it has some of the same characteristics, very heavy dependence on coal and some heavy industry but they have a driver that is really built around... Kirk, how are you doing? Built around... Okay there's always a good story. Built around the need to deal with poverty. They have 400 million people, the largest population set in the world of any country, people who don't have access to commercial energy. This is a key driver in India that they must deal with as they're looking at the structure of their energy sector. So to Indian policy makers extending the energy grid and bringing it in a reasonably priced way to consumers is pivotal in how they look at it. I won't go through all the countries but I think needless to say if you're watching the debate here in the U.S. we have our sets of concerns as well. That we don't have the growth possibilities in our energy sector to be able to be substituting in easily or bringing in new technologies. We have to substitute those into the system. So there's a question of how you displace current incumbents in the energy system. Strong concerns in the U.S. that what's going to happen will lead to higher prices and therefore drive the economy down. So we have similar concerns. Japan I think shares those concerns. Korea is sort of in the middle ground because it's a country that is looking at opportunities to shift out of its heavy industry basis and perhaps it can drive its economic growth around this green revolution that they think is coming. So you have these variations of the country's situations but there are similarities in the solution. So the first solution that comes across in every country is that efficiency is key. Now there's always the political commitment to efficiency. The practical commitment is very different. In China you see a very focused commitment to improving the efficiency in other countries. It's still a political commitment rather than one that's being driven. Also there's the need to deploy these lower carbon technologies and you see that in the way in which countries are looking at renewables and perhaps nuclear and even natural gas as a way to do that. So you have differing situations on the economy but solutions are very similar. And then the third area that we thought was important to develop was that competitiveness becomes a very important question here. So I mentioned already the competitiveness issue that we in the U.S. face which is we have industries that feel like they will no longer be able to compete on the world market if energy prices go up here and so they really fear the imposition of carbon pricing in the U.S. So that's one concern that you'll see in Japan some degree in Korea. The other side of the coin is how do you build up the industrial capacity to produce these technologies for the future and Korea I think is a good example of a very focused effort to take advantage of this green future. So with that kind of a picture we got to the question of what do you do in terms of regional collaboration and I guess being sort of an analyst at heart I felt like the effort we did in bringing together the researchers on these questions was really valuable and needs to continue and need to really educate the negotiation process to a greater degree. So we felt like it was important to continue this dialogue around secure low-carbon pathways so that you really understand where your negotiating partners are coming from. What's the scope of possibilities for them to be able to enter into new agreements. The next one really gets from this point about if everyone is trying to use the new clean energy technologies as the driver for their economy how are you going to have an environment where everyone produces it and who's going to buy it. So the question of green protectionism came up in several of our discussionisms as something that needs to be thought about and kept in mind and needs to be avoided if you're trying to deal with this issue of doing the deployment of clean energy technologies. You need to recognize the strengths that countries can bring to the table to be able to produce these technologies at a cost that allows them to be absorbed into the marketplace. So we think this is an important regional discussion to continue is how to balance out using green technologies as a driver for economic growth but not doing it in a way that stifles the deployment of the technologies that you're trying to use to develop your economy. I think and this becomes a bit of a segue into Tessie's discussions but the idea of really deepening the regional collaboration around these common solutions is important. So what are the strategies for energy efficiency that work to move more efficient technologies into the marketplace? Practices, building standards, et cetera that people can be used and you can share the experiences across the region and be able to understand better. With the deployment of green technologies, what works, what doesn't work, what are the cost profiles that can be done. And then finally, and this reflects, I guess, a point of time where there was wishful thinking amongst us who thought that the U.S. was actually moving to a point where it might be going to set a carbon price internally on our market, I'm not so sure anymore. But at any rate, to the extent the carbon markets begin to emerge and different countries start setting a price on carbon, there needs to be regional collaboration around how to make these carbon markets work together smoothly so that the advantages and the power of the marketplace that a carbon market can create can be taken full advantage rather than having just separately operating markets. So with that, Ambassador Shaper? I'm sorry, Mr. Chairman, back to you. Are you going to have to pawn the ball back to me? Well, thank you very much. And like green light, even better. I want to acknowledge the hard work done by my research assistant, Uttara Dokhipati, and by Alex Matthews, who was an intern in our program in the last semester. In a sense, I have two roles in this project. First of all, I'm the only person in the crew whose primary responsibility has to do with that part of Asia that is west of Burma. Some people don't think that exists, but it actually does, and it's got a hell of a lot of people living there in the event primarily India. The other, which is reflected in what I'm going to talk about is that I took on the task of trying to figure out what the Asian regional organizations had done in the climate change area, and what they had done to bring together an Asian viewpoint or Asian viewpoints on this issue. And these two perspectives actually worked pretty well together. I'll tackle first the second question. What has been the role of Asian regional institutions? They have done a lot in the area of consciousness raising. They have all, for the most part, issued statements underlining the importance of climate change as an issue that the countries in the region must deal with. They have begun the laborious process of setting forth some kind of action plan, but when it comes right down to it, they actually haven't done much else. Now, this kind of consciousness raising is all that the regional countries were demanding of them. And it also fits in with the fact that the regional institutions, as I think Victor will say later on, have relatively modest goals. These are not institutions that see themselves as the precursors to something like the EU. And this is a region where separate sovereignty is taken very seriously and where the ethic of regional institutions is you don't trample on somebody else's sovereignty, at least not overtly. But it's been a cautious and careful and fairly hesitant foray into the world of climate change. The biggest accomplishments, I think, go to APEC, the organization that also includes the largest number of economies, and they do call them economies