 A very warm welcome to this webinar by the Mr. Geopolitics Research Program. This is part of a series that explores how climate security risks shape international cooperation. My name is Tim Fulyada, I'm at the Stockholm Environment Institute and it's my pleasure to be your moderator today as we navigate this kind of question with a specific focus on decarbonisation and the challenges and opportunities that a changing geopolitical landscape brings. It's interesting to reflect back on how different this landscape looked when we embarked upon the decarbonisation theme in this program. In February last year we held a seminar with a room full of colleagues at the SEI offices. The EU had just released the European Green Deal and had pledged climate neutrality. On the agenda for that particular seminar was the potential for European and Chinese cooperation on ambitious climate action. The USA was conspicuously MIA. I don't need to recount exactly what happened next but it's safe to say that we hadn't really anticipated the postponement of the Glasgow Climate Change Conference to this year 2021 and I think anyone who had predicted that the China and the US would join the EU with their own net euro pledges would have really been considered a hopeless optimist. But it's not all of course opportunities and glowing history. There are challenges to turning these kinds of pledges from the top into concrete plans for implementation. It's not an easy task. I can promise you that we're going to get into this today from a range of really interesting angles. We have a great lineup of speakers. So I can give you a sneak preview now to each of the speakers we have today. We have the pleasure of opening remarks from Johan Pirokwena who's the chair of the Swedish Climate Policy Council. We also have Jaye Zhu who is a researcher at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, CEPRI, and he'll be providing closing remarks and also they'll both serve as panellists. The researchers who have been part of the geopolitics of decarbonisation theme within our program are Daria Iveleva, Andrei Monberia, Taylor Dunsdale, and Karl Halding and others as well. These are the speakers you'll hear from today. So now I'd like to give you a short introduction if you'll bear with me to the program Mr. Geopolitics. Mr. Geopolitics is an interdisciplinary research program that critically examines sustainable development in a changing geopolitical era and the new risks and opportunities that arise. Mr. Geopolitics focuses on the interaction between peace and security, human security, global environment change, and global governance. And we do this by focusing on three transformative processes. They transform this potential of the 2030 agenda, the rapid global environmental change, and emerging technologies that the geopolitical landscape and the prospects for sustainable development. Our research focus areas include the geopolitics of decarbonisation, which is the primary focus of our seminar today. Also, food security, sustainable oceans, and a big part of it is forced-backed capabilities and new and emerging technologies. Mr. Geopolitics is a consortium with both Swedish and international partners. And on the next slide, you'll see the alphabet soup of the partners here. I won't go through each and every one, but we have speakers from most of those partners today. So please have a look at our website. You have the link there. And also, if you would like to follow our conversation on Twitter, then use the Mr. Geopolitics hashtag. Today, we very much welcome questions from the audience. So please post your questions using the Q&A function. On the right-hand side, you'll see a little chat box with a question mark inside. The meeting will be recorded and the recording will be available on the Mr. Geopolitics website. So without further ado, I would like to turn to introduce our opening speaker. Johan Schielehwenner. Oh, I forgot to make mention of our team who's supporting also on the webinar. Next slide, please. Maria Cole, who's the communications lead, and Ian Coldwell, who's an information officer. They'll be making sure that the seminar runs well today. So next slide, please. Johan Schielehwenner, we're very proud to have Johan to provide some opening remarks today for our webinar. Johan is the chair of the Swedish Climate Policy Council, which is an independent expert body which evaluates how government policy is aligned with Sweden's net zero commitment by 2045. He is also an adjunct professor at Stockholm University, and he has the distinction of having launched the first phase of the Mr. Geopolitics programme just over four years ago in Stockholm. Johan, over to you. Thanks a lot, Tim. I hope you can all hear me. It's great to be here this afternoon. I really looked forward to this seminar for quite some time now when you invited me. I found it challenging to give opening remarks in a topic which is clearly very complex and wide, so I look forward also not least to the presentation by the experts that we will have following some opening remarks. As you said, I want to give some personal reflections, but I also was requested to give some background from my position as the chair of the Swedish Climate Policy Council. How some of these topics also fit in to the work we do with that in terms of evaluating Sweden and Swedish policies. I was part of that launch, and actually I must say I was really excited. I think the word coming back to me from 2017 there is finally, we start to discuss climate change and the whole transformation in the context where it belongs. I've been working with climate related issues, water related issues for the last 30 years, and it has most of those years been labelled as an environmental issue, and I think that this has partly been the problem. This was partly the problem, I would argue, that we didn't get a new agreement in Copenhagen in 2009. It was not seen as the major transformative topic that it needs to be as part of geopolitics. So in 2017 I think this program was extremely timely, no doubt. Decarbonization is now clearly part of the new geopolitical landscape, as we will discuss today. And I think the focus on the EU and China and the US makes a lot of sense, of course. I catch the word new political landscape, but I think the word new is maybe wrong in many ways. I think the issue is constantly changing geopolitical landscape. I mean, just take the relationship between China and the US in terms of international climate before Paris, an agreement between these two countries, we're part of making sure that we could get the Paris Agreement. After that we had Donald Trump and the shift happening during his presidency, and now we have Biden back. And again, we see a new times of relation or new terms of relationship developing. I think it's really a very quickly moving and shifting landscape, no doubt. Again, the focus on these three countries though makes a lot of sense, because of course if they decide to work more closely together, they are a major part of the global economy. They are a major part of the global emissions. And they also of course host a major part of the global private sector. Then we will have a move in the right direction. The rest of the world would align to a large extent if these three superpowers, if we call them that, would have a common goal and a common agenda and vision. Of course, there are others that I know you focus on as well, India, Russia, Brazil. I think the focus here today in this particular seminar is of course very logical. The last couple of days I've seen a lot of interesting headlines as you are aware, and I'm not thinking mainly on those that relate directly to climate change. Yesterday, the whole spree of headlines related to the fossil fuel sector with Shell and the court ruling with ExxonMobil, where there was almost like a coup from the shareholders to push into additional directors on the board of directors with independent roles of really pushing the company in terms of climate policies and climate action. And Chevron that were also the shareholders pushed the company to also have to consider scope-free emissions for instance. I mean things are changing now so rapidly and