This half-day strategic workshop, organized by Chatham House and E3G, brought together key climate experts, policymakers and influential actors, especially in Europe, for a focused and facilitated discussion on the roles, risks and potentials of negative emissions technologies (NETs). 

An interactive scenario exercise will be conducted, drawing on a climate simulation tool developed by Climate Interactive, to consider the potential roles and risks of different NETs deployments to meet the Paris Agreement targets and to consider the international co-operation required to manage the pathway to net-zero emissions. Participants will explore the political opportunities, discuss different scenarios and risks and identify areas of interventions and collective action.

The meeting is part of a series of events being held at Chatham House as part of London Climate Action Week (LCAW).

One-quarter of humanity faces a looming water crisis, including the prospect of running out of water, which may seem inconceivable when 70 per cent of the Earth’s surface is water. Nevertheless up to 80 per cent of available surface and groundwater is being used every year and water demand globally is projected to increase by 55 per cent by 2050. Why is the world facing a crisis of water scarcity and what is driving the increasing demand for water?

The first reason that is causing water stress around the world is the growing human population at the same time as the water supply has remained the same. Given that there are almost one billion more inhabitants on Earth every 15-20 years, this has led to a progressive deficit in the global water supply. 

The second reason is due to the uneven concentration of the global population. There is not a clear link between the presence of the population in some regions and the presence of water, in other words, water is not where we want it to be every time.

For example, there is, what we call, a ‘triangle of thirst’ from southern Spain, to Pakistan, to the Horn of Africa and back again. In this triangle, you have around two billion people in a very water-scarce region.

Comparatively, if you go to Russia or Canada, they have more water than they need in terms of the size of their population. So this is another crucial reason we are facing a crisis of water scarcity in some regions of the world – but not everywhere. 

Climate [change] will be the fruit on the cake. Currently we have global population growth and then later we will have climate change affecting water availability. But at this very moment, however, the problem for water suppliers and for political leaders is the demographic crisis we are facing – not the climate.

Water use has grown at more than twice the rate of the human population over the last century in part due to industries, such as agriculture, which account for 70 per cent of global freshwater use.

Given that food production will need to grow by up to 70 per cent by 2035 to feed the growing human population, how do we balance the use of water with the need to provide food?

There are some solutions. The first is that we need to improve water efficiency in the agricultural sector. We need to have all around the world, but mostly in developing countries, a better capacity to increase the water efficiency of agriculture without increasing the use of industrial chemical products and to move, step-by-step, to an economical system of organic farming. It will take time – it will not be done in one or even five years but more likely over a generation – but it is the best way.   

Secondly, which could be a faster solution, is that we have to reduce all kind of food waste which represents around 30-40 per cent of all agricultural production. Agriculture is a large sector involving the growing of crops but also livestock. There’s not only waste in terms of consumption but also during the production line, for example, during the transportation of food products. So there is this, sort of, waste cycle which is very important to consider. If you are able to reduce the water waste during the production line by 30-40 per cent, then you use less water, obviously.

The third solution is to be able to, step-by-step, change our consumption patterns. Use less meat, all kinds of agricultural products which need a lot of water etc. I think we will be obliged to do this over the next couple of decades, and we will probably have low animal protein diets in the future, which will mean we have to think of different ways to be able to provide food to the increasing global population.

There are other industries that are water-intensive that also need to be looked at in terms of their water waste such as the clothing and automobile industries. One piece of paper, for example, takes about 100 litres of water to produce while one litre of milk takes about 1,000 litres of water. Another example is that one cup of coffee takes 150 litres of water – just one cup of coffee – that’s because there is not only the water you are drinking but the water needed to prepare the coffee beans and the water used in the materials that make the coffee cup and so on.

So everything consumes water and that’s why humans will be obliged to consume less water over the coming years. 

More than one in three people globally do not have access to safe drinking water and more than 4 billion people lack adequate sanitation. How can waste water be more efficiently used and do you think global goals to provide everyone with safe and clean drinking water are still realistic?

In French, we use a phrase, parent pauvre, which means poor relative. Most of the decisions concerning access to water are not acceptable in the long term. That’s why we at the World Water Council are pushing for the financing of water and sanitation goals [concurrently].

For example, if you have a programme for a city to increase access to water for its citizens, they also need a sanitation programme. If we don’t do that, the mismatch that currently exists between water and sanitation will remain. 

