It was half a century ago that UK Prime Minister Harold McMillan famously noted the “winds of change” buffeting the British Empire. Old verities were crumbling and Great Britain would need to adapt to a new political reality. Something analogous is happening today in the Western Hemisphere, where Latin American governments are rethinking their participation in Washington’s decades-long war on drugs. The latest evidence is a ground-breaking Report on the Drug Problem in the Americas, released May 17 by the Organization of American States (OAS). For the first time, the multilateral body is calling for a sober reassessment of the prohibition strategies the United States has backed since the Nixon administration.

Most international reports simply gather dust. This one won’t. It offers the basis for a long-overdue conversation among the thirty-five members of the OAS.

Produced at a cost of $2.2 million, the report was commissioned at last year’s contentious Summit of the Americas in Cartagena, Colombia. As I argued at the time, the April 2012 meeting revealed fissures in hemispheric attitudes. A new generation of Latin leaders was appealing for new approaches to combating the drug trade, ranging from demilitarization to decriminalization to legalization. Among the most outspoken was Otto Perez Molina of gang-ravaged Guatemala, who warned that he might abandon the anti-drug struggle to save his country from violence. But he was hardly alone. A plea for greater flexibility also came from Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia, whose country has received much of the $20 billion the United States has spent in hemispheric counterdrug efforts this past decade. Alas, President Obama, facing a November election against Mitt Romney, rebuffed efforts to discuss the range of potential options between current counterdrug policies and full legalization.

The United States will no longer have the luxury of avoiding honest dialogue. In two weeks an OAS assembly convenes in Guatemala to discuss the 400-page report, which OAS Secretary-General José Miguel Insulza presented to Santos last Friday. The document actually has two parts. The first is an “analytical report” describing the scope of drug production, trafficking and consumption in the hemisphere, and the often devastating impact that addiction and drug-related crime and violence can have on the social fabric, economic fortunes, and political stability of OAS member states. The second is a “scenarios report” setting out four possible trajectories for the hemisphere, depending on national drug policy choices and coordination among them.

The strengths of the report are its clear-eyed description of the current hemispheric drug problem and its willingness to set out policy alternatives, without endorsing any particular model. As Santos stated on May 17, “Let it be clear that no one here is defending any position, neither legalization, nor regulation, nor war at any cost.” The document’s objective is to provide “the basis for a long-postponed discussion.” Another intellectual breakthrough is explicit recognition that divergent national circumstances warrant “differentiated approaches,” tailored to local contexts and “individual concerns.” This echoes the finding of a 2011 report by the Global Commission on Drug Policy: Namely, it’s crazy to ask all countries to apply “the same rigid approach to drug policy—the same laws, and the same tough approach to their enforcement,” regardless of context. The report also firmly endorses a “public health” approach to the hemispheric drug problem, calling for a greater focus on treatment rather than incarceration of addicts.

Predictably, media coverage has focusing overwhelmingly on just one possibility the report raises: the decriminalization and legalization of drugs, “starting with cannabis.” That’s a pity, for the document outlines a wide range of legal and regulatory alternatives, based on what is actually going on in OAS member states (as well as in individual U.S. states)—and the costs and benefits associated with these various strategies.

The authors’ most creative decision was to offer four distinct scenarios describing what the hemispheric drug problem might look like in 2025, depending on the choices OAS member states make. They provide these alternative futures as thought experiments, labeling them as follows:

1. “Together”: Under this scenario, OAS members understand the drug problem as a symptom of broader insecurity. They thus work to reform and reinforce state institutions so that governments can “control organized crime and the violence and corruption it generates.”
2. “Pathways”: Believing that prohibition regimes and criminal sanctions are causing more harm than good, OAS states under this scenario experiment with “alternative legal and regulatory regimes, starting with cannabis,” and reallocate resources “from controlling drugs and drug users to preventing and treating problematic use.”
3. “Resilience”: In this scenario, OAS members treat the drug problem as “a manifestation and a magnifier of underlying social and economic dysfunctions that lead to violence and addiction.” Their policy response is to focus on “strengthening communities and improving public safety, health, education and employment through bottom-up programs.”
4. “Disruption”: In this fourth and darkest scenario, producer and transit countries conclude that they are “suffering unbearable and unfair costs” from the war on drugs. In response, they unilaterally defect from hemispheric cooperation, “abandoning the fight” or even “reaching an accommodation” with the cartels.

These possibilities show how divergent understandings of the nature of the drug problem could encourage different responses, creating opportunities but also new policy challenges. The bleak “Disruption” scenario, the authors warn, “alerts us to what could happen if we are incapable in the short run of reaching a shared vision that allows us to join forces to address the problem, while respecting diversity in our approaches to it.” Going forward, the price of hemispheric cooperation on illegal drugs is likely to be greater tolerance —not least from Washington—for national experimentation.

What world traveler hasn’t declined at least one local “delicacy”? A decade ago in Oaxaca, Mexico, I turned up my nose at chapulines, a steaming plate of toasted grasshoppers. “Tastes like chicken,” my waiter smiled unconvincingly. But overcoming disgust for “edible insects” may be the easiest way to meet global food needs, according to a fascinating, if occasionally stomach-churning, report from the UN’s Food and Agricultural Agency (FAO), based, of all places, in Rome.

The notion of meeting caloric, especially protein, needs from insects (as well as grubs, worms and other creepy-crawlies) is hardly new. It’s something humans and their hominid ancestors have been doing for millions of years. Paleoanthropologists and biologists speculate that our Paleolithic ancestors consumed prodigious quantities of insects—a fact conveniently omitted by most contempoary aficionados of the “cave man diet”. More recently, nineteenth century European arrivals to Australia marveled at aboriginal tribes’ insatiable appetite for insects, and the dramatic impact such a diet could have on their health and appearance, as documented in a fascinating ethnography, The Moth Hunters.

What’s surprising is how enduring the human taste for class Insecta remains. According to the FAO, more than two billion people—thirty percent of humanity—already supplement their diet with insects. And given the number of insects out there—1 million distinct species have already been identified and nearly two thousand proven edible—diners have a crunchy smorgasbord to choose from. “The most commonly eaten insect groups,” we learn, “are beetles, caterpillars, bees, wasps, ants, grasshoppers, locusts, crickets, cicadas, leaf and planthoppers, scale insects and true bugs, termites, dragonflies and flies.”

