Seychelles, March, 2005 (photo by Wikimedia user Simisa, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license).
The Tropics will have to deal with increasing numbers of so-called climate refugees as states disappear or become unlivable due to climate change, according to a recent collaborative report prepared by 12 research institutions across the region. Comprising tropical, arid and semi-arid areas, the Tropics will be faced with more droughts, rising sea levels and flooding, which could cause large migrations and destabilize fragile states in the region if the environmental stress leads to food shortages and other crises. The warning signs are already there, yet the international community has failed to respond with urgency. The Tropics are traditionally defined [...]
German Chancellor Angela Merkel shakes hands with Chinese President Xi Jinping at the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse in Beijing, China, July 7, 2014 (Kyodo via AP Images).
German Chancellor Angela Merkel was in China last week, where she visited Chengdu, in the west of the country, and Beijing. This marks Merkel’s seventh official trip to China since she took office in 2005, a further sign of the growing importance of Berlin’s special relationship with Beijing. Germany and China have been steadily boosting ties since the late 1990s, when Gerhard Schroeder was chancellor. In 2012, then-Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, while visiting Berlin, announced the goal to increase bilateral trade with Germany from $180 billion to $280 billion by 2015. Trade between the two reached $193 billion in 2013, [...]
The dynamics of triangular interaction among South Korea, Japan and China have constituted a central security paradox in Northeast Asia since the late 19th century, with South Korea cursed by its geographical position at the conflux of great power interests in the region. But the division of the Korean Peninsula and the aftereffects of Cold War rivalry, replaced in the post-Cold War world by the U.S.-North Korea nuclear standoff, have served both to obscure Sino-Japanese tensions over the Korean Peninsula, and to spur periodic trilateral and multilateral cooperation aimed at resolving the regional Cold War hangover caused by Korea’s division. [...]
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