There’s also another important solution which political leaders will be obliged to invest more in which is having more water coming from water reuse. If you produce water from water reuse processes then it means that it will likely have undergone sanitation treatment already which is a win-win solution [for providing safe and clean drinking water].

It’s all moving slowly but I’m optimistic concerning the increasing consciousness of people regarding water pollution – for example the pollution of our rivers, seas and oceans – and I think we will move faster in the sanitation area than in the water access area over the next decade.

Personally, I do not think that global goals to provide everyone with safe and clean drinking water [are the best solution]. I am more in favour of national and local commitments rather than global commitments. National and local efforts are stronger then [the rhetoric] around global goals where there is no authority to oversee the progress they are making. Only the population of a country or of a city can see if their leaders have done their job regarding providing access to safe and clean water.

With the depletion of global water supplies, how can governments avoid the politicization of water, as seen in cases such as the Nile River Basin and across the Middle East, to avoid conflicts over water?

This is a complicated issue because politicians will always do politics so it will always be difficult to avoid attempts to politicize situations. But the key is dialogue, dialogue and dialogue. That is the only way to solve water conflicts as well as better management of water because, in some regions, some of these conflicts are arising from the mismanagement of water supplies – not because of water scarcity. 

If you look at Egypt and the US, people are consuming around 800 litres [of water] per day whereas in Europe people are consuming around 200 litres per day. But why is [water consumption] in Egypt, rather than Europe, the same as in the US? Because they have considerable water losses in industries such as agriculture.

In addition, in the main cities like Cairo, there is not an adequate range of water networks, so, if in the future those living in Cairo are able to consume less water, they will need less water coming from the Nile River which will make politicization of water by politicians less likely. 

In the future, social unrest from water shortages is likely, however, I do not think it will ever lead to wars. 

Countries across the Middle East have invested in modern techniques, such as desalination plants, as an answer to water scarcity, but this can have a negative impact, notably on marine life. In contrast, some of the more ancient techniques, like rainwater harvesting, are being repurposed in cities around the world today. What is your view on these practices and what other solutions are available?

There are a lot of solutions and desalination is among them. Currently probably 100 countries in the world are using, or preparing to use, desalination as a solution so it surely is an important solution. But at the same time, reused water is developing fast and is a much cheaper option than desalination. 

Nevertheless, the price of desalination has been decreasing over the past 20 years and is now less than $1 a cubic metre, whereas 15 years ago, it was $10 a cubic metre.

Some of the negative impacts of desalination exist when you are separating the water from the salt, which can lead to disasters, for example, what has happened in the Persian Gulf. When Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Qatar first used desalination treatments, the temperature of the sea was around 30°C, whereas today, it can be up to 40°C. This increasing sea temperature as a result of the desalination plants has contributed to changes in biodiversity. For example, we are seeing fish disappearing and even the growing population of giant jellyfish – which some desalination plants in Saudi Arabia are dealing with by using shredders which is another type of disaster.

Furthermore, in some regions, we need to keep in mind that desalination is not only along the coast but it’s also in the middle of the land too. For example, in the Sahara region, like in Algeria or Morocco, the water coming from the ground is salted so you need to have desalination plants inland and not on the coast. But where they keep the salt inland, that salt mixes with the rain and enters the ground, thereby destroying some of the biodiversity there too. So it must be used prudently. 

Rainwater harvesting is a technique from centuries ago and I am a great supporter of it as a solution to water scarcity in India, particularly in Rajasthan, and I think it could also be part of the solutions in some places across Africa.

That’s why I believe there needs to be an exchange of solutions because something which is successful here could be successful somewhere else. In this way, we need to be able to show a Senegalese farmer a solution which has been implemented elsewhere, such as in India, and show him this can work for you too – it’s sort of like when the Japanese built the Toyota by looking at the British Land Rover.

With billions of people threatened by the global water crisis, increased water stress could lead to more ‘Day Zeroes’, a term used in 2018 as Cape Town in South Africa came dangerously close to running out of water. In your view, what will happen if the world doesn’t adequately address the global crisis of water scarcity?

The increasing absence of water would mean not only the migration of humans to more water-abundant regions but also the absence of socioeconomic growth of any kind in some places because water scarcity will pose a risk to businesses who will be forced to move to new areas – from small businesses like a hairdresser to factories that are unable to produce any goods or provide any services. So not tackling the water crisis means not being able to tackle our own capacity to prosper by not protecting the environment we depend on.