Most of today’s insect-eaters live in the developing world, in countries where insects are perceived as a perfectly acceptable and convenient source of energy—readily (or at least seasonably) available, highly portable, and requiring fewer inputs than agriculture or animal husbandry. In terms of nutrition, insects provide an outstanding advantages, having “high fat, protein, fiber, vitamin, and mineral content,” and can be a particularly important diet component for children under the age of five in poor countries.

While many in the West may recoil in disgust, the FAO makes a compelling case on food security grounds for entomophagy (eating bugs, in science-speak). Often dismissed as “famine foods,” insects may offer at least part of the answer to the global food crisis. And a crisis is what we have on our hands. Based on current demographic and dietary trends, as I’ve written before, the world needs to double its food production over the next forty years—an effort that will require unprecedented productivity gains while risking ecological calamity.

Here’s where insects come in. Insects, it turns out, are far more efficient than livestock—perhaps ten times so—in transforming feed into edible meat. And they largely avoid the huge greenhouse gas emissions, as well as other environmental pollutants, associated with livestock. While most edible insects continue to be collected in the wild, more organized forms of insect farming have emerged, including “cricket farming” in Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam. Insects are also being increasingly used as animal feed, particularly for poultry and acquaculture. By providing employment opportunities, the edible insect sector has a potential role to play in rural development, from Southeast Asia to Central Africa.

To have a real impact on food consumption patterns, however, edible insects must go global. Today, the international trade in these commodities is neglible, limited to niche markets like fulfilling the dietary desires of diaspora populations.

Expanding global trade in edible insects will require expanding existing national and multilateral health and sanitary regulations. This will include updating the Codex Alimentarius, created by FAO and the World Health Organization in 1963 to harmonize international food standards and codes of practice.

The biggest stumbling block to expanding global consumption of insects is cultural. The very idea of eating bugs remains taboo in many countries, particularly in the wealthy West, where they tend to be confined to “novelty snacks.” There may be ways to make inroads against this stigma, however. A few celebrity U.S. chefs have put insect items on their restaurant menus. In the future, one could imagine trend-setters like Anthony Bordain competing with counterparts to see who can make the tastiest dragonfly confit. Who knows? With Manhattan and L.A. foodies leading the charge, would Middle America be far behind?

So, if you’re inclined to strike a blow for global food security, or just want to set the trend in your hometown, you’re in luck. Since 2010, the FAO has created a useful “Webportal of Edible Insects,” listing your culinary options. Be sure to check out the chapulines. I hear they taste like chicken.

Tuesday’s agreement between Moscow and Washington to convene an international conference on Syria raises some obvious questions. After a brutal conflict that has killed more than seventy thousand, is a negotiated peace between government and rebels forces plausible? And even if a settlement can be negotiated, is it likely to hold?

Certainly, the apparent rapprochement between the United States and Russia is important. For the past two years frictions between the governments have paralyzed diplomacy at the UN Security Council, with Moscow (supported quietly by China) blocking Western efforts to place intense pressure on the regime of Bashar al-Assad. Moscow’s agreement to an international conference, secured during a meeting between Secretary of State John Kerry and President Vladimir Putin, would seem to signal greater diplomatic flexibility—an impression reinforced by Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov’s statement that Russia is not concerned about the fate of “certain” individuals (a clear reference to Assad’s future).

The timing of the conference remains up in the air. Kerry, warning that Syria is heading “over the abyss and into chaos,” wants it “by the end of the month.” Whether the antagonists themselves will actually agree to substantive talks remains in doubt, however. Assad continues to dismiss the rebels as “terrorists,” while the Syrian National Coalition—the Western-backed umbrella group of rebel forces—has long made his departure a precondition for any talks on Syria’s future. Still, international pressure for the two sides to meet will be intense, and likely irresistible.

Getting the combatants to the bargaining table is critical to ending a war that has generated tremendous human suffering and now risks a wider regional conflagration, possibly involving weapons of mass destruction. But it is only a first step. Presuming the two sides actually meet and are able to achieve a cease-fire—or even a more extensive peace agreement—what is the likelihood that that accord will endure?  It is not too early for policymakers in Washington—and Moscow—to begin asking these questions.

With the caveat that each conflict has its own dynamic, the scholarly literature on how civil wars end may provide some clues, if no definitive answers, about Syria’s future. One of the biggest lessons is that negotiated settlements are notoriously difficult to maintain, for several reasons. To begin with, peace agreements rarely remove the underlying societal conflicts, such as political and economic inequities between different tribal or sectarian groups, that led to war in the first place. Second, negotiated settlements, compared to winner-take-all scenarios, are by definition second best, compromise solutions, and formerly warring parties are accordingly often reluctant to invest heavily in them. Third, peace agreements typically force parties to cede unitary control over their respective areas and ultimately disarm in settings of persistent insecurity. Finally, individuals and factions—known as “spoilers”—may have a vested interest in undercutting the peace process, particularly if it interferes with their access to illicit revenue streams that have sprung up during the conflict (say, from smuggling arms or other commodities).

Beyond these generalities, what else can we say? Based on their study of sixteen civil wars (ranging from Bosnia to Sierra Leone) the political scientists Stephen John Stedman and George Downs distinguish between “permissive” and “demanding” environments for implementing peace agreements.  What separates these environments are two sets of critical contextual factors.

The first set of factors are international: All things being equal, peace agreements are most likely to hold if major powers agree to serve as custodians of the peace process, if outsider actors invest major financial and other resources to help support the accord, and if the international community is willing to risk the lives (whether as part of an intervening coalition or UN peacekeeping force) to defend the terms of the agreement.

How would these international factors apply in Syria’s case? First, the United States, Russia and other parties will need to form an enduring “contact group” that shepherds the peace process for years. Second, the international donor community, including major powers, the World Bank, and other entities, must be prepared for a multiyear financial commitment to reconstruct a devastated country. Third, preserving the peace will require international “boots” on the ground. These need not be American, but they will need robust terms of engagement.

The second set of factors determining success and failure of peace agreements are internal and, alas, more numerous and daunting. The most important include: the number of warring parties and the extent of agreement among these groups prior to external intervention, the presence of potential “spoilers,”  the degree of state collapse, the overall number of combatants, the presence of exploitable natural resources, the involvement of neighboring states in the conflict, and whether secession is a motive for the conflict.

