Letter from the Editors

Welcome to the December 2020 issue of The Diplomat Magazine.

If 2020 had a silver lining, it’s this: As the COVID-19 pandemic brought global economic activity to a screeching halt, it gave strength to calls to reimagine a more sustainable path for future development. China, Japan, and South Korea expressed new commitments to a zero-emissions future, while in the United States President-elect Joe Biden outlined the country’s most ambitious climate action plan yet. Will the global community finally take meaningful action on climate change? The countries of the Indo-Pacific region will be a key part of answer – for better or for worse.

In our cover story, Scott Moore, a senior fellow at the Water Center at Penn and lecturer in the Department of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania, examines the starkly different global context for present and future climate action. “Ambitious climate action... is increasingly driven not by a vision of cooperation, but one of geopolitical competition,” he writes, with countries like China and the United States competing both for global leadership but also for ownership of the key technologies that will power a carbon-neutral world. Ironically, that shift to a zero-sum outlook on climate issues might be the key to a zero-carbon future, as governments channel more funds to foster clean energy and carbon capture innovations.

Speaking of geopolitics and climate change, in our next article Matt McDonald explores how Australia’s climate change recalcitrance is jeopardizing its diplomacy with the Pacific Island states – a region where Canberra sees its influence increasingly contested by Beijing. Amid growing concern at home and existential dread among its nearest neighbors, “Changing international winds risk severely isolating Australia and challenging the very rationale for Australian climate policy,” McDonald, an associate professor in the School of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Queensland, argues.

Southeast Asia, as journalist Nithin Coca explains, is the world’s most densely populated biodiversity hotspot, which places special strain on its unique habitats and diverse wildlife. Meanwhile, deforestation and wildlife trafficking raise the risk of another pandemic similar to COVID-19, as wild animals (and their pathogens) are forced into ever-closer contact with humans. The region now sits at a crossroads: Will Southeast Asian countries like Vietnam lead the way toward wildlife protection and habitat preservation, with an eye on preventing the next pandemic? Or will economic desperation in the wake of COVID-19 cause leaders to double down on development at all costs?

Finally, Kabul-based journalist Ezzatullah Mehrdad explores Afghanistan’s other war: the fight against the invisible forces of climate change. The country is already seeing the devastating impact of rapidly melting glaciers in the Hindu Kush. Climate change is causing deadly flash floods during the rainy season, followed by droughts as the steady drip of melting snow no longer reliably feeds into Afghan rivers. Given Afghanistan’s economic reliance on agriculture and already-extreme poverty, climate change could ultimately prove as devastating as decades of war.

We hope you enjoy these stories and the many more inside these pages.