In Cape Town, there was a lack of rain in the city which contributed to the water crisis there but there was also a lack of water management. They knew they could have a lack of rain, and when you have a lack of rain, you have the obligation to prepare a reservoir of water for the year to the next year and so on but that did not happen.

There is a French poem from Jean de La Fontaine about a grasshopper and an ant. The grasshopper just spends his time in the summer enjoying life but the ant keeps working hard throughout the summer to save all of his supplies for the winter. In this way, we need to be like the ant, preparing water supplies for today and for tomorrow.

In the case of Cape Town, there was also another element, which was that the water supplies were being used by the central government as a tool to isolate the regional governor there who was part of the opposition. So the lack of water management was almost used as a political tool as we discussed earlier.

Some say that the water scarcity we are seeing is because of climate change. Yes it is but there is also a lack of water management by humans. If you look at the people living throughout the centuries all the way to antiquity, you see that people around the world prepared reservoirs of water to keep water from the winter to the summer, from the one year to the next, whereas today, we are seeing bad water management. So, in this way, I believe climate change should not be the scapegoat of human error.

As the UK leaves the EU and the formal negotiations on the future relationship begins, this workshop will discuss any immediate changes and review the short and medium term impacts of Brexit on the energy sector. 

The workshop will look to cover:

• The implications for UK business and system operations of the UK leaving the Internal Energy Market.
• Current and future investment trends in the UK energy system.
• The trade of electricity and gas over inter-connectors.
• The need for the development of a new EU-UK operational framework mechanism.
• The UK's EU withdrawal agreement and the operation of the Single Electricity Market (SEM) across Ireland. 
• Options for the UK outside of the EU Emissions Trading System (ETS) and the impact on carbon prices.

This workshop is part of a programme funded by the UK Energy Research Centre on Brexit and the UK’s Net Zero Energy Policy being run by the University of Warwick and Chatham House.

Attendance at this event is by invitation only.

Read all our analysis on the Coronavirus Response

The coronavirus outbreak comes at a difficult time for China’s ruling party. A tumultuous 2019 saw the country fighting an economic slowdown coupled with an increasingly hostile international environment. As authorities take assertive steps to contain the virus, the emergency has - at least temporarily - disrupted global trade and supply chains, depressed asset prices and forced multinational businesses to make consequential decisions with limited information. 

Against this backdrop, panellists reflect on the country’s nascent economic transition from 2020 onward. What has been China’s progress towards a sustainable innovation-led economy so far? To what extent is the ruling party addressing growing concerns over job losses, wealth inequality and a lack of social mobility? And how are foreign investors responding to these developments in China?

The pressure of the coronavirus pandemic is adding to a widely held misconception that trade in food products is bad for the environment due to the associated ‘food miles’ – the carbon footprint of agricultural products transported over long distances.

This concept, developed by large retailers a decade ago, is often invoked as a rationale for restricting trade and choosing locally-produced food over imports. Consuming local food may seem sensible at first glance as it reduces the carbon footprint of goods and generates local employment. 

However, this assumption ignores the emissions produced during the production, processing or storage stages which often dwarf transport emissions. Other avenues to address the climate change impact of trade are more promising.

Demystifying food emissions

In the US, for example, food items travel more than 8,000 km on average before reaching the consumer. Yet transport only accounts for 11 per cent of total emissions with 83 per cent – mostly nitrous oxide (N2O) and methane (CH4) emissions – occurring at the production stage.

US Department of Agriculture data on energy use in the American food system echoes this finding, showing that processing, packaging, and selling of food represent ten times the energy used to transport food.

In practice, it may be preferable from an environmental perspective to consume lamb, onion or dairy products transported by sea because the lower emissions generated at the production stage offset those resulting from transport. Similarly, growing tomatoes under heated greenhouses in Sweden is often more emissions-intensive than importing open-grown ones from Southern Europe.

Seasonality also matters. British apples placed in storage for ten months leads to twice the level of emissions as that of South American apples sea-freighted to the UK. And the type of transport is also important as, overall, maritime transport generates 25 to 250 times less emissions than trucks, and air freight generates on average five times more emissions than road transport.

Therefore, air-freighted Kenyan beans have a much larger carbon footprint than those produced in the UK, but crossing Europe by truck to import Italian wine might generate more emissions than transatlantic shipments.

