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The non-traditional security threats in the form of incessant floods, cyclones, and all-time rising sea levels in the Indo-Pacific region call for an integrated and constructive response led by a climate leader. Climate change is seen way beyond the lens of a mere environmental catastrophe having the potential to destabilize a nation's economy and polity. The global state and non-state actors have acknowledged climate change to be an alarming global security threat. However, the failure of collective management of the climate crisis has mandated a responsible climate leader to monitor the mitigation efforts. In the context of initiatives like the National Solar Mission that envisages India to be a 'global leader in solar energy,' the paper intends to weigh the possibilities for India's role as a cogent climate leader in the Indo-Pacific region. It seeks to evaluate India's climate leadership based on its green policies and assistance to Indo-Pacific countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: Future strategic pressures in the Indo-Pacific region will present major policy and strategic challenges driven by rapidly increasing populations, resource depletion and contests, and forced adaptation to a changing climate. While regional countries remain likely to continue on a high growth trajectory, there is growing concern that nations will face difficulty to sustain economic gains in the face of strategic resource depletion and availability, population growth, and increasingly frequent extreme weather events. This mismatch could result in strategic miscalculation and reformulation, driving CBRN proliferation choices that fall outside of historical norms or standards. Such societal stressors are already occurring in the region and themselves may suddenly impact on health and social systems in unpredictable and complex ways. Method: Three tabletop exercises called the Boxwood Scenarios were conducted utilizing the Avalanche TTX system, including participants from key intelligence, military, and academic experts. Participants were invited to a Delphi study examining positive and negative drivers, shaping factors, motivators, and consequences of CBRNE proliferation in the Indo-Pacific region. Two rounds of result review were conducted by the group. These results underwent a systematic mixed methods analysis (quantitative and qualitative methods) and interpretation. Results: Climate change, demographic and geopolitical pressures were highlighted as key to future potential CBRN proliferation risks, with this nexus resulting in major proliferation concerns as early as 2040. Proliferation decisions driven by, and occurring in parallel to, climate and demographic pressures were identified as of major concern. Such decisions would have profound multi-layered social, health and broader implications for Indo-Pacific countries with declining determinants of national power. Conclusion: Climate change and demographic and geopolitical pressures could drive future Indo-Pacific CBRN proliferation. The consequences to human populations, the viability of ongoing international disaster risk reduction and capacity-building efforts, and the increased future risk of major CBRN events cannot be overstated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

SSTs in the western Pacific Ocean have tracked closely with CMIP5 simulations despite recent hiatus cooling in the eastern Pacific. This paper quantifies these similarities and associated circulation and precipitation variations using the first global 1900-2012 ENSO-residual empirical orthogonal functions (EOFs) of 35 variables: observed SSTs; 28 CMIP5 SST simulations; Simple Ocean Data Assimilation (SODA) 25-, 70-, and 171-m ocean temperatures and sea surface heights (SSHs); and Twentieth Century Reanalysis, version 2 (20CRv2), surface winds and precipitation. While estimated independently, these leading EOFs across all variables fit together in a meaningful way, and the authors refer to them jointly as the west Pacific warming mode (WPWM). WPWM SST EOFs correspond closely in space and time. Their spatial patterns form a "western V" extending from the Maritime Continent into the extratropical Pacific. Their temporal principal components (PCs) have increased rapidly since 1990; this increase has been primarily due to radiative forcing and not natural decadal variability. WPWM circulation changes appear consistent with a Matsuno-Gill-like atmospheric response associated with an ocean-atmosphere dipole structure contrasting increased (decreased) western (eastern) Pacific precipitation, SSHs, and ocean temperatures. These changes have enhanced the Walker circulation and modulated weather on a global scale. An AGCM experiment and the WPWM of global boreal spring precipitation indicate significant drying across parts of East Africa, the Middle East, the southwestern United States, southern South America, and Asia. Changes in the WPWM have tracked closely with precipitation and the increase in drought frequency over the semiarid and water-insecure areas of East Africa, the Middle East, and southwest Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate variability and change present significant challenges for island communities in the Pacific and Indian Ocean regions. Understanding how climate science can be useful for island communities requires knowledge of decision-makers, their climate-sensitive decisions, and the context in which the decisions are being made. In this paper we report on an interdisciplinary research and outreach effort called the Pacific Islands Regional Climate Assessment. We describe potential impacts from the changing climate for island communities, including food and water security, disaster preparedness, human migration and national security. We highlight transferable lessons learned related to building resiliency, engaging innovative leadership and supporting integrated research and outreach. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

IR literature has become inundated with different descriptions for the future of international order. The coming age is purportedly marked by China's ascendancy, American decline, a leaderless "no-one's world", or multiple competing modernities. Yet the global fight against climate change or shared COVID-19 strategies convey a different image of the world's predicament. The situation appears paradoxical: increasingly tense great-power relations are mixed with ever-strengthening interdependencies. This article contributes to these debates by exploring how global orders as well as regionalism today are increasingly defined by various types of connective functional links between intentional actors at various levels of social organisation. To enable a nuanced analysis, the article introduces an analytical framework composed of six connectivity logics, namely cooperation, copying, cushioning, contestation, containment, and coercion. These play out differently within material, economic, institutional, knowledge, people-to-people, and security spheres. The utility of this article's approach is demonstrated through empirical examples related to the policies of key actors in the Indo-Pacific