because they include both China and Chinese Taipei, is that the right magic word? But they have, most of the work they've done has been under the mantle of their energy program, and they have set up a number of research projects which are, at least in principle, set up with a practical bent. ASEAN has gotten interested in climate change, but its formal action program has not done very much with it, with one interesting exception that I will come to in a minute. The third of the major regional organizations is the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation known as SARC, which is India and its seven closest neighbors, which because of the structure of the South Asian region is a very weak organization and doesn't really have aspirations become a whole lot stronger. India is uncomfortable encouraging the other seven as it would be seen from Delhi to gang up on them. The other seven are acutely conscious of how much smaller they are than India. But SARC, it turns out, developed an action plan on climate change. It hasn't moved terribly far with the action plan, but actually getting to the planning stage is a notable accomplishment. The interesting exception to this record of very modest and cautious action actually comes from ASEAN and it's a fascinating one. The ASEAN countries have one unique problem, and that is the problem of haze generated by the burning of Indonesia's peat bogs from Indonesia's tropical forests. Indonesia is one of three countries that has humongous acreage in tropical forests. And basically, when you get rid of these tropical forests, you emit more in a year than most of the rest of the world combined does with all of its burning. So that basically through no fault of the sun, through the bounty of nature, they are in a position to do worse or better for the global emissions problem than practically anybody else. When they burn the peat, it emits smog that messes up its neighbors. Most of the ASEAN countries have now signed a treaty on the control of transboundary haze as the term they use. The one country that hasn't signed it is, you guessed it, Indonesia. So by the normal way these things are measured, this is a failure. But it turns out that while Indonesia was not willing to sign and was full of outrage at this outrageous intrusion on its sovereignty, they were willing through the back door to do some of the things envisaged by the treaty to set up mechanisms that provided resources to do, take other actions in the urban areas. In other words, they found a messy approach that mitigates the problem for which the treaty was intended. So the lesson for those of us who watch the region from the outside is the legal mechanisms of which Americans tend to be so fond are not necessarily self-executing. And they may have an impact not so much because everybody observes them as because people acknowledge an underlying problem and find some other way of approaching it. Which leads me to my second thought, namely, what is the comparative advantage of regional institutions? Well, I would say there are three things that regional institutions are likely to be better at than global ones. The first is the one we've just talked about, dealing with problems that are unique and specific to the region. Besides the Hayes problem, there's the problem of glacial melt in the Himalayas. There are problems connected with the Mekong River Delta. These are not generic. The solutions are going to arise out of very specific rivers and mountains and what have you in this particular region. And that's a situation where global organizations are not particularly well set up to be helpful. The second advantage of regional institutions is regional networking. Now, in principle, there's no reason why several different Asian countries attending the G20 can't network to their hearts content. But the fact is if you have an organization that's based nearby to which travel doesn't require going through eight or ten time zones, which includes a lot of countries from the region, you tend to get other kinds of business done there and you tend to build relationships there and that's one of the valuable tools in approaching this problem. The other comparative advantage of regional institutions is the setting of regional expectations. This is the one area where the Asian regional institutions actually have begun to make a contribution. You can't measure it. You can't notch up legal obligations that people have undertaken. You can't even say that this percentage of the emissions have now been prevented. But I think in the grand scheme of things that this is helpful. Now, there are other areas in which global institutions are likely to be more effective. I'm not going to discuss this at any length, but let me just make two points. There are, I think, six Asian countries that are members of the G20. This is a forum that, for all of them, is extremely important. They have not tried to use it as a vehicle for getting an Asian point of view across and it's not, in fact, clear that there is an Asian point of view. I dare say that India, China, Japan all have their own angle and the smaller Asian countries. India and the world is smaller compared to the India and China part of that. Also have their own angle and don't necessarily want to get it thrown in the blender with these three. But all of these countries want to contribute and see this as an important arena for contributing. The other organization that's tremendously important is the International Energy Agency, which has taken on climate change as one of its major interests, but which does not include either India or China, which is one of the most important energy markets in the world. This isn't the place to go into the historical issues that led to that situation. It basically has to do with the fact that the IEA grew out of the OECD, which is a developed countries club, but it certainly is a structural anomaly in the way the world deals with climate change and one that, at least in my judgment, we ought to be trying to change. So what did my portion of this report recommend? Well, first of all, this is something that you find in most reports of this nature and ours is not an exception. Stronger US dialogue, not just with the countries of the region, but also with the organizations. This is pushing on an open door. I think that's something the US is doing anyhow. We saw some very useful examples of it, but it's something that we would encourage to continue to be strengthened. The second is building capacity in Asia for dealing with issues of energy efficiency and climate change. We could probably apply that recommendation to the United States as well, but since this was of that Asia, that's what we're talking about. A third point is that the regional organizations are well placed to serve as gatherers of data and of expertise, and this in particular is a function that could usefully be built up. Another point, which doesn't fit naturally within any one organization, but which is something that I think US policy ought to be cognizant of, is the need to do Asia-wide outreach. If the organizational structure in Asia doesn't make that easy, and it doesn't, there is no one organization that includes all the Asian countries and the United States, which is kind of the universe that we'd be talking about, then you work with what you got. I don't think that there's much to be served by looking for neatness and tidiness in the world of Asian regionalism. Looking beyond the directly US policy agenda, I've already mentioned my concerns about the international atomic energy and the international non-atomic, the international energy agency, the atomic ones have all these kits in them, needing to expand its ambit. And the other thing I would note is the utility of policy coordination or at least serious policy dialogue before major meetings like the G20, between