Finally, one should take into account the last leg of transport. A consumer driving more than 10 km to purchase 1 kg of fresh produce will generate proportionately more greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions than air-freighting 1 kg of produce from Kenya.

Shifting consumption towards local foods may reduce GHG emissions in sectors with relatively low emissions intensities but, when non-carbon dioxide emissions are taken into account, this is more often the exception than the rule.

Under these circumstances, preventing trade is an inefficient and expensive way of reducing GHG emissions. Bureau et al. for example, calculate that a global tariff maintaining the volume of trade at current levels until 2030 may reduce global carbon dioxide emissions by 3.5 per cent. However, this would be roughly seven times less than the full implementation of the Paris Agreement and cost equivalent to the current GDP of Brazil or 1.8 per cent of world GDP.

By preventing an efficient use of resources, such restrictions would also undermine the role of trade in offsetting possible climate-induced production shortfalls in some parts of the world and allowing people to access food when they can’t produce it themselves.

Reducing the climate footprint of trade

This is not to say that nothing should be done to tackle transport emissions. The OECD estimates that international trade-related freight accounted for over 5 per cent of total global fuel emissions with shipping representing roughly half of it, trucks 40 per cent, air 6 per cent and rail 2 per cent. With the projected tripling of freight transport by 2050, emissions from shipping are expected to rise between 50 and 250 per cent.

Furthermore, because of their international nature, these emissions are not covered by the Paris Agreement. Instead the two UN agencies regulating these sectors – the International Civil Aviation Organization and the International Maritime Organization – are responsible for reducing these emissions and, so far, significant progress has proven elusive.

Regional or bilateral free trade agreements to further stimulate trade could address this problem by exploiting comparative advantages. Impact assessments of those agreements often point towards increases in GHG emissions due to a boost in trade flows. In the future, such agreements could incorporate – or develop in parallel – initiatives to ensure carbon neutrality by connecting carbon markets among contracting parties or by taxing international maritime and air transport emissions.

Such initiatives could be combined with providing additional preferences in the form of enhanced market access to low-carbon food and healthier food. The EU, as one of the chief proponents of bilateral and regional trade agreements and a leader in promoting a transition to a low-carbon economy could champion such an approach.

This article is part of a series from the Chatham House Global Trade Policy Forum, designed to promote research and policy recommendations on the future of global trade. It is adapted from the research paper, Delivering Sustainable Food and Land Use Systems: The Role of International Trade, authored by Christophe Bellmann, Bernice Lee and Jonathan Hepburn.

The Review on Antimicrobial Resistance, chaired by Jim O’Neill, was commissioned by former UK prime minister, David Cameron, in July 2014. Supported by the UK government and the Wellcome Trust, the final report of the review was published in May 2016 and has had a global impact in terms of motivating political leaders and decision-makers to take more seriously the threat posed by antimicrobial resistance.

Yet there is now a perception that the political momentum to address the issue is waning and needs to be reinvigorated.

In a further report produced by Chatham House, the progress of the recommendations of the review is assessed and the key ways to move forward are identified.

Panellists at this event, where highlights of the report are presented, provide their assessment of the progress so far and discuss priorities for future action.

The report was funded by Wellcome.

England and Australia are considered standard-bearers of universal access to health services, with the former’s National Health Service (NHS) recognized as a global brand and the latter’s Medicare seen as a leader in the Asia-Pacific region. However, through the exclusion of migrant and refugee groups, each is failing to deliver true universality in their health services. These exclusions breach both their own national policies and of international commitments they have made.

While the marginalization of mobile populations is not a new phenomenon, in recent years there has been a global increase in anti-migrant rhetoric, and such health care exclusions reflect a global trend in which undocumented migrants, refugees and asylum seekers are denied rights.

They are also increasingly excluded in the interpretation of phrases such as ‘leave no one behind’ and ‘universal health coverage’, commonly used by UN bodies and member states, despite explicit language in UN declarations that commits countries to include mobile groups.

Giving all people – including undocumented migrants and asylum seekers – access to health care is essential not just for the health of the migrant groups but also the public health of the populations that host them. In a world with almost one billion people on the move, failing to take account of such mobility leaves services ill-equipped and will result in missed early and preventative treatment, an increased burden on services and a susceptibility to the spread of infectious disease.