so dramatically that it is difficult sometimes to follow the agenda. And it was also interesting then earlier this year or I would say last year, late last year when the International Energy Agency came out with a report pointing to the fact that solar energy now is the cheapest energy form we ever had. So this shifting landscape is of course extremely interesting and important to keep track on. In New York Times today, reporting on the new U.S. proposed budget for 2022, they highlight how Biden really pushes now to lift U.S. industry to better compete globally in an economy of that the administration believes will be dominated by a race to reduce energy emissions and a combat climate change. So it's also at the center now of fiscal policies. So this highlights that we have many parallel agendas. We have the move out from fossil fuels to move into renewable energy systems and of course also how the whole financial system is changing. These are to a certain extent parallel processes but they are of course also intertwined and this is exactly what Mr. Geopolitics is all about and why it is so important and timely. So this was just a couple of general remarks and I know that in this today's seminar today we will touch upon many of these aspects of these issues of course. But I was also asked to reflect a little bit from the Swedish Climate Policy Council perspective and our evaluation there in 2021 we focused our evaluation very much on Swedish policies and government decisions related to the pandemic and how these decisions and policies also contribute or counteract the goals set by the Swedish parliament in the Swedish Climate Policy Framework. Again what is interesting and also what I tried to allude to in my or earlier is that today there is no separation really between climate actions and the whole transformation in other political areas and this integration of politics that climate politics is actually all politics is an important step forward and this is basically what our mandate is to make sure that all political areas also during a crisis are in line with the policy framework. We looked at two dimensions or the basis for our analysis were actually two dimensions. I mean we can learn a lot from earlier crisis there's no doubt about it. In Sweden the oil crisis led to probably one of the fastest transitions we've ever had away from fossil fuels. We had the structural economic crisis of the 1990s where we established the finance policy framework which really clearly demonstrated the importance of having long-term goals set for good policies similar to what we have now in the climate policy framework. Then we had the financial crisis of the late 2028-29 and of course you know a lot of people are now comparing what happened after the financial crisis and what can happen now after the pandemic. After the financial crisis we also talked about green recovery the OECD for instance talked about the green economy really merging all the investments going into the economy with also the ambition to make it more green. We recognized this from today. We argued though that the situation today is different and it's better and we talked about maturity and momentum in all this and I would of course be very interested to hear from what others you know think about this kind of analysis but overall we argued that the fundamental changes that we have compared to back then at the financial crisis is that we have an aligned political framework or landscape. We have the Paris Agreement. We have national policy councils. We have clear ambitions at the regional and local level and of course also a private sector today more and more aligning to the climate goals. This is very different from just 10 years ago. We have also the private sector as they mentioned who really pushes the agenda forward. Take initiatives and drive the transition and transformation and changing the role of politics from being more of the driver to the enabler of change. We have also renewable energy systems that are competitive on a market-based compared to fossil fuels and we have popular support. So the whole maturity of the issue looks very different today compared to only 10 years ago and we have the momentum huge financial resources now being invested into society to address the crisis but of course also that could be used to drive the transformation to address the climate crisis. So we see both this maturity and momentum which is a unique window of opportunity that we argued exists right now. I will not go into our recommendations but this formed the basis for the recommendations we made in particular related to fiscal policies etc in that the Swedish government has not included the climate aspects into earlier. Finally because I promise to keep this open remarks short there are of course challenges and I know that this is what we are going to talk about here as well in many of the presentations. So the emerging global trends right now that might hinder fast-track decarbonisation the whole socio-economic effects of facing fossil fuels is of course something I know that many of the organisations are working on. The drastic scale up of renewable energy systems start to demonstrate also challenges. Massive infrastructure investments causes a discussion of acceptance in Sweden for instance related to wind power but also solar so we have moved from these being marginal energy or marginal parts of the energy system and now they are supposed to be the massive bulk of the energy system. Of course these craze challenges. The vulnerability in terms of raw materials that I know will be on the agenda here today but also biomass for instance both biomass and minerals and we need to focus really on the whole trade system as part of this that I know also Kalle will talk about and foreign direct investments. The whole issue of resource efficiency that is not really on the agenda and international energy agency in their sustainability scenarios points to the fact that resource efficiency, energy efficiency is absolutely fundamental if we are to reach the climate targets. How can we get the investments to really address also these challenges related to resource efficiency and energy efficiency? Sweden is in many ways in the middle of this agenda. It's no doubt about it. We are an export heavy country. We are dependent on the supply chains for our new industrialisation that we see now regardless if we are talking about steel industry or if we talk about battery industry. Huge infrastructure investments needs to be done in terms of electricity, hydrogen, you name it and of course we also have a lot of big potentials. Potentials that can be realised if we have a well functioning global system, global trade system, a fair trade system that functions the way it is intended but there can also be a lot of competition. So I'm sure that today's seminar will address these and many other aspects. These were some personal reflections and I would like to end with the fact that I really strongly welcome and you should know that I also am now part of the MISTRA board but I really welcome the fact that MISTRA geopolitics has already been granted a second term so I don't have to have a conflict of interest in this decision. So I really look forward to the results that will be presented also in the second phase of MISTRA geopolitics. So thanks Tim, back to you. Thank you very much Johan for that really interesting opening remarks and you flagged some interesting topics that we will certainly be able to pick up as we go into the panel discussion and we are also definitely welcoming everyone who is here joining the event to post your questions in there so that we can take note of those and come back to them. Thank you very much Johan. I'd like to now take the opportunity to introduce one of our researchers who has been a part of the geopolitics of decarbonisation theme, Daria Ibleva, who is a senior advisor for Adelphi in the field of climate diplomacy. In the programme Daria has focused on among other things the conceptual development of geopolitics of decarbonisation and also trade and international investment implications. So I'd like to ask you Daria please to present your your research. Excuse me, hello