the United States and the major Asian countries that are in a position to influence the outcome in more ways than one. Perfect. Thank you. Let's turn to Stacey. You've got three minutes. Sorry. My name is Stacey White. I work with CSIS's post-on-con board for this project to look specifically at disaster management. Sorry about that. To look specifically at disaster management in the context of regional integration and how it was either fostering or distracting from regionalism in Asia. So our time is short here. I'll give a really macro view of the evolution of the architecture really since the time of the tsunami, which was a landmark event in terms of providing an impetus to Asian nations to actually work together on transboundary risk. When I started this project, it was interesting. I thought, oh, it's in Asia. I'm not an Asia hand. I'm a humanitarian practitioner by trade. So I thought it was very much like an Asia-specific project. But what I learned was it was really an Asia-first project. There are many things happening in the region which are pushing the global humanitarian agenda in ways that we haven't seen elsewhere. And this is due not only to the astonishing risk that you see in Asia, and it's off-decided that Asia is the most disaster-prone region in the world, but also due to the fact that there really is our maturing economies and strong political nations that can actually take on some of this disaster risk and this disaster management themselves and they want to do so. How I focused on this is basically we looked at case studies. So we looked at six case studies, four of which were sudden onset disasters starting with the tsunami, cashmere, Nargis, and the Szechuan earthquake. But also as a means to tie it to Dave and Casey's work, is to look at slow onset crises because actually the notion of disaster risk has been changing quite dramatically during the course of time that these regional institutions have stepped up their activities. So we also looked at the Mekong River as well as the melting glaciers or the third pole issue, which is something that Tacey touched upon. Really, I see Asia as an exciting place to watch over the next 10 or 15 years. I mean, people talk about the Asian century and they talk about the age of nature and I really think that these two things are going to interface in Asia in the future and really have a profound impact not only on that region but on the world and on how we address disaster risk in the future. So it was an exciting project to work on. In short, there's been intensive activity in Asia since the tsunami and there have been many specialized instruments that have either been reinforced or stepped up or work committees have been given further resources to look exactly at disaster risk management and some of these achievements of particular note are of course ASEAN's ratification of ADMIR which is the first legal framework for regional cooperation for disaster risk management and in fact they've developed the work program already and that was launched or announced in May of this year and that will actually outlines the implementation of that treaty from 2010 through 2015. It also established the legal framework for the beginnings of an AHAS coordination center for the region. ARF's also been working very hard to sort of link the military civilian component which is a major issue globally but a particularly important issue in Asia since many of these countries have a military capability to actually respond to disasters themselves within their national borders. And then of course, Tasi mentioned SARC and Southeast Asia has maybe not been as dynamic but they certainly have established a disaster management center in 2006 and they've embarked on a process to bring together different maps from all the different countries that are a member of SARC to do kind of a digital vulnerability atlas for the whole region and as far as I understand that hasn't been attempted anywhere else thus far with any sort of success. And then of course APEC elevated its emergency task force on emergency preparedness to a working group in February and remains committed to looking into this issue. So there have been great, great strides. What I found when I interviewed many people of the unsaid perceptions of how things are working is that people were quite critical about how all of this hyperactivity really panned out in terms of making communities safer. And so it is true that the marketplace has become really crowded and convoluted and it's not really so clear how much of all of the movement is resulting in either an enhanced standby and surge capacity for the region in terms of response or in terms of really helping nations with real tools for managing disasters on their own. That said, for the purposes of my research, I didn't focus on that because I actually see the international humanitarian regime as being in a bit of a state of crisis itself. So I find that these institutions were established and are finding their own feet and their own identities in this particular area at a time when people are really questioning the assumptions of how we do mitigation and how we do preparedness and what is exactly the confluence between humanitarian delivery and longer-term development goals. So with that, I just really wanted to look at how one might build upon these formative efforts and how these different institutions could actually rationalize their discrete capabilities so that they could complement each other over the long term. I came up with kind of five key challenges or dilemmas that I see these original institutions facing as they move forward. One of which is one thing we see a lot of and it was mentioned by many of the people I interviewed is that while disaster risk has facilitated a really strong level of cooperation and trust amongst nations, it also risks to divert these countries from actually working on disaster management. What has happened is that many of the meetings are real talk shops and actually brings together these nations on other issues that might be more controversial, but what really needs to happen now is they need to just kind of focus in on the agenda at hand and really look at developing tools at these different conferences and meetings and working groups that they're part of. The other thing I found was that the Asian states are kind of torn between committing themselves to these regional institutions and to the various regional mechanisms and initiatives that I described earlier and really managing disasters on their own. I mean, these are strong economies. One thing that was noted many times is that Asian nations really, it's part of kind of state building. If you have good disaster management, you're a strong nation. So they very much want to manage disasters to the best of their own ability and they do not want second and third and fourth layers of bureaucracy getting involved in action. They still want to be able to act bilaterally, to assist each other bilaterally, but to have certain tools from the regional institutions that would help them to do that more easily. And because Asia is such a diverse region in terms of capability and risk, regional institutions will need to take care that they're able to tailor their support to nations. What might work for Indonesia is not going to work for Vietnam. So they really have to be quite aware of the capacity of the different nation member states they're dealing with. The other thing I noted was that, and this is true not just in Asia, but there's a real uncoordinated donor environment, and this has inadvertently encouraged the bankrolling of different kind of duplicative efforts. And I don't think it's particularly abnormal. This was at a time when many of these institutions were finding their feed and in the humanitarian sector, sometimes you have projects for 18 months, so