England

While in the three other nations of the UK, the health services are accountable to the devolved government, the central UK government is responsible for the NHS in England, where there are considerably greater restrictions in access.

Undocumented migrants and refused asylum seekers are entitled to access all health care services if doctors deem it clinically urgent or immediately necessary to provide it. However, the Home Office’s ‘hostile environment’ policies towards undocumented migrants, implemented aggressively and without training for clinical staff, are leading to the inappropriate denial of urgent and clearly necessary care.

One example is the case of Elfreda Spencer, whose treatment for myeloma was delayed for one year, allowing the disease to progress, resulting in her death.

In England, these policies, which closely link health care and immigration enforcement, are also deterring people from seeking health care they are entitled to. For example, medical bills received by migrants contain threats to inform immigration enforcement of their details if balances are not cleared in a certain timeframe. Of particular concern, the NGO Maternity Action has demonstrated that such a link to immigration officials results in the deterrence of pregnant women from seeking care during their pregnancy.

Almost all leading medical organizations in the United Kingdom have raised concerns about these policies, highlighting the negative impact on public health and the lack of financial justification for their implementation. Many have highlighted that undocument migrants use just and estimated 0.3% of the NHS budget and have pointed to international evidence that suggests that restrictive health care policies may cost the system more.

Australia

In Australia, all people who seek refuge by boat are held, and have their cases processed offshore in Papua New Guinea (PNG) and Nauru, at a cost of almost A$5 billion between 2013 and 2017. Through this international agreement, in place since 2013, Australia has committed to arrange and pay for the care for the refugees, including health services ‘to a standard of care broadly comparable to that available to the general Australian community under the public health system’.

However, the standard of care made available to the refugees is far from comparable to that available to the general population in Australia. Findings against the current care provision contractor on PNG, Pacific International Hospital, which took over in the last year, are particularly damning.

For instance, an Australian coroner investigating the 2014 death from a treatable leg infection of an asylum seeker held in PNG concluded that the contractor lacked ‘necessary clinical skills’, and provided ‘inadequate’ care. The coroner’s report, issued in 2018, found the company had also, in other cases, denied care, withheld pain relief, distributed expired medication and had generally poor standards of care, with broken or missing equipment and medication, and services often closed when they were supposed to be open.

This has also been reiterated by the Royal Australasian College of Physicians, which has appealed to the Australian government to end its policies of offshore processing immediately, due to health implications for asylum seekers. This echoes concerns of the medical community around the government’s ongoing attempts to repeal the ‘Medivac’ legislation, which enables emergency medical evacuation from PNG and Nauru.

Bad policy

Both governments have signed up to UN Sustainable Development Goals commitment to ‘safe and orderly migration’, an essential component of which is access to health care. The vision for this was laid out in a global action plan on promoting the health of refugees and migrants, agreed by member states at the 2019 World Health Assembly.

However, rather than allow national policies to be informed by such international plans and the evidence put forward by leading health professionals and medical organizations, the unsubstantiated framing of migrants as a security risk and economic burden has curtailed migrant and refugee access to health care.

The inclusion of migrants and refugees within universal access to health services is not merely a matter of human rights. Despite being framed as a financial burden, ensuring access for all people may reduce costs on health services through prevention of costly later-stage medical complications, increased transmission of infections and inefficient administrative costs of determining eligibility.

Thailand provides an example of a middle-income country that recognized this, successfully including all migrants and refugees in its health reforms in 2002. Alongside entitling all residents to join the universal coverage scheme, the country also ensured that services were ‘migrant friendly’, including through the provision of translators. A key justification for the approach was the economic benefit of ensuring a healthy migrant population, including the undocumented population.

The denial of quality health services to refugees and undocumented migrants is a poor policy choice. Governments may find it tempting to gain political capital through excluding these groups, but providing adequate access to health services is part of both governments’ commitments made at the national and international levels. Not only are inclusive health services feasible to implement and good for the health of migrants and refugees, in the long term, they are safer for public health and may save money.