thanks so much Tim for handing over and today I will be focusing on the question why trade policy must be considered, must consider the geopolitics of decarbonisation. So this is one lens of looking at it and my first slide is just to introduce you to this concept geopolitics of decarbonisation. We've been working on this trying to figure out what it means for us and I think we see that geopolitics is a complex area in itself about international affairs interacting with geographies and decarbonisation as we've already heard it's a cross-cutting topic it changes all of the society it has political economic and technological dimensions but our basic contention I would say is a group is that these two complex areas interact and they shape each other and we have explored some of the some of the different dimensions of how this interaction is manifesting and what policy implication that brings. So my next slide you will see that trade is actually an interesting lens to look at those interaction and to try to understand them and I would like to to offer you maybe a metaphor of trade as being a game of chess maybe and I'm not a chess player myself so I just hope it works more or less and the first dimension is the substance of trade which would be chess pieces if if you would click kindly thank you and the other dimension would be the institutions and the rules of trade so maybe in our metaphor the board that shows us how we're supposed to move what where can you go and that would be transportation mode so how do actually our chess pieces get from A to B which could be different so in my presentation I would like to take you through these three dimensions and just point to some of the issues that are interesting each and every one of them and I'm sure the colleagues who speak after me will actually dig deeper in some of this of these aspects so Ian thank you so some of the topics that we will present later on starting with a substance on my next slide I would say that most of the debate as we already heard from opening remarks revolves around commodities so if to make it to put it bluntly some of them are high emission commodities such as fossil fuels and we expect to decrease demand in those and some of them are low emission commodities that commodities needed for decarbonization itself so metal stress hydrogen and we expect increased demand in those and of course we think about or debate about how these things pose an economic challenge or an economic opportunity and whether we can overcome some of the all dependencies and maybe some of new dependencies will be created so geopolitical dimension of this is of course how does this change the international relations through this changing shifting commodity trade going to the next slide if you look at the institutions we see the trade is governed by a multi-layered very complex trade regimes and here we can ask ourselves how these regimes can be actually more supportive of more sustainable decarbonized trade and how this this can be more aligned with the needs of of climate policy but on the other hand we'll also think about how these regimes can help us cope with the different risks that emerge through these shifting commodity trade commodity commodity trading and some of the issues that that are in focus here are for instance the WTO reform so how the WTO could be more aligned with climate policy but also can it be a more effective way of governing the different transition processes that we are likely to be facing but also it is about the climate change in the climate change aspects in trade investment agreements and you know that they use actually quite proactive in this and in general a inappropriate policy mix of boosting green trade because it's not going to be just up to the trade institution themselves but also a wide range of economic politics so on the next slide and we have a final last dimension the transportation so the mode of trade the physical mode of trade so to say we cannot imagine trade without transportation unless a digital trade which is a different which is a different topic maybe but you see that this sector is of course very easy to lock in because once you build infrastructure it's there and it locks you into a certain path but it's also very hard to decarbonize in the cross countries I think we will we do see slower progress than in other sectors and the international dimension of transportation only adds to those challenges so if we were to embark on a decarbonization pathway how do we govern this among different countries so you know the the whole road so to say from A to B actually can work as a to carbonized infrastructure and this intersects with the geopolitical agendas of countries so we have different actors who push their connectivity agendas and these have a geopolitical dimension but how does this go along with a decarbonization imperatives and one prominent example is China's Belt and Road Initiative if you look at how China tries to conquer or maybe use their proteases of the markets outside it and also connecting to Europe but what does it mean for for the decarbonization of transportation sector in the countries where the initiative goes through so to say geographically well here more today on the Belt and Road Initiative but on the energy dimension of this so it just in my last slide I would like to I would like to point to the fact that this of course trade and the trade lens of decarbonization of geopolitics is central to EU policies first and foremost because the external dimension of the European Green Deal is connected intimately with trade trade is central area to any external policy of the EU and of course the Green Deal itself states that for the EU as a global leader on the green agenda trade is just a very central instrument both for the internal transformation because of course a lot of commodities need to come in through trade but also to promote decarbonization outside of the EU's borders and if you look at it from a different perspective not so much from the green perspective but from the trade perspective itself you also find that a lot of these questions that we've just discussed the new dependencies the risks how do you position yourself as a trade actor and these questions are already in the EU strategic thinking and you can witness this in the trade policy review document which is called in open sustainable an assertive trade policy and there you can really see how the EU grapples with those different goals and different different questions and bringing these being a promoter of open trade but also protecting its own geopolitical interests you will find some interesting language on this in this document so thanks so much this is so much for me and I think other speakers will elaborate on several of these aspects. Thank you Daria thanks for setting the tone on the the concept we're talking about here and also elaborating on a very interesting analogy there I would like to now turn to Andre Monbea who is an associate senior lecturer at Environmental and Energy Systems Studies in Lund University. In this program Andre has an important part of his work is focused on the implication of decarbonization for raw material flows so without feeling your your thunder there Andre I'd like to hand over to you to present your research please. Thank you Tim so my presentation will focus on the metals that are used in low carbon technologies and in this research we started from an observation that most of the previous research on geopolitics and natural resources focused on the role of fossil fuels and we then asked but what if we use renewable energy instead could the metals that are embedded in the renewable energy technologies result in similar dependencies as the fossil fuels and are certain countries in the world more important than others for supplying these metals and if so is there a risk of a resource curse in these countries so next slide please next slide so this figure here shows the global lithium demand in four different low carbon scenarios up to 2060 and we did this type of estimates for 14 metals that are used in different renewable energy production use or energy storage technologies and each scenario starts from the