Taking all of these factors together, chances for an enduring peace in Syria would appear to be dim. Let’s begin with the warring parties. Despite press coverage dividing combatants into government and rebel forces, the latter are extraordinarily heterogeneous. For example, there is little agreement on Syria’s future between those secular opponents of the Assad regime favored by the West and the al-Qaeda-linked al-Nusra Front, which is already establishing Islamist rule in cities under its control. Syria is also replete with potential spoilers to any eventual peace treaty. These include first and foremost the Alawite coterie around Assad himself, likely to fight tooth and nail against a diminution of its historic influence in Syrian politics. Shia militants, backed by Hezbollah, could also play a spoiler role, as could Syria’s Christian and Kurdish minorities, depending on the composition of any transitional government.

The Syrian state, meanwhile, is close to collapse. The government has ceased to function in approximately 85 percent of the country and struggles to deliver services even in areas that it controls. Syria’s physical as well as administrative infrastructure has been decimated, contributing to a humanitarian catastrophe that now includes over 1.2 million registered refugees and 4.25 million internally displaced persons. Meanwhile, the country has become a battleground for regional rivalries between Shiite Iran and Sunni-dominated Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, and Turkey, with each funding their local proxies. Finally, at least some Alawites, fearing eventual collapse of the Assad regime, appear prepared to carve out a secessionist enclave of their own in western Syria, while Syria’s Kurds have their own secessionist ambitions. Only in the area of exploitable natural resources, it appears, does oil-poor Syria escape vulnerability.

If history is any guide, these internal vulnerabilities may well trump even robust external support for any future peace settlement. Still, the fact that the belligerents in Syria appear locked in a “mutually hurting stalemate” make this a ripe time for the U.S.-Russian initiative.

Coauthored with Alexandra Kerr, program coordinator in the International Institutions and Global Governance program.

On May 2, 2011, the American people celebrated the news that Osama bin Laden, mastermind behind 9/11 and international symbol of al-Qaeda, had been brought to justice. Addressing the nation that night, President Obama praised the U.S. special forces that killed the terrorist leader in Pakistan, calling bin Laden’s death “the most significant achievement to date” in the United States’ efforts to defeat al-Qaeda. Yet, he cautioned that this victory was not the end of the fight against terrorism: “We must —and we will—remain vigilant at home and abroad.”

The President was right. Although al-Qaeda has been degraded and become far more decentralized in recent years, its Salafist ideology continues to resonate among jihadis in many corners of the world. Over the past year alone, we have witnessed Islamic militants join forces with al-Qaeda of the Islamic Maghreb to seize northern Mali, declaring the short-lived independent state of Azawad and imposing harsh sharia law; increased violence from al-Qaeda-linked jihadist groups Boko Haram and Ansaru in Nigeria; and the alignment of the al Nusra Front rebel group in Syria with al-Qaeda. Even in the United States, the “self-radicalized” Tsarnaev brothers drew inspiration from jihadist internet sites in planning April’s Boston Marathon bombing.

This litany of carnage should not obscure the considerable counterterrorism successes of the international community. The United States and its partners have indeed remained vigilant, and shown commendable stamina against this persistent threat.

This is a point we make in the Global Governance Report Card, recently released by the Council on Foreign Relations. The first effort to grade multilateral cooperation in addressing major global challenges, the Report Card gives both the international community and the United States high marks—a ‘B’ and ‘B+’, respectively—for their counterterrorism efforts.

These grades reflect several laudable achievements, including cooperation in eliminating high level al-Qaeda leaders, progress in developing counterradicalization strategies to reduce al Qaeda’s attraction, and active measures to ensure that terrorists never get their hands on weapons of mass destruction or the materials necessary to build them. But perhaps most significant has been the effective international collaboration to crack down on terrorist financing, by stemming the flow of funds to terrorists’ hands and providing legal frameworks to prosecute those providing them.

The United States stands out as the leader of counterterrorism efforts worldwide. Beyond the elimination of Osama bin Laden, the United States has denied safe-haven to al-Qaeda through its operations in Afghanistan and has thwarted at least thirty attempted al-Qaeda inspired attacks on U.S. soil since 2008, contributing to the deterioration of the network. Alongside Saudi Arabia, the United States established the influential Global Counterterrorism Forum (GCTF), increasing multilateral coordination in counterterrorism strategies, and has worked with Russia and other nations to secure the world’s stocks of fissile material, reducing the threat of nuclear terrorism.

That said, while a ‘B’ or a ‘B+’ is commendable, it also indicates room for improvement. The United States must work with partners to close remaining gaps in the counterterrorism regime, both at the international and domestic level. So what would it take to earn an ‘A’? Well, finally forging international consensus at the UN on a definition of “terrorism” would be an admirable start. Beyond that goal, the Report Card suggests the following tangible steps:

Uphold human rights while fighting terrorism: The most shameful aspect of global counterterrorism efforts has been failure to consistently uphold international human rights norms. Egregious violations have included depriving accused perpetrators of due process, the persistence of state sanctioned targeted killings (including by drones), military actions that have resulted in disproportionate civilian casualties, and the use of torture as an enhanced interrogation technique. The United States should work to negotiate common rules for the detention and treatment of terrorists apprehended both in and outside theaters of war, expedited extradition procedures to facilitate trials in home countries where sufficient capacity and dedication to human rights norms exist, and international norms governing targeted killings of suspected terrorists.

Establish a UN counterterrorism coordinator: In the wake of 9/11 the UN Security Council passed Resolution 1373, creating a new Counterterrorism Committee and establishing a Counterterrorism Executive Directorate which offers technical and financial assistance to nations fighting terrorism. Building on this progress, the UN should now establish a counterterrorism coordinator to provide strategic coherence for the mandates of officials who currently oversee the UN’s efforts.

Hold state sponsors of terrorism—and wavering governments—accountable: One of the enduring obstacles to thwarting terrorism has been the insufficient will—and in some cases the outright connivance—of governments in countries ranging from Pakistan to Eritrea, Iran, and North Korea. The United States and its partners should use existing international legal frameworks more effectively to hold state sponsors of terrorism accountable—and increase pressure on governments that simply look the other way. UN member states should continue to support capacity-building efforts in countries whose governments are weak but well-intentioned.

Increase coordination between bilateral and multilateral counterterrorism efforts: The United States and other UN members should work to integrate their bilateral mechanisms for counterterrorism assistance with existing multilateral frameworks, particularly when it comes to capacity-building for intelligence, policing and counterradicalization.