basically you're always looking to sustain yourself. But I do think that if you have many external donors who are really looking to engage in Asia, which many of them are, that they really need to get disciplined and think smart and strategically about which of these institutions should be doing what and how they can complement one another. Another issue that came up that I touched upon was the use of the military. And I think the trick for multilateral arrangements now, ARF being obviously at the forefront of that, is to build the humanitarian capacity and the clear rules of engagement for militaries in the region to go into other countries should there be the need and should they be asked to do so in a way that does not make states uncomfortable or insecure about rising militarism in the region, is something that I think nations do not want to go back to. And then finally, an interesting thing that's happening is I find all of these, the proliferation of regional institutions in Asia to me is really kind of a little bit coming to the future as we have more disasters everywhere and not just in the hapless south. I think there will be a real effort to localize and regionalize not only assessment and advocacy and action, but even movements of money to finance responses. And so what is happening in Asia is interesting in the sense that these regional institutions will need to figure out how they're going to nest within international machinery. And what I would suggest is that these regional institutions do not look to duplicate what the United Nations offers already but actually they've been built out of a very different era and I actually think they can transcend and fill gaps in areas where the UN is perhaps not performing as it could for the 21st century. So I would challenge these institutions to really look at themselves differently and to actually know that they can perform in different ways in different ways from what the international apparatus currently delivers. And I think I'll leave it at that. Thank you. Thanks, Charles. Well, I think first I want to, and you probably already did this, we're really grateful to the MacArthur Foundation for allowing us to do this research and I particularly wanted to thank Bob Huang. I don't know if he was out there in the audience for shepherding this whole process. He was going to get an incredible job. You know, unlike everybody else up here, I don't have any data. I did no field research. The only thing I can claim to have his data experience on this is that the tsunami that Stacey referred to was my second day of work at the White House on the NSC doing Asia. So that 24-hour delay in the U.S. response was basically my on-the-job training. My role in this was to take the very good work that had been done on each of these areas and try to induce from what we learned about disaster response, climate change, or carbon pathways, and try to induce from this what are some of the lessons about more broadly region architecture in Asia. And for this, for a time's sake, let me just say that there are sort of three main findings that came out of this. And I think each of them in one way or another undercuts sort of the conventional wisdom or conventional thinking about architecture in Asia. The first finding I think from looking at these studies of disaster response and climate change is that there really is no single architecture that defines Asia. The conventional wisdom and the comparison is always to Europe. And it's often to NATO or to the EU or to other sorts of large mega-organizations that we see, institutions that we see in Europe. And the absence of those institutions in Asia leads everybody to say, well, there really is no architecture emerging in Asia. And I think one of the things that this project shows in terms of the way the region has responded to disasters and with regard to climate change is that the absence of one single overarching structure does not necessarily connote failure in terms of regional architecture. And it should not be surprising that there is not one single architecture, not even APEC, sorry Kurt, not even APEC that plays that role. The second is that ad hoc institutions or groupings may actually work better than formal ones in Asia. Again, the conventional wisdom in terms of architectures you think of formal institutions that have a set membership, that have a secretariat, that have joint statements, that have processes, that's the way we often measure architecture. And I think what these cases of, particularly in the case of disaster response shows is that what you often have or what often works best are these informal groupings that come together to deal with a functional problem, a very specific functional problem. These are the ones that seem to be the most effective or where much of the activity seems to be clustered in Asia. In terms of disaster response, the tsunami response very clearly, the core group that was formed among the United States, India, Australia and Japan was again a very ad hoc response to a very specific problem that I think most would agree was fairly successful. This sort of ad hoc informal gathering is interesting because it means a lot of the collective action problems that you have with regional groupings often you're able to circumvent them because if you have informal groups that come together, the countries or the economies that have the most interest in solving the problems are the ones that step up. So you start to resolve the collective action problem simply through the informality and ad hoc nature of these groupings. The third broader finding is that bilateral architecture in Asia and multilateral architecture in Asia are not necessarily opposed to one another. Again, the conventionalism is the most prominent architecture that we know of in Asia is the U.S. bilateral alliances and that somehow this operates at odds with indigenous regional multilateral groupings that form. And I think what these studies show is that's not the case at all. In many cases, bilateral relationships and these multilateral groupings are actually reinforcing and often you cannot pull together strong effective multilateral groupings unless they are based on pre-existing very deep bilateral relationships. So there I think that that's a common misconception that I think was proven wrong in cases like the tsunami and other cases. When you pull all this together, the upshot of all this is again the architecture in Asia is not EAS. It's not one large institution, but it's actually much more fluid and it's much more complex. And it's a patchwork. The term we use in the paper is a patchwork of these different very fluid ad hoc informal groupings that are often overlapping. Whether it's the tsunami core group on the one hand, the U.S.