same basic assumptions on the technologies that are similar as the current ones but then as time goes on we change the assumption for material efficiency improvements recycling rates and so on and these factors have changed in the past and our research here shows the huge uncertainty of the future demand it also indicates that there is substantial potential to reduce demand if we use the resources more efficient next slide please we then looked at the geographical concentration of reserves for the metals that we included here on this table compares the concentration for some of these with oil that you can find in the bottom row and and as you can see the concentration for most of these these metals are higher than it is for oil and I can also add that we looked at the political stability and for some of these countries they're characterized as fragile which some import dependent countries see as problematic so next slide please we then took our metal demand scenarios and we calculated the economic value of the metals and then allocated this value to different producer countries based on their share of the global reserves and this enabled us to estimate how big the incremental metal revenues could be compared to the size of these countries economies and there is of course a huge uncertainty here but in general the peak values that we could calculate are rather low when we compare to the importance of oil for some countries in the past and if we take the next slide we can see that in our sample we had a total of approximately 40 countries that we looked at but there's only a group of fiber so that have rather high revenues and these are predominantly countries that are rich in lithium and cobalt and most of them are rather poor too and I think it would be good to have a bit more detailed studies on this and then both for the metals and for the countries within this group I would also like to emphasize that it's important to keep in mind that this is at the country level but mining can take place in a local and remote area where its impact can be influential for that area and the effect of the local impact is something that we did not study if we then take the next slide so another aspect of the resource concentration is to what extent the metal exporters or the metal exports can be used as a foreign policy tool and how this compares with energy and this figure here shows the Chinese export of rare earth elements and their share of the global market and China used to dominate the market almost the sole supplier up until about 10 years ago and at that time China reduced their mining and exports and there are some different stories of why this happened but some draw the connection to a border dispute that took place with Japan and in the short term the price increased dramatically but as you can see the Chinese market share has since declined as other countries have ramped up their production next slide please so can the metal rich states use their exports as a foreign policy tool well I think that there are some different arguments in the literature on this but the difference can partly be explained from the time frame so in the short term yes it is possible but it seems difficult to succeed in the long term and this is a result of the possibilities with substitute recycling and so on and these possibilities provide a very different dynamic than what has been the case with oil in the past so next slide please so to summarize and conclude I would say that the resource demand is uncertain due to technological development available substitute and recycling and to some extent these factors respond to market price signals if or when price when problems arise there are some new countries that will gain in importance as resource suppliers and some of these are considered to be fragile but then there are low revenues for most of the exporters on a country level although the local situation can be different and it seems difficult to successfully use the metal exports as a foreign policy tool at least in the long term so thanks a lot Tim thank you Andre very interesting presentations and you've highlighted some points which I'd like to bring up in the panel discussion particularly about the new countries that may gain importance in the resource suppliers but let's continue with our presentations everyone's keeping time like clockwork so very much appreciate that now I'd like to introduce Taylor Dimmesdale who's the program director on risk and resilience at e3g he's been active in this research program on looking at risks posed by climate change for the financial system and also how key technological gifts may play out Taylor please applaud yours sure um thank you very much Tim and very nice to be with you all today um so uh yeah as Tim as Tim's mentioned our research um in this context really was looking at the geopolitics of the electric vehicles and specifically I think we were trying to answer was seemingly a fairly straightforward question which was how countries might respond in a scenario where there is very rapid and significant uptake of electric vehicles globally um and if we move to the first slide we started just by looking at some of the trends and forecasts and drivers um I think even the most conservative forecasts were showing significant growth in electric vehicles it's actually easier in many ways to make EVs than conventional vehicles batteries are really the largest cost and like wind and solar technologies those have fallen pretty dramatically in recent years so when our report first came out in 2019 I think the predictions were essentially that you would see cost competitive EVs even without subsidies in the early 2020s and I think that has that has remained the case and so you saw all of the major forecasters really having to consistently revise their forecast upwards which has often been the case with renewable technologies historically um there are challenges of course uh you know it needs to charging infrastructure of course behind it um people some people have range anxiety and things like that um but basically our analysis of the sort of technology in the market was that if you're just looking at those factors there are good reasons to believe that um not only is this transition going to continue but that it could actually happen um faster than some of the mid-range forecasts would project so if we move to the next slide um of course it's not just technology and market factors what you've also had is more political or policy based drivers um and essentially this has now been identified as a strategic industrial priority by quite a few countries including um the US, EU and China so when we wrote our report a couple of years ago it was really China having taken the lead they identified um what they are calling new energy vehicles uh as one of their big industrial priorities for the future and then you have the European Union I would say to some extent you know playing catch up also identifying this as an important opportunity um thinking about uh you know France and Germany working together putting some real money behind trying to make Europe a leader in battery technology for example um meanwhile at the time of course this wasn't a big priority for the Trump administration to say the least and if you talked about electric vehicles in the US many people would love to point out that the most popular selling car here was still the Ford F-150 pickup truck which is decidedly not an electric vehicle um but of course if you fast forward to today um one of the big changes as people have already mentioned uh is Biden's election in the US and some of you some of you may have seen just a couple of weeks ago um the president gave a speech about this while test driving an electric Ford F-150 and explicitly saying that they are now in a race that the US is now in a race with China and there's about close to 200 billion dollars in Biden's infrastructure plan for encouraging the uptake of electric vehicles in the US so you now have the world's three largest economies really all having identified electric vehicles as a strategic priority and also trying to come to terms with whether they are competitors uh or partners or some