Integrate counterterrorism with the fight against transnational crime: Given emerging relationships between terrorist and criminal networks, international and domestic agencies that fight terrorism should integrate counterterrorism and anticrime efforts. The evolution of the Financial Action Task Force—created to combat money laundering but now enlisted in the fight against terrorist financing—provides a good example of how this can be done.

History suggests that significant bouts of terrorism—like the anarchist movement a century ago—will eventually burn themselves out. But in an age of weapons of mass destruction, waiting out al Qaeda is a luxury we cannot afford. By bolstering multilateral counterterrorism efforts, we can get closer to the day when bin Laden is only a distant memory.

As Mayor of New York, the late Edward Koch famously asked constituents, “How’m I doing?” He got an earful. But he valued the instant feedback and even adjusted occasionally. As we commemorate Earth Day, we might ask the same question of ourselves – but on a planetary scale. When it comes to addressing the world’s gravest ills, how are we doing?

Not so well. That is the big takeaway from the first Global Governance Report Card, released today by the Council on Foreign Relations. Designed in the old grade school style, Report Card grades the international community and the United States on how they are responding to six big challenges: global warming, nuclear proliferation, violent conflict, global health, transnational terrorism, and financial instability.

Click here to continue reading this article on CNN: http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/2013/04/22/grading-the-world-on-our-biggest-problems/

The Obama administration’s $3.8 trillion budget request to Congress, released Wednesday, calls for $47.8 billion in discretionary funding for the Department of State and the U.S. Agency for International Development. That’s quite a chunk of change to most Americans, but it represents little more than a penny for every dollar of proposed federal spending. It’s also a bargain, given the range of critical tasks that U.S. diplomats and development professionals perform every day to advance U.S. national security, global influence, economic prosperity, and moral values.

The International Affairs (or “Function 150”) account is always a hard sell on Capitol Hill—particularly compared to defense spending. When it comes to courting Congress, the Pentagon runs circles around the State Department and USAID. It’s not simply that most legislators have military installations or defense contractors in their districts—although that is part of the story. Members also have few electoral incentives to invest in the civilian elements of U.S power. This is particularly true for foreign aid, which, as Ronald Reagan noted back in 1981, “suffers from a lack of domestic constituency, in large part because the results of the programs are not immediately visible and self-evident.” Indeed, for all the recent talk of “soft” (or “smart”) power, many congressmen still have difficulty connecting the work of State and USAID to tangible national security objectives. The International Affairs account is particularly vulnerable in lean times, as legislators seek to trim (alleged) budgetary “fat” at minimal political cost.

The Obama administration’s foreign affairs budget tries to dispel those concerns. In his summary letter justifying the FY14 request, Secretary Kerry documents the innumerable ways that diplomats and development professionals advance the national interest. And repeating the theme of his February speech in Charlottesville, VA, Kerry drives the point home: “There is no longer anything foreign about foreign policy.”

Faced with “the clash between a shrinking world and shrinking budgets,” Kerry’s challenge was to craft a budget that was both frugal and strategic. He hit the mark. The budget is trimmed to reflect fiscal and political realities, resulting in a 6 percent decline from actual 2012 spending. But it also holds the line on critical programs while shifting funds to evolving U.S. priorities.

A few highlights worth mentioning:

- Drawing Down in Frontline States: Despite the much-ballyhooed “pivot” to Asia, the administration has not abandoned Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. It plans to spend $6.8 billion in FY14 to promote good governance, development, and partnership in those countries. Still, this represents a significant decline from peak nation-building years, and includes a big cut in Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) funding related to counterinsurgency and stability operations.

- Assisting Political Reform in the Middle East and North Africa: Recognizing the turbulence and vulnerability of recent political openings in the region, the administration expands bilateral U.S. economic and security sector support for countries like Egypt, Tunisia, and Yemen. It also includes $580 million for regional programs, notably the Middle East and North Africa Incentive Fund to encourage long-term economic and political reform.

- Ramping up U.S. Diplomacy and Assistance in Asia: Consistent with the U.S. strategic “rebalancing”, the budget includes more than $1.2 billion designed to advance “security prosperity and human dignity across the Asia-Pacific,” including through support for the Lower Mekong Initiative of sub-regional cooperation among the governments of Burma, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam. While a decent start, the relatively modest resources requested fall short of the grand objective of reorienting U.S. civilian power to Asia—and are hopefully only a down-payment on the new strategy of reassuring regional partners against the uncertainties of China’s rapid rise.

- Reforming Dysfunctional U.S. Food Aid Policy: Among the budget’s biggest innovations is a provision that would overhaul the $1.5 billion annual U.S. food aid program so that it meets the needs of the world’s hungry rather than the interests of U.S. agribusiness. The administration would cut funding for the traditional U.S. food program (P.L 480), which mandates that U.S. food aid must be sourced in the United States and sold abroad for cash. This perverse system not only undercuts local agricultural markets but also prevents the United States from purchasing food commodities more cheaply elsewhere. The new arrangement, if approved by Congress—a big “if”, given that twenty-one farm state Senators have already declared opposition—would grant U.S. diplomats leeway to purchase food in markets near crises. It would also create a highly flexible $75 million Emergency Food Assistance Contingency Fund to address unanticipated crises.

- Keeping America’s Promises in Global Health: The FY14 budget continues the bipartisan tradition of U.S. investment in international health, calling for $8.3 billion to support the Obama administration’s Global Health Initiative. The funding would maintain the $1.65 billion U.S. contribution to the cash-strapped Global Fund for AIDS, TB, and Malaria, fulfill the U.S. pledge to the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunizations, and increase U.S. investments in maternal and child health and family planning worldwide.

- Investing in Multilateral Organizations and UN Peacekeeping: In lean times, it helps to have partners to share the load. The budget includes $1.57 billion to meet the U.S. assessed (legally binding) contributions to forty-five different organizations, including UN agencies like the International Atomic Energy Agency and the International Civil Aviation Organization, regional bodies like the Organization of American States and NATO, and stand-alone institutions like the World Customs Union and the International Tropical Timber Organization. Importantly, the budget includes $2.1 billion for assessed U.S. contributions to international peacekeeping, which will support fourteen UN missions from Lebanon to South Sudan, as well as the AU mission in Somalia. And with every quarter it spends, the United States leverages a dollar of international effort. Finally, the budget requests $3.2 billion in multilateral assistance, including contributions to the World Bank, regional multilateral development banks, and a dozen other global bodies.