region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Water scarcity is a long-standing issue among Small Island Developing States (SIDS). The issue is further magnified by climate change and is emerging as an existential threat to SIDS. Ironically, these states are among the lowest contributors to greenhouse gas emissions which is the primary cause for climate change. Due to limited indigenous economic and technological capacity and capability, SIDS often require external assistance. In this context, this article explores the opportunity for India to offer its Low Temperature Thermal Desalination (LTTD) technology to tackle water scarcity in SIDS. The article will assess the advantages of LTTD over conventional options such as membrane-based and other distillation-based techniques. By promoting the technology through bilateral and multilateral mechanisms, India can reinforce its position as a major stakeholder in the Indo-Pacific and as a responsible actor committed to combating and mitigating effects of climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The variability of Indo-Pacific SST on seasonal to multidecadal time scales is investigated using a recently introduced technique called nonlinear Laplacian spectral analysis (NLSA). Through this technique, drawbacks associated with ad hoc prefiltering of the input data are avoided, enabling recovery of low-frequency and intermittent modes not previously accessible via classical approaches. Here, a multiscale hierarchy of spatiotemporal modes is identified for Indo-Pacific SST in millennial control runs of CCSM4 and GFDL CM3 and in HadISST data. On interannual time scales, a mode with spatiotemporal patterns corresponding to the fundamental component of ENSO emerges, along with ENSO-modulated annual modes consistent with combination mode theory. The ENSO combination modes also feature prominent activity in the Indian Ocean, explaining a significant fraction of the SST variance in regions associated with the Indian Ocean dipole and suggesting a deterministic relationship between these patterns. A pattern representing the tropospheric biennial oscillation also emerges along with its associated annual cycle combination modes. On multidecadal time scales, the dominant NLSA mode in the model data is predominantly active in the western tropical Pacific; this pattern is referred to here as the west Pacific multidecadal mode (WPMM). The interdecadal Pacific oscillation also emerges as a distinct NLSA mode, though with smaller explained variance than the WPMM. Analogous modes on interannual and decadal time scales are also identified in HadISST data for the industrial era, as well as in model data of comparable time span, though decadal modes are either absent or of degraded quality in these datasets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Coral reefs and their associated fauna are largely impacted by ongoing climate change. Unravelling species responses to past climatic variations might provide clues on the consequence of ongoing changes. Here, we tested the relationship between changes in sea surface temperature and sea levels during the Quaternary and present-day distributions of coral reef fish species. We investigated whether species-specific responses are associated with life-history traits. We collected a database of coral reef fish distribution together with life-history traits for the Indo-Pacific Ocean. We ran species distribution models ( SDMs) on 3,725 tropical reef fish species using contemporary environmental factors together with a variable describing isolation from stable coral reef areas during the Quaternary. We quantified the variance explained independently by isolation from stable areas in the SDMs and related it to a set of species traits including body size and mobility. The variance purely explained by isolation from stable coral reef areas on the distribution of extant coral reef fish species largely varied across species. We observed a triangular relationship between the contribution of isolation from stable areas in the SDMs and body size. Species, whose distribution is more associated with historical changes, occurred predominantly in the Indo-Australian archipelago, where the mean size of fish assemblages is the lowest. Our results suggest that the legacy of habitat changes of the Quaternary is still detectable in the extant distribution of many fish species, especially those with small body size and the most sedentary. Because they were the least able to colonize distant habitats in the past, fish species with smaller body size might have the most pronounced lags in tracking ongoing climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study evaluates the influence of various climate modes on sea level. The altimetry record has excellent spatial coverage but the limited length becomes an issue when evaluating low frequency variability in the presence of a trend. We use altimetry along with two ocean models to study how the relationship between sea surface height (SSH) in the Indian and Pacific Oceans and four climate modes [the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, the Indian Ocean Dipole and the Southern Annular Mode] depends on the length of the time series. For low frequency variability such as the PDO, a time series on the order of 50 years in length is required to separate variability from the trend. Using shorter time series results in aliasing of the SSH trend and low frequency variability, which has implications for ascertaining the role of the PDO in the SSH trends. We find that the regression of SSH on to the PDO during the altimetry period, which is thought to have been responsible for a large fraction of the recent western Pacific SSH trend, is not representative of the SSH-PDO relationship in the longer-term record. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human activities have resulted in the loss of over 90% of sharks in most ocean basins and one in four species of elasmobranch are now listed at risk of extinction by the IUCN. How this collapse will affect the ability of populations to recover in the face of continued exploitation and global climate change remains unknown. Indeed, important ecological and biological information are lacking for most shark species, particularly estimates of genetic diversity and population structure over a range of spatial scales. Using 15 microsatellite markers, we investigated genetic diversity and population structure in gray reef sharks over their Indo-Pacific range (407 specimens from 9 localities). Clear genetic differentiation was observed between the Indian and the Pacific Ocean specimens (FST = 0.145***). Further differentiation within the Pacific included a West and East cleavage as well as North-Central and South-Central Pacific clusters. No genetic differentiation was detected within archipelagos. These results highlight the legacy of past climate changes and the effects of large ocean expanses and circulation patterns on contrasting levels of connectivity at global, regional and local scales. Our results indicate a need for regional conservation units for gray reef sharks and pinpoint the isolation and vulnerability of their French Polynesian population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]