combination of the two so if we move to the next slide um essentially one of our conclusions from the report was that a lack of preparedness for this kind of high electric vehicle scenario as we're calling it um increases the risks of geopolitical tensions due to the disruption and if we move to the next slide an apology is that it's not very easy to read this but essentially we we identified sort of four mechanisms um where EV adoption could influence geopolitics so the first being on international trade um and it could go either way right I think uh on the one hand you know EV costs need to decline quite dramatically to meet their full growth potential and contribute to meeting the sustainable development goals for example that would imply a deepening of global supply chains as well as regulatory and market integration which could prompt a sort of a new rising green free trade agreements on the other hand you know we've seen what happens uh when a country starts to mass produce a technology very cheaply for example with solar tariffs um just a few years ago so it could also result in trade tensions um with respect to energy security uh of course if electrification reduces oil demands that means public revenues from oil could decline in producer countries many of those are in um uh regions already at risk of instability it could result in a rebalancing of key geopolitical dynamics between producers and consumers including the US and China um the third was on resource scarcity so I wouldn't see this as a high probability scenario but the need for some of these new materials and minerals could certainly have knock on effects one of which being you know access to these elements being used as oil has been for energy statecraft which speaks to some of the the research that Andre was just talking about and then second the potential interaction of the demand for these minerals with state or regional instability so many of them are found in parts of the world that have poor governance records or at risk of instability and then finally we sort of looked at second and third order effects more generally so there's one estimate that you could have 20 trillion dollars in revenue disappear from the oil industry by 2040 clearly that's going to have knock on effects particularly for you know tax revenues and oil producing states again but it also carries risks for institutional investors and pension funds and and all sorts of other parts of the financial system that could have that could have even human security implications so what could we do about it if we move to the last slide we did try to come up with some recommendations for trying to manage this transition so one of which was just working together on trade and there's a process underway through the WTO on environmental goods of course that has been sort of stalled for a long time but could you come up with some sort of multilateral free trade agreement on electric vehicles by solving some of these disputes around what sort of state support is considered fair for example we thought harmonizing regulatory approaches and standards would be necessary I think scaling up research and development cooperation for example through things like mission innovation could spill over into other areas so I think one of the best ways of promoting cooperation is to find a specific thing to cooperate on and sometimes that has a sort of domino effect we also recommended countries stress testing their sort of foreign policy and security strategies against this high EV scenario we've suggested the G20 or other sort of developed countries working to improve resource governance in some of these fragile states and then the last recommendation being helping particularly some of the high cost oil producers with risk assessments and transition strategies where they really don't have many other options at the moment so I'll stop there but thanks very much for the opportunity to present and looking forward to the discussion thank you very much Taylor fascinating to hear about the two different pathways that disorderly orderly transitions could take and I would like to move directly into our next presenter and that is Carl Halding the senior research fellow at the Stockholm Environment Institute understand Carl that you will share your screen so while I introduce you perhaps please try that first in the program Carl has focused on a lot on foresight and scenario approaches which has been an important aspect of the the mystery of politics program and he's also looked quite deeply at technology and investment issues with a focus on China so can I hand to you Carl to take us through your presentation please thanks a lot Tim and thanks a lot for providing me the space to present this fascinating research we're just wrapping up here where we look at well try to look at Chinese investments abroad and to what extent these are green or brown and I hope you could all see my presentation now so I think this is something which reflects the power of narratives in the international scene and the role of narratives in shaping geopolitics and geopolitical how geopolitics are being shaped I think also this this story about Chinese outward investments is worth reflecting on from a perspective of more constructivist ideas of how we could solve the climate crisis or more realist ideas about how to move ahead and particularly in this triangulation between China Europe and the US so is China's energy investments abroad are the green and green or or brown well particularly if we look at what China has said our Xi Jinping has called what the the built-in road initiative for green healthy intelligence and peaceful and predominantly China has presented its ambitions in the built-in road initiative which is essentially Chinese outward investments as something to boost green development and bring prosperity around the world particularly in developing countries so how does this hold well we all know that China is a big actor when it comes to renewables they're the biggest producer on components for wind and solar the big on green low carbon infrastructure such as a rapid train transport and so on what has been less known maybe we all know that China is big on coal but that is mainly in China what has been less known is Chinese the China is big when it comes to building new coal power outside of China and this is a prospect for a big big coal power plant in South Africa so what what we've done here is try to compare promises and realities we're done so looking at investment streams and analyzing outward investment streams and comparing them to what we could find out of looking at content from Chinese media and international media and here we used AI driven content analysis on the investment streams we've looked at three different globally available databases the China global power database from Boston University is specifically looking at all different outward investment from China in the power sector we have reviewed a global coal public finance tracker which is set up by the global energy monitor it's a big database with essentially all coal power plants around the world listed more of which now about 217 are Chinese projects then we looked at a broader database called the China global investment tracker by the American Enterprise Institute it's a big database of any kind of outward investment from China from 2005 and onwards the content based analysis we'll review Chinese language articles over 7 000 uh Chinese English language out of those um it's about 550 articles and in that international English language articles that's 4600 octaves so this is it's a lot of content analysis where an AI based platform makes it possible to actually look through all of these in a in a quantitative way where you could draw qualitative analysis and we're doing this work together with our partners at decipher analysis decipher analytics sorry so what are we looking at we're looking at the Belt and Road Initiative and we're particularly just to illustrate what's happening here we look at the red arrow here it's a part of the Belt and Road Initiative called the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor. China is investing around 50 billion US