Uttam Kumar Sinha

China is a thirsty country desperately in need of water—a lot of it. In order to meet its water and energy requirements in the densely populated and fertile northern plains, it is successively making interventions in the Tibetan rivers in the southern part through dams and diversions. While China is well within its riparian rights to do so, a set of externalities involving the principles of water-sharing and lower riparian needs—stretching from Afghanistan to Vietnam—raise concerns.

• Published: January 2012
• Strategic Analysis

With the first commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol expiring in 2012, time seems to be running out for a new successor agreement. The Protocol remains the most comprehensive attempt to negotiate binding limits on anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The long-term challenge, defined by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), is to stabilise GHG concentration in the atmosphere at levels that would prevent interference with the climate system. There are, however, economic and social realities that drive anthropogenic GHG emissions.

• Published: November 2010
• Strategic Analysis

Rivers are more than what Samuel T. Coleridge poetically expressed in Kubla Khan: ‘meandering with mazy motion’ and falling into the ‘sunless sea’. Rivers are life-givers, carrying a mystic and sacred quality about them. That they are oft described as being ‘mighty’—the mighty Amazon; the mighty Nile; the mighty Brahamaputra; the mighty Murray; the mighty Mississippi and Missouri—is hardly mystifying. Civilizations have grown around it and flourished. In contemporary politics the salience of rivers cannot be overlooked both in terms of being drivers of cooperation and conflict.

• Published: September 2010
• Strategic Analysis

Like in the 1950s, the word ‘riparian’ is back again in the India–Pakistan lexicon, becoming this time intensely political, emotional and divisive. This development is both instructive and unsettling. It is instructive to note how the current water realties of the two countries, which have changed significantly since the Indus Water Treaty (IWT) in 1960, will now determine the treaty's future. With growing populations, inadequate water management techniques and the impact of global warming, water resources are under pressure.

• Published: July 2010
• Strategic Analysis

Climate change has acquired high priority in the United Kingdom's foreign policy. It has in recent years raised the issue of climate change at various international forums, such as G-8, the European Union and the UN Security Council. This article examines how and why climate change has become one of the core components of UK foreign policy, and in so doing analyses the interconnections between foreign policy and climate change, and interactions between domestic and international politics.

• Published: May 2010
• Strategic Analysis

Climate change is hugely challenging. But there is an unmistakable straightforwardness to it – reduce emissions to reduce global warming. In many ways, this reflects the sum total of the paradoxes that define our reality and the contradictions and hypocrisy of coping and dealing with it. Climate change raises all the right concerns from effectively all the right quarters. But concerns require actions and that is where the debate starts, the positions get entrenched and more often than not words and gestures become hollow and empty.

• Published: November 2009
• Strategic Analysis

The Road to Copenhagen in December 2009 has two visible signposts. One that reads, ‘The time for climate change action is now’, the other that warns, ‘The road is bumpy’. The first signpost expresses the apocalyptic language that the earth's rising temperatures are poised to set off irreversible consequences if concrete steps are not taken quickly. It suggests that the climate is nearing tipping point. The second signpost forewarns that arriving at a bold, equitable, and binding treaty will not be easy and that the politics of climate change will undermine the science of climate change.

• Published: September 2009
• Strategic Analysis

That there is a freshwater crisis today is an irrefutable fact. That there is also a water policy that is in perpetual crisis is an equally undeniable fact. Continued population growth and the impact of global warming along with over-consumption, inadequate conservation, and wastage are putting enormous pressure on water resources. Water covers most of the planet but only 3 per cent is fresh water, of which a mere 1 per cent is readily accessible for human consumption. What it means is that less than 0.007 per cent of all the water on earth is available to drink.

• Published: July 2009
• Strategic Analysis

• Published: March 2009
• Strategic Analysis

• Published: November 2008
• Strategic Analysis