• The 2016 Review on Antimicrobial Resistance has had a global impact: as an advocacy tool, in raising the profile of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) on the international agenda, and in helping to stimulate a number of new initiatives, in particular relating to the funding of early-stage research.
• However, there has been very little progress on the review’s central and most expensive recommendations for transforming research and development incentives for antibiotics, vaccines and diagnostics.
• There have been significant advances in reducing antibiotic use in agriculture, particularly in high-income countries, but there is a long way to go in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs).
• There has been greater investment in awareness raising but questions remain about its impact and effectiveness in changing behaviour.
• Proposals to restrict over-the-counter sales of antibiotics, as recommended by the Review, have foundered in the face of poor living conditions and access to healthcare in LMICs.
• A major reason for the use of antibiotics in LMICs is the prevalence of unhygienic conditions in the community and in healthcare facilities, which contribute to infection and limit the impact of messages about awareness and infection prevention and control.
• Providing quality healthcare to all and moving towards universal health coverage in LMICs will be crucial in addressing the problems of both adequate access to antibiotics and in restricting over-the-counter sales.
• A greater emphasis on investments in water, sanitation and housing will be central to reducing reliance on antibiotics in LMICs in the longer term. This agenda should inform the operations of governments and funding agencies such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank.
• Investments have been made in improving surveillance of antibiotic use and resistance, particularly for humans, but more effort is required to create surveillance systems that provide data sufficiently accurate to influence policy and action. This applies also to antibiotics and resistant genes circulating in the environment.
• The emerging innovations in the global governance of AMR need to lead to action rather than more words.

The World Health Organization (WHO) declared the spread of COVID-19 to be a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) on January 30 this year and then characterized it as a pandemic on March 11.

Declaring a PHEIC is the highest level of alert that WHO is obliged to declare, and is meant to send a powerful signal to countries of the need for urgent action to combat the spread of the disease, mobilize resources to help low- and middle-income countries in this effort and fund research and development on needed treatments, vaccines and diagnostics. It also obligates countries to share information with WHO.

Once the PHEIC was declared, the virus continued to spread globally, and WHO began to be asked why it had not yet declared the disease a pandemic. But there is no widely accepted definition of a pandemic, generally it is just considered an epidemic which affects many countries globally.

Potentially more deadly

The term has hitherto been applied almost exclusively to new forms of flu, such as H1N1 in 2009 or Spanish flu in 1918, where the lack of population immunity and absence of a vaccine or effective treatments makes the outbreak potentially much more deadly than seasonal flu (which, although global, is not considered a pandemic).

For COVID-19, WHO seemed reluctant to declare a pandemic despite the evidence of global spread. Partly this was because of its influenza origins — WHO’s emergency programme executive director said on March 9 that ‘if this was influenza, we would have called a pandemic ages ago’.

He also expressed concern that the word traditionally meant moving — once there was widespread transmission — from trying to contain the disease by testing, isolating the sick and tracing and quarantining their contacts, to a mitigation approach, implying ‘the disease will spread uncontrolled’.

WHO’s worry was that the world’s reaction to the word pandemic might be there was now nothing to be done to stop its spread, and so countries would effectively give up trying. WHO wanted to send the message that, unlike flu, it could still be pushed back and the spread slowed down.

In announcing the pandemic two days later, WHO’s director-general Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus reemphasised this point: ‘We cannot say this loudly enough, or clearly enough, or often enough: all countries can still change the course of this pandemic’ and that WHO was deeply concerned ‘by the alarming levels of inaction’.

The evidence suggests that the correct message did in fact get through. On March 13, US president Donald Trump declared a national emergency, referring in passing to WHO’s announcement. On March 12, the UK launched its own strategy to combat the disease. And in the week following WHO’s announcements, at least 16 other countries announced lockdowns of varying rigour including Austria, Belgium, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Serbia, Spain and Switzerland. Italy and Greece had both already instituted lockdowns prior to the WHO pandemic announcement.

It is not possible to say for sure that WHO’s announcement precipitated these measures because, by then, the evidence of the rapid spread was all around for governments to see. It may be that Italy’s dramatic nationwide lockdown on March 9 reverberated around European capitals and elsewhere.

But it is difficult to believe the announcement did not have an effect in stimulating government actions, as was intended by Dr Tedros. Considering the speed with which the virus was spreading from late February, might an earlier pandemic announcement by WHO have stimulated earlier aggressive actions by governments?

Declaring a global health emergency — when appropriate — is a key part of WHO’s role in administering the International Health Regulations (IHR). Significantly, negotiations on revisions to the IHR, which had been ongoing in a desultory fashion in WHO since 1995, were accelerated by the experience of the first serious coronavirus outbreak — SARS — in 2002-2003, leading to their final agreement in 2005.