dollars in this corridor for transporting things so what is happening inside of that corridor if we just review that little part we could see that of the infrastructure investment projects a majority of those are actually new coal power and very little is is solar and wind there is a bit of hydropower as well but the energy backbone that China is investing in here is essentially a coal and carbon based system. If we look broader around the world these are new coal power plants around the world that are in planning and if we look at China's share of these Chinese investments go into the majority of these these are the future investments by Chinese finance around the world for new coal power. China is definitely a big player when it comes to coal power if we then review how much investment that has gone into different fuel source power generation here and these are aggregate numbers I will have to emphasize that we see that coal is really dominating the picture followed by big-scale hydro which is often problematic as such and then gas as a big investing stream as well. What we call the renewables here are really much less in the Chinese portfolio artwork investment so let's let's contrast this with what we find from the content analysis. Interestingly coal is not the major topic in Chinese media it's a bigger topic in international media whereas non-fossile is really dominating in China and also in international media so reading these media you get a picture of China's investments are predominantly non-fossile investments. Interestingly here nuclear is really showing up in Chinese media also to a certain extent in international media although nuclear represented very little share of Chinese actual artwork investments and I think this is a reflection of the importance that is connected to nuclear power in China domestically and also that those projects have been flagship projects which some of which never came into rotation so that's why they have attract a lot of attention. Also interestingly gas doesn't show up at all in Chinese language media it's a big part of our Chinese output investments it's also just a minor reflection in Chinese English and international media. Well that's the number of articles how are these things then described dirty and unsustainable or clean and sustainable so looking at Chinese media the major tone here is that these are clean and sustainable investments very late the reflection about that these could be dirty and unsustainable. Looking at international media we have much more of a balanced view more than half of the articles reflect on these investments being dirty and unsustainable. Digging deeper into the analysis we looked at specific topics that are then coming out from the AI based analysis we look at the topic dams and hydropower produce in Southeast Asia and in Chinese media these are being presented as helping ward conservancy these are about responsible stakeholders the good environment impact assessment done whereas overrepresentation in international media is about damage it's about deforestation these are controversial projects affecting civil society having environmental impacts and so on. Another topic here are Chinese coal power exports in China these are in Chinese media these are presented as environment friendly high utilization rate it's clean power or clean coal whereas in international media you see another type of representation on the topic more about how Chinese export exportation of over capacity the Chinese financing dirty coal over the world and this these investments are slowing the green shift so this I think these these give you a little bit of an idea of different narratives here and maybe narratives that are worth reflecting upon in terms of you know what type of narratives are are reflecting the geopolitical situation that we need to face to drive a rapid transition. Some conclusions there is a huge gap of course between the Chinese promises for green development and realities as we see them being reflected by looking at the real investment streams. And the narratives that emerged from Chinese media communicate this very strong focus on green investments and that these investments are leading to prosperous developments around the world. But even in international media there is a clear overrepresentation on reporting on Chinese green investments as compared to what you could see from the real investment streams and finally although we didn't have time to look at the time series here the gap between narratives and realities are rapidly closing in international media where we see in later years particularly last the last 12 to 18 months a rapid increase in critical articles about Chinese outward investments. I stop there and hand back to you Tim thanks for your attention. Thank you very much Carl very interesting and nice slides as well. So now we'll return to the the main presentation I believe and moving right along to our second to final session in this webinar and this is the panel discussion and Q&A we've already received some questions posted there so thank you for those and we're welcoming more now. While you're thinking about it and while I ask each of the panelists to make the turn on their videos so it's like a real panel I would like to introduce the final guest for our seminar today Jayi Zhu who is a researcher at C-Prix.com International Peace Research Institute in the program Jayi is focused a lot on the geopolitics of food security. Jayi will give closing remarks but we'd like to invite Jayi to pose the first question to one of our panelists here please. Jayi over to you. Great thank you so much Tim and thanks to the Mr. organizers and for all the panelists for such a rich discussion and a rich set of results on such important issues I think at the intersection of geopolitics and climate policy which as Johan mentioned in the beginning has become so integrated. So my question is in relation to that integrated agenda I think that it comes with a lot of opportunities in terms of the importance of climate environmental issues on high level political agendas but also with some perils. I will I'm sensitive to the time so to focus on potentially some opportunities I'd like to ask the panelists whether or not they see even within the framework of heightened strategic competition between the major powers whether or not there is a possibility for a race to the top or as has been mentioned a race to reduce in kind of the same way we've seen competition channel more attention and investments in financing into infrastructure overseas development finance things like that. We know the US and China right now are engaged in a battle of narratives battle of discussions about global leadership and responsibility but whether or not that translates also into higher ambitions. Whether or not the panelists could discuss what they see the potentials to be there. Thank you Jay. That's a very good question and I think it goes to the heart of the cooperation competition that we see playing out here and referred today from our speakers. So that's a exciting optimistic note to begin on so would one of the panelists like to answer Jay's question about the potential for a race to the top. I could take your first stab on that and reflecting on transatlantic dialogue that I sat in on on yesterday or discussing particularly the geopolitics of of climate change and sort of the same topics we have here today. I think there is a strong there were two groups of people there one group proponent of you know we have to find the common ground within the UNFCCC we have to set the common standards for that and we have to work through the UNFCCC here so to get everyone on board and that was another camp much more realist camp that said that well it's all in the hands of the US and in Europe now you could set the rules and move ahead and do that through trade policy instead of working through the UNFCCC and then of course everyone understands that there is a middle ground you have to work maybe both these arenas but I think that was an interesting observation from my side here that there are you know two two ideas of how to move ahead here given that we have a new geopolitical situation with