Cyclone Mocha in conflict-ridden Myanmar is another warning to take climate security seriously

By Sarang Shidore
Sarang Shidore is Director of Studies and Senior Research Fellow at the Quincy Institute.

Republished in South China Morning Post: https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/opinion/article/3220840/cyclone-mocha-disaster-myanmar-wake-call-asean-world-take-climate-security-seriously/

MAY 17, 2023

Coming on the heels of a brutal heatwave in Southeast Asia is Cyclone Mocha, among the biggest in the region’s history. The storm has left a trail of destruction across Myanmar’s coastal Rakhine state. But even as we mourn the humanitarian tragedy, we must come to grips with the fact that climate change is a security issue, with profound implications for war and peace. And there is a wrong way and a right way to address climate security. The right way to deal with grave challenges such as climate security is to have an all-hands-on-deck approach.

The Bay of Bengal region straddles South and Southeast Asia and is enormously vulnerable to climate change-fueled natural hazards, particularly cyclones, floods, and sea level rise. But the pre-existing political fragility of the region means that these hazards could potentially worsen social fault lines and enhance conflict. Such conflict can be induced through various pathways - hostile responses to migrants and refugees, widening of existing faultlines over scarcer resources in communities, or states of emergency that may lead to harsh crackdowns and alienate citizens from their government to name a few.

A recent study on the climate-conflict nexus in the Bay of Bengal region published by the Center for Preventive Action at the Council of Foreign Relations (CFR) in Washington DC (and authored by me) identifies a zone of  high climate-conflict risk spanning northeastern India, Bangladesh, and Myanmar. Here, the greatest climate vulnerability coincides with the highest risks of conflict. The CFR report lays out four climate-conflict scenarios in the Bay of Bengal region, the most dangerous of which is a climate shock or a more gradual impact that further accelerates Myanmar’s fragmentation.

But even if climate change did not exist, Myanmar would be in trouble. Topping the list of its woes is a horrific civil war, with perhaps as much as half of its territory currently not under the control of its government. The country’s wide diversity, which could otherwise be a source of strength, is a major weakness as social fault lines have deepened. Rakhine province saw a major campaign of expulsion of its Rohingya minority in 2017, about a million of whom now are perched precariously in rickety refugee camps in southeastern Bangladesh, close to the Myanmar border. (Mercifully, the cyclone appears to have mostly spared these camps.) Rakhine’s insurgent Arakan army, demanding deep autonomy, is in episodic battles with the military. And Myanmar is among Southeast Asia’s poorest states, officially classified as a “Least Developed Country” by the United Nations.

Rakhine province is also a site of a geopolitical contest underway between India and China. Both are involved in major infrastructure projects there. The United States is also present in the overall region as a major power with deep ties to India, Bangladesh, and most ASEAN states. Myanmar is an ASEAN member. The military takeover and the civil war have presented the otherwise highly successful regional organization with its biggest challenge in decades.

But there’s a right way and a wrong way to deal with a climate security challenges such as Myanmar. The wrong way is coercive interventionism. This is what some international actors, led by France, threatened to do under the questionable “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P) doctrine during a previous such disaster, the 2008 Cyclone Nargis which killed about 140,000 Myanmarese. Other voices refrained from invoking R2P but demanded coercive diplomacy and other forms of pressure. Undoubtedly, Yangon was falling well short in taking the needed action to save lives and was resisting many foreign aid agencies from operating in the country. However, circumventing the Junta to deliver aid directly to the affected population using military airdrops – which was among the suggested actions under R2P – would only have made the situation worse by triggering nationalist resistance, opposition from major regional states, and worsening Myanmar’s fragility in the longer run.

R2P is not currently in vogue in the great power competition-focused discourse in Washington. But as climate impacts worsen, it could return as a part of such a competition – with intervention advocated in Global South states deemed to be moving too close to Russia or China.

Using humanitarian crises to solidify bloc-building against geopolitical adversaries is also not helpful. This was a byproduct of the otherwise highly commendable relief effort in the wake of the Asian tsunami of 2004, which Washington used as an opportunity to greatly increase military interoperability with some regional states.

Overcoming grave challenges such as climate insecurity needs an all-hands-on-deck approach. Asia is a vast and increasingly integrated space in which all its states along with a key external power, the United States, have a stake. If they cannot work together on combating an existential threat to humanity, what else could they cooperate on? Hostile US-China relations are clearly an obstacle for the two great powers to work together. But if they are looking for some areas of cooperation, surely the best place to start is humanitarian assistance and disaster relief.

As the CFR report stresses, institutions at national, regional, and pan-Asian levels need strengthening. At the national level, Bangladesh’s remarkable success in disaster preparedness can be a model. At the regional level, ASEAN’s AHA Center has lessons for other up and coming organizations such as the Bay of Bengal’s BIMSTEC, which India has done much of late to energize. At the pan-Asian level, the Changi Regional HADR Coordination Center (RHCC) includes the participation of both the United States and China. But hostile U.S.-China relations mean that the two great powers cannot be seen to work too closely together.

A key hallmark of the ASEAN way is placing state sovereignty at the core of its work. This has its critics. But, during the Nargis episode, Myanmar was much more open to working with ASEAN rather than western states, as the generals did not fear a trojan horse aimed to subvert the regime. If we are to achieve practical solutions in a world of diverse political systems and increasing multipolarity, sovereignty cannot be callously discarded.

All ASEAN states – not just Myanmar – believe that sovereignty must be protected. However, sovereignty does not mean noncooperation in humanitarian areas. A culture and habit of cooperation should be created among the ASEAN countries, which goes hand-in-hand with respecting state sovereignty.

Institutions that develop deep habits of voluntary cooperation, transmitting best practices, and learning from bottom-up solutions can aim to bridge some of the drawbacks of centering sovereignty. The worsening climate security challenge demands nothing less.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore.