The plight of the Rohingya people has hit the international headlines again. Following the August clashes in Rakhine State between Myanmar police and army and an armed opposition group, Myanmar has seen an accelerated exodus of Rohingya people into Bangladesh.

There are estimated to be about one million Rohingya in Bangladesh with between 500,000 to 700,000 left in Myanmar. Moreover, since the late 1970s, 350,000 Rohingya have fled to Pakistan, 200,000 to Saudi Arabia and 150,000 to Malaysia to escape persecution.

Others are in Thailand and countries of resettlement such as New Zealand and Australia.

The most recent situation is so tragic that a recent Times Higher Education article called for some of the world’s top universities to cease educational partnerships in Myanmar until human rights abuses, especially towards the Rohingya people have ceased.

Rohingya are Muslims living in Northern Rakhine State (formerly Arakan) in Myanmar (formerly Burma) who constitute an ethnic, linguistic and religious minority. They were stripped of citizenship in 1982 and, subsequently, have been the victims of severe discrimination and persecution.

For the last few years, there has been evidence of Rohingya risking their lives and fleeing Myanmar to neighbouring Bangladesh and other countries. In August this year, with the insurgence of the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army, the Myanmar army began a “clearance operation”, characterised as “ethnic cleansing” by the United Nations, that lasted for several weeks.

Amnesty International published a report on October 18 claiming the Myanmar Army operation which involved “widespread and unlawful killing” including rape and other sexual violence and the burning of Rohingya villages, constituted “serious human rights violations” and “crimes against humanity”.

Tragic situation
The situation is tragic and needs urgent international attention.

The underlying problem for the Rohingya people is that Myanmar refuses to accept they are a recognisable ethnic minority and therefore citizens of Myanmar.

While scholars are divided over the Rohingya’s earliest settlement in Rakhine, the 2017 Advisory Commission on Rakhine State led by former United Nations (UN) Secretary-General Kofi Annan, maintained the Rohingya people are an integrated population of Muslims who have lived in Rakhine since at least the Kingdom of Mrauk U, the final Rakhine kingdom (1429-1775), and possibly 600 years earlier.

Others are 19th and 20th-century migrants from Bangladesh and West Bengal of India.

In any case, all Rohingya have been living in Rakhine state for at least several generations and many of them much, much longer. To put this into perspective, Rohingya have been living in Northern Rakhine in some cases perhaps before the Māori settlement of Aotearoa and at least as long as European settlement here.

Moreover, in light of the United Nation’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights conventions relating to statelessness (Article 3) and reduction of statelessness (Article 1), the Rohingya people are entitled to citizenship, their human rights should be upheld, and they are entitled to non-discrimination.

Above all, in no way ought they or anyone else be the victims of ethnic cleansing.

From the UNHCR’s perspective, there are three durable solutions for refugees: repatriation, local integration, and resettlement.

Since Bangladesh is already hosting close to a million Rohingya and is a low-middle income country, it may not be feasible to integrate all the new Rohingya who have fled Rakhine state since August.

Repatriation very slow
As for repatriation, Bangladesh and Myanmar recently agreed to form a joint working group by the end of November. However, with current documentation issues outstanding for the Rohingya, repatriation could take a very long time.

In the meantime, global leaders, including from the United States, European Union, and UN Security Council, have expressed extreme concern over the Rohingya situation. International pressure on Myanmar needs to be reinforced to expedite the repatriation.

Regarding resettlement, although Bangladesh did not ratify the 1951 Refugee Convention and 1967 Protocol, it started a third-country resettlement programme in 2006 and this continued until the Bangladeshi government suspended it in November 2010.

However UNHCR, being the global refugee-resettling facilitator, may approach Bangladesh and mediate with refugee-resettling countries to open a special quota for the Rohingya and extend the opportunity to resettle them in third countries.

Because New Zealand is a refugee resettling country and some Rohingya have been successfully resettled here, New Zealand needs to urgently create provision for a special intake of Rohingya refugees, as it has done recently for the Syrian refugees.