with Biden now in the White House. Thank you Carl, Daria would you like to comment on that? I can always support that actually because I would also see that's the danger of work well or the you cannot turn a blind eye on all these different agendas such as the trade agenda and its geopolitical components which I think this group is kind of all about that we're trying to raise awareness for this for this aspect but on the other hand of course the UNFCCC can create what is a very valuable forum and there can be a mutual reinforcement so to say if we do if we manage to play those different games on those different levels in appropriate in appropriate forum so to say and always being conscious of the geopolitics behind it if that's if that's a helpful comment. Yes absolutely thanks thanks Daria. Anyone else like to add their two cents on that before I go to another question? Johan please we can hear you now. Can you? Yeah okay because it says I'm still and well you know just adding to these really good points but I was also trying to reflect upon is you know the quote from from the US the fact that Biden clearly puts into his budget for 2022 that this is about competitiveness for US industry is one positive example you know we we see a completely different force while we before looked at very much you know politics we have now different actors and in particular the market driving the whole shift there are challenges with this no doubt and we you know we talked about some of them today but I think fundamentally this represents a very important shift in how policy is made and a difficult change for politicians as I mentioned you know moving maybe away from being those that you know they're used to making the decisions and driving this to more being the enablers of the change that we see more coming bottom up than top down so I think that there is a very positive shift here and you know we move away from carbon tax the global carbon tax is the only viable solution to a more much more multi landscape which I think is more interesting to a certain extent. Thank you Johan let me move along to a question which I'd like to pose to the panel and welcome responses from everyone because I think it has a relevance to explain what we're talking about here in more detail. I think I'm conscious that it would be very good to find some concrete examples of a country or or other actor in which this competition cooperation between the EU, US and China is playing out. I think for each of the remarks that we heard there's some very interesting aspects that we can dig into if we focus on individual countries and I may start with you Andre if I could. I'd like to you'd made mention of new countries that will gain importance as resource suppliers I think it would be great to hear which countries you have in mind there and we have two questions related to your presentation that were posted in the Q&A. I'm sorry if I mispronounced your name this is a question regarding tax havens and resource rich countries and Nina Bondre and this relates to the fact that mining is carried out often by private companies so question about how private actors play into this so not just countries Andre. Yeah thank you so when companies different metals and there are a few different countries for the different metals I would say so for example if we take the lithium and South America like Chile, Bolivia and Argentina is often considered to be like a lithium triangle where we have the big resource concentration of low cost lithium there are lithium in other countries too but it's very easy to extract it at the low cost from these countries for the cobalt it's Congo of course a country which is perhaps not spoken that much about it's South Africa which has a lot of platinum and it could be important if we have more hydrogen either for the fuel cell vehicles or for the industry and in the estimates that I have this was done a few years ago and we have fairly low assumptions on the hydrogen use so if we would have redone this study today and looked on the industry transition which we did not include then we would probably increase these revenues for South Africa quite a bit. EU is an import dependent country so Sweden is one of the few countries in the EU where we have quite a lot of mining so for the EU as a whole it will of course be important how these networks act at the global scale or if it would be bilateral negotiations with these countries. Now when it comes to this with the mining I mean yes sure the mining is done but by private companies but still there is taxes on the mining and that can be a different way of having those type of regulations in Sweden it's fairly low or very low I should say based on the value of what is in the metals but some other countries have substantial fees that you need to pay to the government so in some way there is still money that is going back to the government budget and it could be at different levels sometimes it's more at the local some have it at the state so there are different regulations for that. This with the tax havens and so I think that that is a bit outside the scope of my core research because most of my core research has been on the critical materials and the critical materials they are usually not that important when it comes to the total carbon emissions that they are part of. I mean they're used in very small quantities the materials the bulk materials like aluminum iron and so on concrete that's where we see the really big emissions and we touched upon this in one of the reports that we have and how this relates more to the carbon leakage problem and so on and if there is a need for some type of carbon adjustment tariffs and so on and I don't have a clear answer to that I think that it's a huge uncertainty for these industries if you have them within like Europe for instance and you have these big investments that they need to make in order to have these low carbon low carbon materials. At the same time the materials are usually a very small part of the total product value so it's it's not necessarily that expensive for the end user to internalize the cost but there needs to be some institution in place to do it. Thank you very much Andre. I'd like to turn to Taylor now because some of the materials you mentioned are quite relevant for well electric vehicles but also fuel fuel fuel vehicles perhaps a little bit outside the scope but would you like to reflect on the materials in your scenarios you've looked at or perhaps you'd like to talk instead about a particular country that it might be that the US, EU and China might be dependent on in this competition that they're quite explicitly outlining now. Sure I mean there is quite a bit of overlap clearly with some of the countries that Andre has been looking into in terms of where some of these minerals are produced you know whether it's cobalt or or nickel or lithium and you know places like the Democratic Republic of Congo is is a big one where I think that there are clearly sort of national and international security interests that all of these actors have in terms of trying to maintain stability in some of those in some of those regions but you know I certainly I think that the sort of transition towards electrification will have pretty significant implications in terms of the sort of geopolitical positioning of all of these of all of these actors so I mean one of the reasons for example you know China I think identified electric vehicles as one of these 10 advanced industries as part of the made in China 2025 plan I think what some of the rationale behind that was that you know China is tired of relying on the US for protection of global oil supply chains right so the US has seen that as a strategic advantage historically I think China sees the control and production of some of these new clean energy supply chains including around battery production as a potential strategic advantage in the future and clearly that reshapes both the relationship between the sort of three major powers that we're looking at today but then on downwards you know downstream in the supply chain where some of the minerals and metals are also being produced and you have big changes in the