-Japan-Australia TSD on the other, the plus three, the six party talks. You have all of these different functional groupings that form to solve specific problems and that taken as a collective is your architecture. Now some people may think that's awfully complex. How can you call that architecture? But sometimes, ironically, complexity can actually be a good thing because complexity and fluidity can allow for groups that might have political tensions with one another to be able to work together in one grouping. So I think in Stacey's paper, she talks about China and Taiwan being able to work together in terms of certain disaster response capacity building. If China is not a part of one group, this is not exclusion because that may not be a functional task that they are best suited to solve. But China will be part of a different grouping. So complexity helps actually to mute some of the insecurity spirals that we see in terms of membership in Asia. There are clearly disadvantages to complexity as well. One of the disadvantages in Stacey referred to it in terms of disaster responses, when you have many different organizations doing disaster response or one piece of it or another piece of it, you often have duplication. And that might not be the most efficient way of doing things. We could have, I think, the term that uses hyperactivity in terms of some of these sorts of things that can be very inefficient. The other problem with this sort of informal functional groupings is when you have informal groups that come together to solve a specific problem, it often means time horizons are very short. So some of the slow onset disasters, these sorts of functional groupings may not be well positioned to deal with, because they're looking to try to solve a crisis of the day rather than something that's evolving over decades. The last thing I would say, because we all want to hear Kurt, so the last thing I want to say is that one of the things that I found interesting in terms of thinking about US and security architecture in Asia is that disaster response, for example, is one area where it's kind of, a lot of things are happening on the ground. It's fairly low profile, but it is the one area where you really see the region working to try to find effective solutions for it. And, you know, the United States, we are interested in being part of the architecture in Asia. The alliances are a key part of the architecture in Asia, but this disaster response activity is the one thing that the region has been doing quite vigorously and effectively, and it's the one area where they are producing real results. And therefore, I think this is one area where the United States, if it wants to maintain itself as a central part of this architecture in Asia, needs to be quite focused on in addition to our bilateral alliances. So with that, thank you. Thanks, Victor. Before I turn it over to Kurt really quickly, since Victor already outed him, to say that one of the audacity, audacious things about this project was, as I said at the beginning, the fact that we already actually had to work together to do a project. And we were very lucky, just dumb luck, I guess, that one of State Department's best diplomats landed on our doorstep in time to actually help us work together, and it required hours of deaf diplomacy. And thanks to Bob Wong, really this project came off. Bob not only worked between offices here to make this happen, he actually worked with external organizations on this as well. So Bob did a remarkable job, ably assisted, I should say, by Jeff Bean, who's in the back, who really was magical in bringing this together and making sure we hit the high notes and hit the deadline. So thanks to Bob and to Jeff for the hard work. I also want to note Amy Searide is one of the authors here. She should be up on this panel, but she's not. Thank you, Amy, for all the work that you did. And now, the moment we've all been waiting for, Kurt. Great. Come on, right? Thanks and good afternoon, everybody. Real pleasure to be here. I promise there's a good story for why I was late. I don't know how many of you have 18-year-old daughters, but mine misplaced her telephone in a movie theater in Manila. And I had visions of that telephone calling Fiji and just being left on. So I needed to resolve that crisis first. So crisis response, right? Didn't have a coalition doing it. I did it by myself. So just very, very pleased to see this report. And I strongly endorse its contents and recommendations and the thoughtful work that's gone into it. The fact that there's this focus on climate change in particular, disaster preparedness, but climate change in particular, I think, reflects the fact that this issue and more broadly the environmental impact of rapid economic growth in the Asia-Pacific region is absolutely central to our common futures. And often we're in internal discussions thinking about what are the main challenges for U.S. policy in the Asia-Pacific region? The ones that come out are macroeconomic rebalancing, economic integration in the form of deepening trade ties and dealing with the environmental impact of the rapid growth that's taking place. So this is a very timely, very important report. I just want to endorse the contents of it. I think that the findings are absolutely dead on, that there's great logic in using regional approaches to address these issues, but that the regional institutions that currently exist to address these are either not performing optimally or could do a better job, be organized differently, and there's ways for us to make this work better. And I think that you heard different aspects of that from the different presenters and it all made quite a lot of sense. I completely endorse Victor's view that flexibility and how we view regional institutions is the right approach. The longer term the issue, the more rigid the structure you need, but on shorter term issues and on evolving issues, emerging issues, like climate change, you need to be flexible in how we use these institutions and not try and get locked in to specific structures. I think Ambassador Schaffer's point about the perfect, not being the enemy of the good and how we pursue things absolutely right on the mark and also Stacey's conclusion that the regional institutions will be doing a better job on the disaster preparedness front I think is right on. Just a couple thoughts about the what and the how of how regional institutions can be addressing these issues and there's some areas of divergence between disaster and preparedness and response and climate change but I'll just lump them together for the sake of simplicity. I think regional institutions can have a major role, as was mentioned in agenda setting and consciousness raising, a very important function for them in data sharing and experience sharing. That's sort of the bread and butter of how APEC works and the coordination amongst the different members of the group in sharing information and experiences. In technology development, the Asia Pacific Partnership on clean energy and development is a very important example of that and one that needs to be expanded and deepened as has been described by the presenters. Next, capacity building, the whole question of institutional strength in each of the economies of the region making them better able to have their policies match the challenges that they face, both on the mitigation front when you're talking about climate and being prepared for what's coming for many other countries in the region it's really the most important thing they can do is just get ready for something that they can't do anything about. But also on the technology front and as Dave was describing, optimizing their adoption and the use of low-carbon technologies in their growth models so that they're having the least impact on themselves and others going forward. The last one I mentioned didn't get as much description in this report is activation of the private sector incentivization of private sector activity. So the private sector activity is supporting the general objectives on climate change and disaster preparedness and really helping drive the progress that's being made. So then turning to the how of these questions really the key is to get beyond the superficial. I think one of the presenters mentioned that in some of these issues, particularly disaster preparedness, there's a tendency to say, well, this is something everyone agrees with, everyone hates disasters. So let's talk about this because we can all get along and it's important to not allow important issues to be taken up because they're less controversial than whether or not we should go to war. So these issues should be taken up and get beyond the superficial, particularly in the climate area where just talking about, gosh, climate, that's a big problem, yep. All right, yeah, we all agree with that. I mean, I've been to a lot of those meetings and that's not a particularly significant