- Bolstering Security at U.S. Embassies and USAID Missions: Finally, the budget promises much more robust efforts to protect U.S. government civilian personnel, particularly those operating in high-threat posts. The brutal murder of U.S. Christopher Stevens, the U.S. ambassador to Libya, and the more recent slaying of Anne Smedinghoff, a young Foreign Service Officer in Afghanistan, underscore the risks to State Department and USAID employees and the inadequacy of current security measures. The administration appropriately calls for $4.1 billion to expand its ranks of Diplomatic Security officers, as well as construct more secure facilities abroad.

Secretary Kerry will have his hands full in winning congressional approval for his budget, which is a major improvement over competing resolutions passed in both the Senate and House. The former, calling for baseline spending of $45.6 billion, is at least in the ballpark. But the latter, would cut the budget back to $38.7 billion, a draconian 25 percent decrease from only four years ago. Here’s hoping that Kerry’s standing on Capitol Hill will pay off, and that enough Republicans share Senator Lindsay Graham’s view that investing in foreign policy is a form of “national security insurance.”

The recent H7N9 flu scare in China has shown once again that we live in “an epidemiologically interdependent world.” If so, the future of global health will depend mightily on the evolving policy choices and growing material capabilities of the world’s emerging powers. My insightful colleague Yanzhong Huang explores the implications of these trends in a fascinating new CFR paper, “Enter the Dragon and the Elephant: China and India’s Participation in Global Health Governance”.

That public health decisions made in Beijing (or New Delhi) may have consequences for us all should be commonplace by now, a decade after the outbreak of SARS and in the throes of the latest (bird) flu scare. While the H7N9 virus has not yet proven capable of human-to-human transmission, a mutation could easily occur to permit this—with disastrous implications, given the disease’s apparently high mortality rate. The result could be a global influenza pandemic, with potentially catastrophic economic, as well as human, costs. Epidemiologists estimate that humanity suffers one such pandemic on average each century—the last being the so-called “Spanish influenza” of 1918–1919 , which infected approximately a third of humanity and killed between 20 and 100 million people worldwide. We are, alas, due for another.

Huang’s paper asks how China and India have sought to contribute to “global health governance” (GHG)—a phrase describing the sometimes messy collective efforts of national governments, international agencies (like the WHO, UNAIDS or the World Bank), public-private partnerships (like GAVI or the Global Fund) and non-state actors (like the Gates Foundation) to formulate new global health norms, cooperate in battling diseases, and help build capacity in the world’s poorest countries. He focuses on the role that the Chinese and Indian governments have played in delivering foreign assistance to other countries and, at the multilateral level, in shaping new rules for global health cooperation. His findings are instructive. While seeking to strike out new profiles as aid donors and occasionally complaining about existing multilateral structures, the two countries are not yet pulling their weight at the global level; neither has offered a compelling, alternative vision for a new global health regime tailored to the twenty-first century and to their own preferences. Finally—and perhaps most worrisome—China and India have embraced global health activism without addressing persistent deficiencies in their own domestic public health systems. Until they address these daunting needs, their global health diplomacy and aid programs will remain largely symbolic.

The rapid emergence of China and India as players in global health is a surprising development. At the turn of the century, epidemiologists and public health experts warned that the two countries were on the cusp of a public health catastrophe—HIV/AIDS seemed poised to move rapidly from sub-Saharan Africa to the more populous states of Eurasia, infecting tens if not hundreds of millions. Fortunately, these fears proved overblown. Although prevalence in both countries rose, public health interventions and unique societal norms curtailed the pace of new infections. Contrary to the alarmists, the “next wave” of AIDS was no tsunami.

But there were other indications that the big emerging GHG players, particularly authoritarian China, might not be ready to play a constructive global health role. The nadir came during the SARS epidemic of 2003, which Chinese leaders lied about for months to avoid jeopardizing trade and tourism. Such egregious conduct—which facilitated the transnational spread of a disease that killed nearly a thousand people and cost the Asian region at least $25 billion—suggested that disastrous governmental decisions (particularly when a ruling regime monopolizes information and control) can make an otherwise “strong” state a weak link in responding to global public health crises.

As Huang documents, China and India have ramped up their development assistance for health, particularly in Africa, focusing primarily on health infrastructure. As of 2011, “China had built one hundred fully stocked hospitals in fifty-two countries,” while India was leveraging its information and communications technology to improve standards of care. Overall, China and India are shifting from net recipients to net donors of assistance—though their spending on global health (in the hundreds of millions in recent years) remains dwarfed by U.S. aid and that of other traditional OECD donors. Moreover, neither government has effective interagency mechanisms to design and coordinate health interventions, leading to fragmentation and lack of strategic focus.

At the multilateral level, China and India have expanded their involvement in cooperative efforts to prevent and control infectious disease. Stung by the SARS debacle, Beijing has embraced regional and global health arrangements, including the WHO—a body in which Margaret Chan, a Chinese national, was elected Director-General in 2006. Beijing also adopted a welcome openness in responding to the H5N1 and H1N1 pandemics. India has staked out a leadership position in calling for urgent global action against non-communicable diseases (NCDs).

More negatively, Huang criticizes China and India for clinging to a narrow “state-centric approach” toward new global health norms, rules, and standards. This approach privileges national sovereignty, while undercutting deeper cooperation with either international agencies, other governments, or civil society actors. Huang considers it shortsighted, since it “limits the scope and effectiveness of international cooperation in an era of interdependence.” For China, the one important exception has been acquiescence to the revised International Health Regulations (IHRs). Indeed, “China now boasts the largest infectious disease surveillance and reporting system in the world,” well placed for cooperation with the WHO’s Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network. India has also faithfully implemented the revised IHRs.

The Achilles heel of Chinese and Indian aspirations to shape GHG may be their common failure to translate dynamic economic growth into health sector gains at home. Belatedly, the two countries have recently increased investment in the health of their citizenry. But they have a long way to go. The two countries account for fully one third of the global disease burden. India hosts the world’s largest TB-infected population, with 1.21 million new cases a year (China has 870,000). Both countries confront a massive threat from NCDs, which could account for two thirds of all deaths by 2020 (up from 53 percent today). Another public health challenge is tobacco: China is world’s largest producer and consumer, India the second. And when it comes to covering health costs, citizens are often on their own, spending 48 percent out-of-pocket in China and 70 percent in India.

As with so many other transnational challenges, China and India’s ability to contribute to global governance in health will require difficult trade-offs along the domestic-international frontier. Meeting national health goals will likely take precedence, at times limiting tangible contributions to multilateral global health initiatives.