relative sort of geopolitical attention being played to regions like the Middle East for example relative to some parts of Africa or Latin America so you know I yeah I would just say you know I think that there there are big changes already underway and part of that purpose of of the paper was to what to try and highlight that as an area where you know you need to try and identify some concrete venues or opportunities to start to cooperate on some of these on some of these questions because I think just based on the status quo I would have I would have concerns about where we end up despite some of the very positive developments in the financial markets for example that we've seen thank you Taylor I would like to turn our turn to Carl and Daria to we only have a couple of minutes left for this panel discussion I'm afraid but there's a question in the chat about climate change being one of the few remaining areas of cooperation that between the US and China is this realistic I wonder if you may like to comment on on that the question by Maria Marion Geffrault go ahead Kelly yeah sorry I I think it you know may have looked like that when when there was an agreement between Biden and Xi Jinping here before Biden's big climate meeting that China and the US should work together are in you know in in the world I didn't see any realism behind that I don't know how on what basis they should cooperate actually but it's important for them these both parties to to provide an image of them as as you know working together I think however it should be very important to bear in mind that Xi Jinping has developed a number of strategic underpinnings for Chinese in engagement with the world on one of them is an offer to work on issues of common destiny to jointly work together on issues of common destiny while at the same time keeping sovereignty of states at a very high level that means corporate and climate change but don't talk about human rights don't talk about freedom of speech don't talk about democracy and don't talk about open free trade and then on that premises I don't think there is a basis there is not the common idea of a rules-based system in which China and the US could cooperate thanks Carl Dari would you like to add any points there or any other reflections so to promote my own report on Kazakhstan where in the the belt and road initiative in Kazakhstan the one of the big points there was also to say yes we do have to look at what China's interest is behind the the belt and road initiative and the you for the focus was on the you there or China have to take be aware of that but also there is another side of the on of the China's investment abroad and this is the countries where it is invested so I do think that what there is not exactly an answer to the question in the chat but maybe it well I would say one was also what also needs to to see this other cooperation route so to say so where you or the US can cooperate with third countries where China is investing heavily and how we can shift the incentives for decarbonized investment there to make maybe China or or you or us to make an alternative offer for instance on the on the energy side on the transportation side on the industry side so this is also an important aspect from my point of view very good point thank you Daria now we have sadly come to the conclusion of our panel discussion I'm glad everyone had a chance to speak I'd now like to reintroduce Jeju to please provide some final remarks your reflections on today no pressure thank you there's no way I can provide any sort of summary but it's been such a great conversation and I would like to just raise three broad reflections from the discussion the first I think is on sort of this tension related to interdependency I think many of the panelists have highlighted you know the perils the risks geopolitical and otherwise related to the fact that we do have really integrated supply chains really into integrated economies and part of the the dynamics that you do see in this new geopolitical environment whether or not it's a new one or it's just a more turbulent one is that a lot of countries and actors have been moving towards mitigating those risks and in reducing interdependency so you have this broader shift towards shortened supply chains diversification in terms of you know the EU's new focus on strategic autonomy or not so new but also investing in R&D and innovation locally domestically but I think that the tension that I find and a really interesting one and I don't think any of us necessarily have any answer is that the reason why we're discussing all these things together is because of the interdependencies of the climate system the fact that this is one planet we're living on so in a sense policies by one country even if they are so called domestic even if they are about competitive advantage that implicates all of us all together but you know then one caveat there is that we don't all have the same vulnerabilities and I think that that's a really important point in terms of climate risks you know there are countries that may benefit more than others from the changing climate in many many countries that have a lot of higher risks and I think that also needs to be in direct focus. A second point is a more pessimistic one I think the first question that I asked about this race to the top I think highlighted it was in line with this this broader point about the integration of climate and environmental issues with politics and to the extent that that's an opportunity is great but I think I would like to echo what Kala said that there are perils with that. We can't really and especially what you see in geopolitics today is these things are not necessarily being separated broader issues of political governance human rights transparency industrial and technological competitiveness and competition these are becoming integrated as well into the broader discussion of climate leadership of economic models things like that and John Kerry recently suggested that climate was a standalone issue that could be seen apart from the difficulties of the U.S.-China relationship broadly but I think that that's that's really an open question even the Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi seemed to suggest that China sees these things as also part of a broader game and I think that that's something we have to look closely at together in terms of being clear eyed about risks and the potential challenges to to deeper cooperation and then a third point I think which for me is also not something that I have any clear idea about but I think it's the question of governance and I think it's it's so important to focus on of course these major actors of the EU and China and the U.S. because they are such strong and important players in shaping global governance norms and rules but I think it's so necessary to broaden that out because the past four years under Trump I think really highlighted to the rest of us the risk of taking you know only one leader or only one person setting the norms or standards I think it has to be diversified it has to be broadened and shared and that conversation about who governs and who shapes those rules it has to include countries like Sweden and many many others emerging economies developing ones and so I'd like to just leave it with that that there's so many open questions but I think that this conversation has really highlighted many of the issues at the heart of it so thank you. Thank you very eloquent summary well not summary but reflections I think which are very important issues as you say this has highlighted many questions that we'll be continuing to address through the Mr. Geopolitics program over the next four years so I wanted to conclude now by thanking our speakers from the program very much for the excellent presentations and our special guest Yohan Shirehwena for opening up and being part of the panel we really appreciate all of your time and finally to thank all participants for joining today and for the questions you've posted please do continue to follow the program you can see the website and the Twitter hashtag there so with that I'd like to conclude our webinar thank you everyone