Under the IHR, WHO’s director-general decides whether to declare an emergency based on a set of criteria and on the advice of an emergency committee. IHR defines an emergency as an ‘extraordinary event that constitutes a public health risk through the international spread of disease and potentially requires a coordinated international response’.

In the case of COVID-19, the committee first met on January 22-23 but were unable to reach consensus on a declaration. Following the director-general’s trip to meet President Xi Jinping in Beijing, the committee reconvened on January 30 and this time advised declaring a PHEIC.

But admittedly, public recognition of what a PHEIC means is extremely low. Only six have ever been declared, with the first being the H1N1 flu outbreak which fizzled out quickly, despite possibly causing 280,000 deaths globally. During the H1N1 outbreak, WHO declared a PHEIC in April 2009 and then a pandemic in June, only to rescind both in August as the outbreak was judged to have transitioned to behave like a seasonal flu.

WHO was criticized afterwards for prematurely declaring a PHEIC and overreacting. This then may have impacted the delay in declaring the Ebola outbreak in West Africa as a PHEIC in 2014, long after it became a major crisis. WHO’s former legal counsel has suggested the PHEIC — and other aspects of the IHR framework — may not be effective in stimulating appropriate actions by governments and needs to be reconsidered.

When the time is right to evaluate lessons about the response, it might be appropriate to consider the relative effectiveness of the PHEIC and pandemic announcements and their optimal timing in stimulating appropriate action by governments. The effectiveness of lockdowns in reducing the overall death toll also needs investigation.

Almost four years since it was established, the China-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) has approved 49 projects and proposed 28. The AIIB claims to be more efficient and less bureaucratic than traditional multilateral development banks (MDB’s) which has threatened the existing model of multilateral development finance. At the same time, China’s increased role in previously Western-led economic institutions, such as the WTO and IMF, has raised questions over the future of the international trade order. How will a rising China shape the international institutional order? Where are there opportunities for potential collaboration and what areas pose challenges? And how should other states and international organizations respond?

Attendance at this event is by invitation only. 

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has been regarded by international society as a major policy tool in China's geo-economic strategy. Under this policy platform, Beijing has pledged to invest billions of dollars in the infrastructure and industrial sectors across Eurasia and in the Indo-Pacific nations. It is widely believed that such huge amount of investment will inevitably generate significant geostrategic repercussions in these regions. In response to the BRI, the United States and other powers have come up with a ‘free and open Indo-Pacific’ strategy. This article attempts to address the following question: what impact is the BRI likely to have on the security ties between China and the other major players in the Indo-Pacific? The author finds that the BRI may significantly transform China's international security policy and the expansion of Beijing's security influence may further intensify the security competition between China and other major powers in the Indo-Pacific region. The article also proposes a new analytical angle for the study of geo-economics that unpacks the role of economic activities and processes in generating geopolitical intentions and catalysing geopolitical competition.

As a geographical concept, ‘Indo-Pacific’ has existed for decades. As a political and strategic concept, it has since 2010 gradually become established in the foreign policy lexicon of some countries, especially Australia, India, Japan and the United States. However, China seems to be reluctant to identify itself as part of the Indo-Pacific; Chinese leaders believe that the US-led Indo-Pacific strategy aims to contain China's rise. While the battle between the two geographical concepts ‘Indo-Pacific’ and ‘Asia–Pacific’ may be fairly easily settled in the future, US–China strategic competition has just begun. Will the Indo-Pacific become a battlefield for US–China rivalry? How will China cope with the US ‘free and open Indo-Pacific’ (FOIP) strategy? How will other regional actors respond to the US–China strategic competition in the Indo-Pacific? What are the strategic implications of the ‘Indo-Pacific’ concept for regional order transformation? How will the Indo-Pacific be institutionalized, economically, politically and strategically? This article introduces the January 2020 special issue of International Affairs, which aims to address those questions, using both country-specific and regional perspectives. Seven articles focus on the policy responses of major players (Australia, China, India, Indonesia, Japan and ASEAN) to the US FOIP strategy and related US–China rivalry in the region. A further three articles examine the profound implications of Indo-Pacific dynamics for regional institution-building and for geopolitical and geo-economic architecture.

This conference will be the fifth in an annual conference series exploring global geopolitical and geoeconomic trends and their respective influences on Japan and the UK.

This conference will be held in partnership with the Daiwa Institute of Research.

Attendance at this event is by invitation only.