Coauthored with Andrew Reddie, research associate in the International Institutions and Global Governance program.

The Final Conference on the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) convened by the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) is being presented as a last-ditch attempt to negotiate standards for the international trade in conventional arms. After a twelve-year process involving panels of experts, regional dialogues, and a lengthy planning program, it is showtime for the international community.  Given the well-documented hurdles to achieving consensus among 193 UN member states on international issues, however, the treaty is unlikely to be the “final”  word on the issue.

The previous round of negotiations on the ATT concluded in failure just eight months ago, in July 2012, in part because the Obama administration did not want to hand Republicans a red meat issue in the run-up to the November elections. This time around the White House seems to be on board, buoying prospects for the treaty’s signature. For the first time, the world is on the verge of new rules to govern trafficking in conventional weaponry, including small arms and light weapons. On the surface, governments  have accepted the compelling humanitarian need to curb the trade in instruments of violence too often exploited by war criminals, despots, and human rights abusers

All is not rosy, however. As often occurs in complex multilateral negotiations, the language in the draft ATT has been diluted to reflect the discrete interests of major players. The United States, for example, has previously rejected proposals to regulate the trade in ammunition—of which the United States has half of the $4.3 billion annual trade. China, too, has added reservations to allow the “gifting” of weapons to favored strategic partners, including in sub-Saharan Africa. Russia, similarly, has requested an addendum to allow it to loan weapons to its own allies.  Clearly, these initiatives violate the spirit of the proposed agreement.

There remains broad disagreement, moreover, concerning the scope of any treaty—and considerable hypocrisy among the great powers. For instance, while the Permanent Five members (P5) of the UN Security Council (China, Russia, United States, Great Britain, and France) signed a statement supporting “the highest common standards” for regulating the international trade in conventional weapons, all except Great Britain reject a joint statement of 120 countries (drafted by Mexico and backed by Germany) calling for a “strong” treaty.

Given the reluctance of the P5 (excepting perhaps the UK) to create binding and international mechanisms of enforcement, the impact of the ATT will depend on the vigor of its implementation by domestic  authorities. The draft treaty [PDF]  proposes that each state party rely on its own national control system, with limited oversight from a modest international secretariat. In conjunction with Conference President Peter Woolcott’s decision to strike language broadening the treaty’s application to weapons not explicitly specified in the convention, states will enjoy broad license to define their own efforts to regulate the arms trade. In the absence of a more powerful secretariat empowered to define concepts like “war criminals,” “terrorists,” “illicit markets,” and the like, the long-anticipated ATT may make little difference in the real world.

Beyond a weak secretariat, the effective implementation of the ATT will face three additional obstacles. The first relates to capacity. Poor states like Mali have already made clear that though they are likely to ratify the treaty, they will require financial and technical assistance to implement its complex provisions.  It remains unclear that the international donor community will offer such aid, particularly in an era of fiscal austerity.

The second obstacle is less about capacity than about will—specifically, the lack of commitment among some “outlier” states to conform to the treaty, regardless of whether they ratify it. The draft ATT is different from other arms control treaties, such as those concerning the use of biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons (as well as initiatives to ban landmines and cluster bombs), in that it would regulate a market in legitimate arms, rather than a prohibition against those broadly considered normatively out of bounds. For the ATT to be effective, states must be willing to distinguish between licit and illicit forms of trade in the same class of weapons. Unfortunately, outlier states like Iran, North Korea, and others have proven all to willing to disguise the final destination and purposes of trafficked weapons, including by using shell companies and false end-user certificates. Even if the ATT goes into force, non-ratifying (and even some ratifying) states may occupy a position similar to that of tax havens, continuing to facilitate the illicit and increasingly opaque transfer of weapons. Some fear that an imperfect treaty might actually exacerbate the illicit trade in weapons—and that no treaty might be better a fatally flawed ATT.

The third challenge is legislative. Signing a treaty is one thing, ratifying it quite another. This is most obvious, and problematic, in the case of the United States, which has signed numerous multilateral treaties, including the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), and the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), only to see them languish in the Senate. Prospects for ratification of the ATT have been complicated by conservative resistance, backed by the influential lobbying activities of the National Rifle Association (NRA). Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) has introduced an amendment to a U.S. budget bill that would prevent the United States from becoming party to the ATT, on the grounds that the treaty would impinge upon citizens’ Second Amendment rights.

This claim is entirely without merit, since the ATT regulates international trade in weapons, does not interfere with domestic commerce, and places implementation entirely in the hands of the state, rather than any international body. As Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) pointed out in his own amendment, the United States cannot be party to treaties that violate the U.S. Constitution in any case (making Senator Inhofe’s amendment moot). Nevertheless, it is quite possible, even likely, that opponents will be able to generate opposition from more than one-third of the Senate to block ratification.

As of today, a final draft treaty has been produced and released by Conference President Peter Woolcott with no further scope for amendment. It remains unclear whether states will, in fact, sign onto the treaty . The ATT negotiations reflect the obstacles to achieving grand bargains in the twenty-first century, particularly ones requiring difficult negotiations at both the multilateral and domestic levels. If nothing else, we can  be confident that this “final”  treaty will not be the last word.

Not long ago, concerns about environmental degradation were marginal in U.S. national security deliberations. What a difference climate change has made. Foreign policy officials and experts are starting to recognize profound linkages between planetary health, economic prosperity, and international security. These connections were on full view Wednesday, when the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) teamed up with Conservation International (CI) to convene a symposim,“Global Resources, the U.S. Economy, and National Security.” The livestreamed event (available here) assembled intelligence officials, development economists, defense experts, conservation biologists, and corporate executives to discuss the rapid degradation of the earth’s natural endowments and its dire implications for long term prosperity and stability. The provocative conversation ranged far beyond global warming to assess the implications of deforestation and desertification, collapsing fisheries, habitat destruction, and water scarcity.  That these topics were broached at CFR—an august institution traditionally concerned with issues like Middle East peace, nuclear proliferation, or China’s rise—shows how central the subject of sustainability has become for foreign policy professionals.