The new government has the opportunity to demonstrate its credibility to the world by extending compassion to a community in deep crisis and thereby upholding Labour’s election slogan “Let’s do this”.

Associate Professor Sharon Harvey is head of the school of language and culture at Auckland University of Technology. Sorowar Chowdhury, a PhD student from Bangladesh, is researching the resettlement of Rohingya in New Zealand. This article has been republished by Asia Pacific Report with the permission of the authors and was originally published by The New Zealand Herald.

By Dyna Rochmyaningsih in Jakarta

Scientists in South-East Asia and the United Kingdom’s Met Office have teamed up to develop a model that predicts how the climate in the region will be like in the next 100 years.

According to the model, the region will be generally 2-4 degrees Celsius warmer by 2060 and continue to heat up around 3-5 degrees Celsius until 2100.

The strongest warming will occur in mainland South-East Asia. Extreme rainfall events will occur in the northern part of the region, which covers northern Vietnam, Laos, parts of Thailand and northern Philippines.

From June to August, the region will face significant reduction in rainfall. From September to November, rainfall rates will increase. In the archipelago, the difference between wet and dry seasons will be more pronounced.

The project, called Southeast Asia Climate Analysis and Modelling (SEACAM), was initiated by the Centre for Climate Research Singapore (CCRS) in collaboration with the UK Met Office’s Hadley Centre. Scientists from Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam were involved.

SEACAM and the Met Office have put up a climate change tool website for South-East Asia based on a climate modelling system dubbed PRECIS, which stands for Providing Regional Climate for Impacts Studies.

“One of the main aims of the SEACAM project is to enhance collaboration and capacity-building among South-East Asian countries in climate research,” says Raizan Rahmat, CCRS project coordinator and senior research scientist.

Climate scenarios
He adds that prior to SEACAM, there had been limited collaborative research in South-East Asia to create climate scenarios in the region.

“Given the geography of South-East Asia, with its complex terrain and maritime characteristics, it was necessary to generate more detailed climate simulation at a higher resolution than that provided by global climate models used in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports,” he says.

Unlike global climate models, PRECIS has a higher resolution that can more accurately predict the future climate of the region. Several climate parameters such as temperature and rainfall have been analysed.

Developed by the Met Office, PRECIS is beneficial for smaller islands in South-East Asia because the climate model shows these islands as land masses rather than ocean points. Lands respond to climate change differently from the ocean.

David Hein, a software engineer from the Met Office, says the model is user-friendly. Scientists can simulate regional climate parameters with a mouse click.

“PRECIS allows anyone with a desktop or a PC to be able to run a climate model. It is simply a matter of clicking ‘Run PRECIS’ and PRECIS will produce data which can be used to study possible climate change in the region,” he says.

This article was produced by SciDev.Net’s South-East Asia and Pacific desk.

As 190 nations grapple with the world’s future at the global climate summit in Paris, forest fires in Indonesia have been continuing to rage since July 2015.

Emissions from this year’s fires have reached 1.62 billion metric tons of CO2, bumping Indonesia up from sixth largest to fourth largest greenhouse gas (GHG) emitter in the world, surpassing Russia in a matter of six weeks and the entire US economy in just 38 days. [1]

Global Forest Watch Fires detected at least 127,000 fires across Indonesia this year, the worst since 1997. These fires were mostly caused by the clearing of forested peat lands to plant palms for oil.

The fires have produced toxic smog smothering Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and as far away as Thailand and the Philippines. The haze closed schools, disabled airports and caused more than 500,000 cases of respiratory illnesses in South-East Asia. More than 40 million Indonesians have been affected.

In preparation for the Paris climate summit, 190 countries that are party to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change were asked to submit their Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) to control carbon emissions. [2]

The UN has received 120 INDCs, which will be used to draft a new international climate agreement towards a “low-carbon and climate-resilient future”.

Eight of the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) have submitted their INDCs before the 1 October deadline. Only Brunei Darussalam and Malaysia have yet to make submissions.