contribution to mankind. So there are a lot of different ways that the institutions operationally can get involved. They can do research projects, tends to be expensive, issues of IPR, issues of funding, issues of organization, who controls the results of the joint research. The joint research tends to be better than isolated research. There are training opportunities that could be expanded and organizations could do a lot more on the policy side as well as the technology side in training people to respond to these issues. And then perhaps most interestingly, there's the whole question about what regional organizations can do in goal setting and establishing heaven forbid targets for shared activity and shared sense of responsibility in addressing these issues. And that's an important area for exploration going forward. I know the APEC experience most closely and APEC has delved into that only occasionally with the Sydney Declaration in 2007 on climate and energy being the main attempt at that. It was a useful effort, now sort of overcome by events with Copenhagen and other subsequent activities, but it's something that potentially regional organizations could do. So to get back to the main thrust, I completely agree that bilateral activity is critical, should coexist with regional activity. And there's things like working with ASEAN. When the U.S. works with ASEAN, I don't know if that's bilateral or multilateral, but it's good. And so we need to be doing more of that. And then in APEC in particular, I just want to close on this front, there's often this discussion about whether APEC should be getting in and how far APEC should be getting into non-trade issues, because the original purpose of APEC was to foster economic integration in the region. It's done a lot in that area, has a lot more to do. But how far should it be crossing over into non-trade areas like science policy or development policy related to climate change or disaster preparedness and things like that? And I think there is a role for APEC in this area. And it can potentially be a significant one. And Jim Steele, who went to the symposium that helped contribute to this paper and others in the U.S. government and myself were looking very closely at how we can better optimize APEC's efforts in this area, both in the non-trade area as well as in trade as it impacts environmental issues, which is, of course, the whole question of environmental goods and services trade liberalization is a very important one as well. So somewhat random thoughts, but didn't want to go on too long. I think this is really... I just want to conclude by very much endorsing the effort that's found into this paper and the thoughts in it. Thanks, Kurt. I appreciate that. We have some time for questions, if there are any. If you do have questions, we have mics in the front. We have no roving mics, is that correct? If not, if you feel like asking a question or feel like telling us what's wrong, please identify yourself and let us have it. Thanks. I'm Tim Gallaudet. I work for the Navy's Task Force Climate Change. I have two questions. One, the first one's for Stacey. He talked about for disaster relief, the militaries in the region encouraging them to work together and prevent in a way that would prevent any kind of militarism and military buildup in the region. What's your recommendation for the U.S. Department of Defense and how we can support that? And then my other question is for the group. Did your report or have you thought about, and if not, what would you think, what are your thoughts about sea level rise impact on territories, specifically if the Spratlys and Paracels? What happens if there are no Spratlys and Paracels in several decades? What would you imagine would be the regional responses to that kind of scenario? Thanks. That's yours. As part of my trip to the region, I did go out to Paycom. And in my paper, I do make recommendations. We talk a lot about the military and their sort of logistical capacity, but I actually think that the U.S. DOD could do a lot in terms of enhancing the merging of science and practice. So actually bringing science and technology and bringing it in much more real time to the practice of responsive mitigation. And I also think, we talked a little bit, someone mentioned a bit about training, but I actually, what I saw in my study is beyond the two-three-day training, I think that we could do a lot more in terms of real education climatology or land degradation. I mean, there are not regional experts in certain of these areas and it came through actually when the Indian government put up the climate network to look at the third poll issue and they actually had one glyceologist only. So I actually think that U.S. government and in particular the military forces could support those kind of efforts. Victor, I don't know if you want to take up. But the disappearance, I think it's if the Spratly's parasols disappear, I doubt the problem goes away. I think that they still will be quite a controversial part of the part of the world and it's nice to think of, there might be a magic bullet, I'm not sure that's it. Yes, sir. My question actually follows, I think. My name is Liz Strange. I work with a consulting firm ICF International. I work on climate change mitigation as well as adaptation. And my work in particular is focused on impacts and adaptation. And I'm just now undertaking a project for Asian Development Bank in Central Asia. But my question in particular has to do with adaptation and how you see climate change adaptation and the various elements and issues you've been talking about in terms of architecture. We've talked about mitigation and I think there's very much more conversation about mitigation than there is about adaptation. But obviously the two go together. So I just wondered your thoughts on that. It was interesting as we put this together because it was unusual to take a discussion on climate change in our portion of those really around the climate change mitigation part of the process and then jump immediately to assuming you're going to have to have a faster response. And so we talked about that a little bit and I think we realized in the study that spending time on the adaptation part of this was something that needs to come soon and building the institutional and regional capability to think through that and how to do it. Unfortunately within the scope of what we were doing here we couldn't get very deep into it. But it is clearly one of the key items if you're assuming that mitigation is fast enough, you would like to think that you can do enough adaptation that you don't need to jump to Stacey's disaster response. But that would be a nice world to be in. I suspect that if you get serious about adaptation you're going to be talking about disciplines that are quite different from the ones that we covered. Agriculture for example when you're dealing with different quantities and periodicity of water and different temperatures you're going to get out beyond the kinds of things we've been talking about. I think much of our thinking has been in terms of energy and climate as two sides at the same point. But I think it's going to wind up not being a two-sided thing if you start seeing irreversible effects of climate change that are affecting different areas of our lives. Sorry, I would just add that within the humanitarian sector I mean climate change adaptation is definitely integrated within that and there are many humanitarian organizations doing climate change adaptation for sure. What I think would be useful in the case of Asia is that we start measuring what governments are giving either intra-Asia or from external sources in terms of disaster response money in terms of climate change mitigation and in terms of climate change adaptation a bit like the OECD countries track that so there's real