The reasons are clear. For the first time in Earth’s 4.5 billion year history, the most powerful force shaping the planet is human activity. Some geologists have coined a new label for this era: The “Anthropocene.”  This epoch may turn out to be short-lived, however, given the disastrous pace at which our species is degrading the earth’s natural capital endowments—from rainforests to oceans to aquifers. Globally, governments have failed to account for—and private markets to put a price on—the many  “ecosystem services” that nature provides, ranging from arable land to clean air to fresh drinking water.  Unless humanity reverses course, warns the Stockholm Resilience Center, the world could be in for “irreversible and abrupt environmental change.”

Powerful demographic and economic forces are driving these trends.  The world will need to make room for two billion more people in coming decades, before the global population stabilizes at nine billion. Consumer demand will accelerate even faster, as humanity becomes richer. Between now and 2030, the global middle class is slated to double­­.  These newly affluent populations will place extraordinary strain on the earth’s limited supplies of arable land, fresh water, fisheries, and forests, with knock-on consequences for political instability and international security.

• Fresh Water. According to the National Intelligence Council’s (NIC) Global Water Security [PDF] report, the world’s annual water requirements will exceed current supplies by forty percent in 2030, thanks to demographic pressures, agricultural demands, and watershed degradation. Nations  will need to negotiate new arrangements to manage the world’s 263 shared water basins (among these the Mekong, Nile, and Tigris-Euphrates) negotiate equitable access to stressed aquifiers The alternative, the NIC warns, could be growing instability and conflict, particularly in contexts of “poverty, social tensions, and weak political institutions.”

• Arable land. Meanwhile, the global demand for food will surge [PDF] more than thirty-five percent by 2030, as populations swell and dietary preferences (particularly for meat) evolve. Already, food consumption has outpaced production in seven of the last eight years—and current global food reserves amount to only two months of world production. Such scarcity virtually ensures a future of price volatility and disastrous shortages, of the sort that led to food riots in dozens of countries—and the toppling of the Haitian government—in 2008. Historically, degradation and scarcity of arable land has fuel violence, whether in Central America in the 1970s or Darfur in this century.

• Fisheries. The degradation and emptying of the world’s oceans were among the most alarming trends discussed at the conference. As Kerri-Ann Jones, Assistant Secretary of State for Oceans, Environment and Science, told the gathering that the vast majority of the world’s commercial fish species are over-exploited [PDF], fished to capacity, or barely recovering, thanks in large part to rampant illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing.  Simultaneously, growing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases are acidifying the oceans, portending “an unprecedented loss of species,” including the disappearance of biodiverse-rich coral reefs by the end of the century. Such an environmental catastrophe would have devastating implications for global food security, given that one-fifth of humanity depends on fish for their primary protein source.

• Deforestation. Finally, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization reports that global deforestation and forest degradation continue, albeit at a slower pace. Already, twenty-seven percent of the world’s tropical forests are cleared, and each year, the world loses additional forest cover twice the size of New Jersey. Rampant logging—much of it illegal—deprives the world of valuable biodiversity, degrades watersheds, destroys habitats, and leaves countries vulnerable to environmental disaster. Uncontrolled and illegal logging has been linked to repression and violence in many countries, from Cambodia to Haiti, Burma to Liberia.

As the conference sessions made clear, recent multilateral efforts to advance conservation and environmental sustainability have been woefully inadequate. Several problems stand out. First, the world is clearly fatigued with large, UN-sponsored mega-conferences (like the UNFCCC Conferences of Parties or the Rio Plus 20 meeting), which promise comprehensive solutions but deliver little but rhetorical pablum. Second, the existing set of “regimes” governing the global environment is fragmented, with significant overlap and redundancy among competing, but underpowered and underrersourced institutions. In the absence of a single “World Environmental Organization,” one answer may be to ramp up the UN Environmental Program into a fully-fledged specialized agency, on a par with the UN Development Program (UNDP), to help provide coherence to UN efforts. Third, international negotiations on the environment suffer from a crippling bureaucratic weakness. They are typically conducted under the purview of the ministers of the environment—whose political clout pales in comparison to their foreign or finance ministry counterparts.  Finally, global environmental cooperation is hamstrung by a lack of global leadership—not least from the United States fails—which remains outside the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea and the Convention on Biological Diversity.

Given the perceived failures of top-down, intergovernmental efforts, what can be done? Conference participants offered several suggestions. One was to look more closely at narrower “minilateral” efforts. Rather than insisting on the presence of all countries, why not begin with coalitions of the willing, relevant, and capable? A second was to encourage parallel national processes when a formal treaty or agreement was impossible. In place of a binding agreement, ask countries to adopt a “pledge and review” approach in which countries promise to take certain actions—such as phasing out harmful subsidies, embracing “green procurement,” or increasing foreign aid for natural resource management—and set up a system to monitor commitments. Another was to expand the use of multi-stakeholder partnerships, including by enlisting the private sector in certification schemes to ensure that their complex global supply chains do not inadvertently contribute to illegal logging, overfishing, or trafficking in endangered species. Advances in information technology, including geospatial mapping and remote sensing, can play an important role in identifying problems (from deforestation to poaching to illegal fishing) and empowering governments and law enforcement.

Participants also noted the potential of multi-level approaches that could enlist municipalities and local communities and even individuals as partners in the campaign for sustainability. Among the few major accomplishments at the 2012 Rio+20 conference was the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group—a coalition of fifty mega-cities whose mayors (including Michael Bloomberg of New York) agreed to collaborate on new approaches to urban waste management.

These are all laudable initiatives, but we can’t afford to ignore the multilateral track entirely. Three priorities come to mind. The first is to ensure that the post-2015 successor framework for the Millennium Development Goals includes new sustainability priorities beyond the provision of “clean water and sanitation” and attempt to price the ecological costs of economic activity. In parallel with this effort, national governments should endorse the proposal by the UN Secretary-General’s Global Sustainability Panel to create a Global Sustainability Index [PDF], which would measure “development” beyond mere calculations of gross domestic product. Second, the international community must deepen its commitment to fight corruption and increase transparency among UN member states, recognizing that organized crime is frequently at the core of rapacious behavior toward the environment. A good place to start would be to develop an analog to the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) or the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), which could establish minimum environmental standards, identify non-complying or underperforming jurisdictions, and eventually permit the naming and shaming of countries, corporations, or organizations that embark on environmental crime.

In closing the conference, CFR President Richard Haass joined with CI’s Chairman Peter Seligman and Vice Chair Harrison Ford in underscoring the “direct connection” between global resources, the U.S. economy, and U.S. national security. Ford’s message was a plainspoken reminder that “nature doesn’t need us. We need nature.” Richard Haass, for his part, explained that the world, unlike universities, isn’t divided into separate departments. In the twenty-first century, major security challenges will span borders, both geographic and disciplinary.