Conditional target
Cambodia committed to reduce GHG emissions by 27 per cent by 2030, which will be taken from the energy, manufacturing and transport sectors, aside from other industries. But this target is “conditional” on international support. Cambodia also plans to increase its forest cover to 60 per cent of its land area by 2030.

Laos plans to increase its forest cover to 70 per cent of its total land area by the year 2020, with trees and forests serving as GHG sinks. The government also commits to increase the share of renewable energy to 30 per cent of its energy consumption by 2025.

Myanmar has the largest tropical forest area in mainland South-East Asia, so it is already a net GHG sink, its INDC said. But it will need international assistance in its socio-economic development.

The Philippines promised to reduce its carbon emissions by 70 per cent by the year 2030, which will be taken from the energy, transport, waste, forestry and industry sectors. But like Cambodia, the target is “conditional” on assistance from the international community.

Singapore, the first ASEAN country to submit its INDC, said it will unconditionally reduce emissions intensity by 36 per cent by 2030 in energy, industry, agriculture, land use, land-use change, forestry and waste.

Thailand, which is one of 16 countries considered most vulnerable to future climate change impacts in the next 30 years, placed adaptation as top priority and pledged to reduce its GHG emissions by 20 per cent by 2030.

Vietnam promises to unconditionally reduce its GHG emissions by 8 per cent by the year 2030, but the rate could reach 25 per cent with international support. Vietnam has intensified its efforts in forest protection, afforestation and reforestation.

For Indonesia, its INDC pledged to reduce deforestation and cut annual emissions by 29 percent by 2030 is unlikely to be met, however, if it does not put out the forest fires permanently.

Core issues
Observers note that the UN-sponsored climate talks start with countries submitting their INDCs to the planned climate change agreement. That these INDCs, focusing mainly on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, are “nationally determined” suggests that the agreement will have a strong bottom-up approach.

The summit will try to merge the INDCs with “top-down” elements to forge a compromise that assures broad participation and stronger direction. The task, however, will not be easy. Four core issues remain intractable. [3]

Differentiation – Developed countries do not want to have binding emissions targets for developed nations only, which they contend should be for all. Developing nations want the onus to be on the big emitters.

Finance – Developing countries want developed countries to make good on their commitment to mobilise US$100 billion a year in public and private finance by 2020 to establish a Green Climate Fund to finance mitigation and adaptation projects. Developed nations want to have more donor countries so the burden is not entirely on them.

Legal character ­– While the agreement will have “legal force”, there is no consensus on precisely what form it will take. While the United States, for example, is ready for binding procedural commitments, it opposes binding emission targets.

Transparency – Existing requirements for the reporting of country efforts are two-tiered, with a more rigorous system for developed countries than for developing ones. Developed countries are pushing for a common framework for all parties.

But there is hope that intractable positions in the past might change this time around, in view of undeniable evidence that global warming and climate change are here.

The United States and China have announced that both want a deal. The European Union also has set its target, which accounts for more than half of the world’s emissions. India has begun devoting more attention to climate change.

If only Indonesia can put out its fires and two big Asian economies, Japan and Korea, join the bandwagon, and political will strengthens among the big economies, Paris 2015 could be a landmark for the struggle to mitigate global warming and climate change.

Crispin Maslog is a former journalist and now science journalism professor at the University of the Philippines Los Baños and director of the Silliman School of Journalism, Philippines. He is a consultant of the Asian Institute of Journalism and Communication and board chairperson of the Asian Media Information and Communication Centre, both based in Manila. This piece was produced by SciDev.Net’s South-East Asia & Pacific desk.

References
[1] Nancy Harris et al. With latest fires crisis, Indonesia surpasses Russia as world’s fourth-largest emitter (World Resources Institute, 29 October 2015)
[2] Center for Climate and Energy Solutions Submitted Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) (Accessed 14 November 2015)
[3] Elliot Diringer The core issues in the Paris climate talks (Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, 2 November 2015)

Source: Pacific Media Watch 9508