transparency because it will affect trade negotiations, it will affect things on carbon costs, etc. We have a separate paper coming out which is actually an expansion of one of the chapters in this looking at the politics of climate change in seven different countries and how that affects not just the internal dynamic on climate change but how those countries interact with a broader climate change exercise and I think a lot of us who participated in that study came to the conclusion that mitigation is fine and all but we're going to need to get our head around adaptation pretty darn quick. Hi my name is James Fahn from Internews Earth Journalism Network thank you for the panel it's been very interesting we run a project called the third poll project that specifically works with journalists around the Himalayan region to help them cover climate change and when we define that region we also include downstream countries and one of the basic problems we always run into is the obstacles in the way of sharing basic information whether it's hydrological data glacial data agriculture again this is also probably more refers to adaptation but it really is a significant problem many of the journalists we work with don't even get visas to go and see what's going on in other countries but also the scientists you know they're restricted but because of security concerns from sharing basic information so my question first of all to Stacy is I was interested to hear about this vulnerability map that's being created in Sark can we expect that countries like India and Pakistan will actually be sharing relevant data to that will help map vulnerability and on a broader basis for the panel what other institutions are out there that could help promote this exchange of basic information I know there's ICMOD which is based in Integrated Center for International Mountain Development based in Kathmandu I know they're trying but they're also constrained are there other institutions out there that can help promote this exchange thank you should I start your first question again let me get to the institution so certainly I've spoken to ICMOD and it's very difficult anyway just because the terrain is so rugged and then there are political factors the DBA so just to answer your question about India Pakistan I mean I know that that is the hope publicly they're working on it but to be honest I haven't actually seen what they have exchanged but indeed politically not just technologically these issues are quite huge and I know that Central Asia in terms of Tajikistan, Uzbekistan Kyrgyzstan are having the same problems the UN's been trying to get them to share some of their regional mapping information and it's politically very very difficult in terms of the third poll I mean another organization that I work closely with is called the Humanitarian Futures Program and they've just actually done a huge study on the third poll in concert with China Dialog which is run by Isabel Hilton out of London and then I know that the Chinese Academy of Sciences also ran a conference I think it was just last year in which they brought together scientists from around the world to study glacial melt and actually they were looking to bring in the other regional countries and I have information on that in the report and myself if you want to get that afterwards the short answer to your first question is don't hold your breath it is still the case in both India and Pakistan that you can be arrested for taking a photograph anywhere at any airport this in a time when satellites above your head including civilian ones can shoot to their hearts content and send the stuff down on GPS systems I think that data transparency is going to be a lagging indicator I would argue that this is an area where contrary to what I said before about regional organizations being uniquely valuable as data gatherers I think you're going to get farther in a global context on this because you can get scientists together in a global context and somehow it gets slightly slightly shorn of its context of being hobnobbing with whoever your rival country is and gets put more into the context of our scientists are rubbing elbows with the best and the brightest in the world isn't this nice and just briefly the data exchange aspect permeates all of this discussion so for those of us who lived in the energy world for a long time we act like we know what the numbers are the reality is there's some numbers we know well and there are a lot more guesses this part of the world is actually one of the areas where there are a lot of guesses we think they're good guesses there's also this linkage of data and is it useful as a commercial tool so you're now beginning to see in China the potential that information about different energy technologies may become a sensitive subject that gets people arrested and so there needs to be I think it really reinforces the need to build these regional structures that can get the idea across that there's common benefit to understanding and being able to communicate here and not using the data as a tool for some other leverage because I think you're absolutely right if you can't get around and get the information it's really hard to know if you're doing anything that's worthwhile Hi, Jennifer Sclerer from George Mason University and many of you mentioned in your discussions and the role of green technology and you also referenced a new report that's coming out so maybe the answer to my question is in that one but I'm wondering about, Kurt had referenced the private sector and the role of the private sector and most of the discussions seem to be focused more on how governments can cooperate regionally so I'm wondering about the role of the private sector or the possible role of a private sector in regional institutions I know that the World Business Council for Sustainable Development is trying to develop something globally so I was curious on the regional level in Asia whether there's any possibility that that could happen or what industry might be doing in these different countries that would be influencing the drivers that David mentioned APEC has a private sector consultative mechanism the Asia Pacific Partnership which Kurt and Victor have both worked on also brings in private sector people there's a lot, in addition there's a lot of lip service to bringing in the private sector you hear the magic words private public partnership more times than I like to think about that actually seems to be fairly hard to do as opposed to talking about I don't think the difficulty here is it's hard to kind of get your arms around it and really be sure that you know what's going on the regional organizations are fundamentally organizations of governments and so setting up a private sector arm means that the people in it are going to be operating across that barrier between private and public everybody agrees in principle that this is where a lot of practical solutions have to come from the problems that you run into there are not the kind of security problems that traditionally bedevil relations between China and Japan, between India and Pakistan, between various other collections of countries the problem that you're more likely to run into is the place for commercial advantage if, for example there are large Korean companies that with the backing of the Korean government see a big opportunity for themselves a few years down the road as sellers of green technology they may come to a meeting on green technology they're probably going to be fairly careful in what they say because they don't want to inadvertently give their golden goose to Tata a Japanese competitor or whatever and so that's the other obstacle in the way of real cooperation and of course if you bring American companies into it you always have in addition the joys of antitrust two fingers on this the