The history of global governance is in many respects the story of international adapation to new technologies. As breakthroughs emerge, sovereign governments have tried to craft common standards and rules to facilitate cooperation and mitigate conflict. Consider the phenomenon known as standard time. We now take for granted the world’s division into twenty-four separate hourly zones, with Greenwich Mean Time as the baseline. But in the middle of the nineteenth century, there were 144 local time zones in the United States alone. It was only with the global spread of railroad lines in the late nineteenth century—and the need to standardized train schedules both nationally and internationally—that major countries convened in Washington and agreed to synchronize time within each zone, rather than continue to allow localities to calculate time according to local meridians or solar time.

More ominously, consider the oddly-named United Nations Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCWC). Negotiated in 1980 and entering into force in 1983, this binding multilateral treaty proscribes the use of certain weapons that are (in the formal language of the treaty’s title) “deemed to be excessively injurious or to have indiscriminate effects.” An annex to the Geneva Convention of 1949, the CCWC represents a global effort to come to terms with and regulate the use of destructive technologies—some of which had previously been imagined only in the realms of science fiction. Separate Protocols prohibit the use of several categories of weapons: those that produce non-detectable fragments in the human body; non-detectable mines and other explosive devices; incendiary weapons directed at civilian targets; and laser weapons designed to cause permanent blindness.

As these examples make clear, advances in technology have long driven global rule-making. What is different today is that the furious pace of technological change risks leaving global governance in the dust, as national governments and international institutions scramble to come to terms with—much less regulate—innovations with profound implications for human welfare and global order. This growing gap between what technological advances may permit and what the international system is prepared to regulate is increasingly clear in multiple areas. Two of the most obvious, on which I have already written, are the governance of outer space and of cyberspace. But at least four other global regulatory challenges spring to mind, where international laws and rules are virtually nonexistent. These include the expanding use of drone warfare; advances in synthetic biology; the spread of nanotechnology; and the specter of geoengineering.

• Drones. As my colleague Micah Zenko has observed in multiple fora, including a recent CFR Special Report, the United States has struggled to develop its own legal rationale for what are, in essence, targeted assassinations by remotely controlled, pilotless aircraft. Initially, foreign objections to drone strikes were heavily concentrated within targeted countries, including Pakistan, where they have continued to elicit public outrage, and Yemen. Increasingly, however, drone strikes are the subject of political and legal challenges, both domestic and international—with the latter depicting them as violations of international humanitarian law and the laws of war. In 2010, Philip Alston, the UN special advisor on extrajudicial killings, delivered a damning report to the UN Human Rights Council (HRC) arguing that the United States, in conducting its policy of targeted killings, was oblivious to the inevitability that others would follow its lead. By ignoring the principle of due process and undermining the international rule of law, the United States was courting global anarchy.This January, Ben Emmerson, special investigator for the HRC, convened a panel to conduct a nine-month study on “the rising use of drones and other forms of remotely targeted killing.” Beyond raising difficult legal and moral questions, the rapid spread of drone technology to new players, from states like Iran to China to non-state actors like Hezbollah—makes it imperative to create clear rules of the road—designed to make the use of armed drones the exception rather than the rule.

• Synthetic biology. Drones may dominate the headlines, but rapid advances in biotechnology could pose greater long-term threats to international security. Thanks to rapid scientific advances, human beings are in a position to create new biological systems through the manipulation of existing and insertion of novel genetic material. While these technologies have tremendous therapeutic and public health potential—for overcoming congenital diseases or defeating malaria and other infectious diseases—they also have the potential to undermine biosafety and biosecurity. Indeed, as technology spreads and barriers to entry fall, it becomes easier to envision rogue states—or rogue scientists—fabricating pathogens like smallpox or inadvertently creating creating dual-use technology. It is disturbing, in this context, to realize that there is no overarching international framework for managing the risks of synthetic biology. Rather, there is an incomplete patchwork of regulations. The Biological Weapons Convention, for instance, limits the application of synthetic biology in weapons but does not prevent research taking place. The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), likewise, has added synthetic biology to its portfolio through the toothless Cartegena Protocol on Biosafety [PDF], which urges a “precautionary approach to the field release of synthetic life, cell or genome into the environment.” As global regulatory regimes go, this framework is feeble—and made weaker by the failure of the United States to ratify the CBD or its associated Protocol. My colleague Laurie Garrett has decried the current regulatory vacuum on dual-use biotechnologies, and has convened meetings of scientists and senior policymakers to try to remedy the situation. Meanwhile, a global coalition led by Friends of the Earth proposes a set of Principles for Oversight of Synthetic Biology as a starting point for international negotiation.

• Nanotechnology. Nor is there any international regulatory arrangement to govern research and uses of nanotechnology, defined as the process of manipulating materials at an atom- or molecule-based level, or address the potential dangers of introducing nanoparticles to the environment and the human body. Where regulation of nanoparticles exists, it is performed primarily on a national basis. In the United States, this function is carried out jointly by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology. A partial exception to this national approach is the European Union, in which the Health and Consumer Protection Directorate has performed a primary risk analysis [PDF] of nanotechnology and begun the process of regulating it. But, as with synthetic biology, the overall international regime is fragmented and under-developed—and there is no consensus on which global organization—if any—should exercise jurisdiction. One major obstacle to regulatory coherence is that most research and investment on nanotechnology is carried out by the private sector, which has little incentive to consider potentially negative global costs (or “externalities,” in economics-speak) of the new technology.

• Geoengineering. Finally, there is the growing risk of uncoordinated efforts to try to alter the trajectory of current global warming trends through experiments to transform the Earth’s absorption of solar radiation or other large-scale interventions to the planet’s climate system. Initially dismissed as fanciful, “geoengineering” has become a plausible means to prevent catastrophic climate change. Possible approaches include seeding the world’s oceans with iron filings (as one freelancing U.S. scientist attempted last July off the coast of Canada), deflecting solar radiation through a system of space-based mirrors, interfering with the climate of the Earth’s poles, and preventing the release of methane held in arctic tundra and the ocean. As the world warms and the implications become graver, countries and private actors will be tempted to take matters into own hands, with little certainty about the planetary consequences. Consequently, the world urgently needs rules concerning goeengineering processes. The CBD, in concert with the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, appears to be the most likely venue for new multilateral regulations.