Global Outlook

A recent online conference on “Climate Change and Pacific Sovereignty” discussed the issues of identity and sovereignty with a focus on Pacific atoll nations. Politicians, academics and civil society representatives from the atoll nations of Tuvalu, Kiribati and the Marshall Islands presented their experiences, views and political approaches. They were joined by legal and policy experts from Fiji and Australia.

The US and the German governments just agreed on a compromise about the controversial and long-debated Nord Stream 2 pipeline that is planned to supply natural gas from Russia to Germany. The supply of natural gas by Russia is not new.

After almost a year of being community COVID-free, Fiji Islands, one of the popular tourist destinations in the Pacific, is currently experiencing an exponential increase in active cases since the Delta variant, second wave of the Corona virus, landed on her shores in April 2021. The outbreak has recorded, to date, a total of 22,443 active cases and 177 deaths over the past three months.

More than 1/3 of those tested for Covid-19 in Myanmar now test positive. The crematorium in Yangon can hardly handle all the bodies. Many health workers remain on strike since the February 1 coup. When they try to help people on a voluntary basis, they risk arrest. Social media is full of desperate requests for oxygen.

Given North Korea’s stronger nuclear arsenal, the pervasiveness of anti-North Korean sentiment in the US, and the intensifying rivalry between the US and China, another North Korean nuclear crisis at this point might not be manageable.

With the advance of algorithmic technologies, the international legal regulation of fully autonomous weapons systems has risen up the international security and humanitarian agenda in recent years. But calls for the outright prohibition of such systems seem both premature and destined to fail.