general direction of APEC just one of the institutions is in the direction of greater private sector participation and and seeding of some of the territory for agenda setting in APEC deliberations and operations to the private sector that's ramping up and that process is continuing I expect it to continue and hope that it will continue in particular in the area of green growth and green development because as I was mentioning earlier I think having these technologies become common use in the market and having the proper set of incentives established to push that forward is really a critical part of particularly the climate change mitigation effort but the I think when Ambassador Schafer is saying is absolutely right that their public private partnership can be difficult to organize you often have a public sector which doesn't want to really give up control of the agenda in meetings or in operations and discussions in international fora and then you have a private sector that sometimes doesn't want to go beyond advertisement and self promotion and actually get into real discussion of issues and sharing of their deeper thoughts and so it can be tricky to organize. I think the crossover point that leads to the best private public discussions is a focus on incentives and in fact a focus on government policy and so getting governments to agree to discuss policy in front of their private sectors to put it in one sense is the key to a successful operation. It's not easy but when it works it's pretty useful. Just really I think Dave talked about this earlier that the real danger of protectionism on this issue because every country that's out there that we looked at has a separate industrial policy to encourage development of their own domestic sector in part because there's at least in China and India there is a sense that the green technology revolution is a trick of the west to again leapfrog past those countries as they aim for development that the whole climate change discussion is all about keeping those economies down so therefore there's a lot of jealousy and domestic challenges. Industrial policies in every country are skewing the marketplace really badly in ways that do not make one encouraged that we're going to be able to develop this global market where everybody's cooperating and sharing information and applying their particular comparative advantage. The last thing I was going to add is that in some ways as I was thinking about this question I think we get to a point where we have to almost make our vocabulary a little more complex because when you look especially in Asia the distinction between private and public gets blurry so there are very close connections between what are businesses and the government and then there are private businesses that are somewhere having to deal with these quasi private businesses so I think there's this very complex array of players that you have to deal with and I was thinking that yes I should have mentioned the private sector more in our section but I think the idea that we had was very much this question of incentives that governments will need to put the incentives in place that will get those who have the access to the resources to the investment and they may be on this continuum from purely private to purely government there are different types of players and US industry when it goes out has to figure out what's the game and there are different players on that continuum Hi my name is Elizabeth Kiernan and I work with the corporate public policy team at Chevron so you've kind of answered my questions which were going to be about public private partnership and just to sort of continue on about that do you the idea seems to be that you're suggesting that there's probably more room for domestic companies maybe ones that are more public historically have been public companies to become more involved with the regional actors rather than larger international companies at this point that's sort of the trajectory that you'd see first or I personally think it could be valuable to be able to have this broader array of businesses I had worked on the APEC aspect of it for quite a long time and it's sometimes hard to get business people to see value in going to these government led meetings so that becomes a challenge is to convince them that it's really worth their time and energy to go to what often I think someone characterized as talk shops and things but I think the broader array of the different business entities you can bring into the discussion the better because they're all players in this environment And I'd point out that your company is a big supporter of APEC and that's what I'm talking about Yeah Hi, I'm Darrelson, political councillor at the Singapore Embassy and former deputy director of climate change back in Singapore and I just have two questions one is that the move to do greater action on climate change seems to add another impetus on nuclear power throughout the region we see countries throughout ASEAN mentioning the desire to build nuclear power plants what do you feel are the implications for regional architecture or regional security of this and two again in terms of the move towards taking greater action on climate change what do you feel are the possibilities of trans boundary cooperation in practical areas such as the ASEAN the long talked about ASEAN grid and other possible shared regional actions Okay, me The question about well first the recognition that nuclear power is a existing commercially available and generally energy source that's priced to fit today's marketplace has grown tremendously in terms of realization that this is a tool a major tool so you've seen many countries now moving forward with their plans for nuclear power the emergence of the strong interest though in countries that have not had experience with commercial nuclear power has really created quite a discussion so we are actually can do commercials we are actually looking at the possibility of starting a program around that very question so what are the implications of seeing rapid expansion of nuclear power both in terms of some of the security but also the commercial side because there's quite a competition that's emerging to feed the market as for the the ASEAN grid concept multinational grid concepts have sort of been in play many places in the world and they generally get to a certain point and then they have to overcome this sense of do we really trust our neighbors to be responsible for our electricity sources so this is really in many ways a confidence building exercise that the economics becomes very clear the one I'm most familiar with is the idea of a grid through Central America where you have a number of small countries all of whom want their own power plants so they love the idea of having the grid as long as the power plant that serviced it was in their country not in somebody else's and I think in ASEAN you'll have similar sort of confidence building that does one country want to be does Singapore want to be totally reliant on Malaysia for its electricity maybe that's not a good thing from an energy security point of view so it really is trying to move forward on that confidence building that indeed you have the relationship that will make it work but the economics generally say it's a really good idea so it's how do you balance the two we're going to get a national grid here I didn't say that if there are no other questions I want to thank everybody for coming out on a Friday afternoon I really want to thank those of of our research staffs and administrative staff who've put a lot of time and effort into this and I think it's a pretty darn good project a pretty darn good product I hope you'll take it and if you have comments about it I hope you'll direct them to us after the fact even if you want today thanks again everybody for coming out