Former President of Colombia and Nobel Peace Prize Winner Juan Manuel Santos explained Colombia’s pioneer role in shaping the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) while reminding that Colombia was the first country to turn the 17 SDGs into law and to regionalise them. “The latter is very important for large countries, such as Kazakhstan, whose regions have different conditions,” he noted. “We must make many more people aware of the urgency with which we have to act. »

“We lost 20 years of time to implement sustainable policies between the two Rio Summits despite the fact that our survival depends on this. This week the temperature in the Arctic Circle reached 29 Celsius degrees,” stressed Professor Jeffrey Sachs from Columbia University. “We should think ahead in a generational scale instead of living from tweet to tweet. The quarterly GDP accounts are meaningless if we don’t have long term perspective in terms of debt and environmental devastation. We should not look at shallow indicators but at the quality of life.”

“For Kazakhstan, which is at the heart of Eurasia, the Belt and Road Initiative is very important. But we have to find ways to make it a green sustainable development initiative instead of constructing more coal plants under this banner,” Sachs concluded.

The Vice-President of the Asian Development Bank Shixin Chen stressed the role of regional organisations in supporting the implementation of the SDGs. “We can help countries to reform their policies to build up public management capacities and to boost technological progress,” he said.

The Under-Secretary-General of the UN and Executive Secretary of the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) Armida Salsiah Alisjahbana highlighted the need to transform economies to more diversified models in the region and to make them less dependent on oil, gas and minerals.

“Kazakhstan has a huge potential due to its geographic location at the centre of the sub-region connecting not only several countries in the region but also Europe to the rest of Asia. This strategic location could be developed as a transportation or connectivity hub. This is the direction where the Kazakh economy is going,” she said.

She also highlighted that Central Asia could hugely benefit from the from ASEAN’s initiative of global energy interconnection development cooperation (GEIDO), which foresees an interconnected grid of renewable energy.

“To accelerate the progress of the Asia and the Pacific region in order to achieve the SDGs by 2030, strategically targeted investments, a deeper economic integration and trade facilitation measures will be needed,” she added.

The President of PlaNet Finance, Jacques Attali, who was the initiator of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, highlighted that the top 14 countries in terms of SDG performance were in Europe, Sweden constituting a good example. “But there is a major flaw in the SDG mechanism: It doesn’t take into account the spill-over effects of imports,” he argued. “If we think in terms of global impact, the results for importing countries, such as Germany and France, are much worse.”

Referring to the Global Positive Index, taking into account different factors, such as democracy, demography and transparency, Attali underlined that, “the capacity of OECD countries to take care of the next generation is diminishing. No investment should be done without an impact analysis for future generations. »

Haukur Hardarson, Chairman and Founder of the Arctic Green Energy Cooperation, pointed out that 80 percent of the energy used for the heating and cooling of cities is generated from fossil fuels, which is responsible for environmental pollution and public health damage. “This will be more problematic in the future as the urban population is increasing. Due to the fact that solar and wind energy cannot be stored, geothermal energy could solve this problem,” the Icelandic speaker put forward.

Suggesting that SDGs should be applied to businesses, Dinara Seitjaparova, Financial Director of Almaty International Airport, gave an example of her enterprise, which reduced 30 percent of emissions by investing in equipment to increase visibility during the landing of planes in foggy weather and thus managed to avoid extra miles to land in other airports.

More than 460 politicians, businessmen, Nobel prize winners and top representatives of international organisations spoke in the forum, which was organised for the 12th time this year. Some 5600 participants representing government, private, NGO and media sectors from 74 countries joined the deliberations of the event, which now competes with the likes of St. Petersburg International Economic Forum.

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One of the previous winners of the award and Nobel prize laureate Rodney John Allam, known for his Allam power cycle to convert fossil fuels into mechanical power while capturing CO2, flagged the “depressing” BP Energy Outlook forecasting that the share of the fossil fuel use in the total energy mix would not necessarily change by 2040. According to the most optimistic scenario of the Outlook, in spite of the large increases in the use of renewables, the primary energy demand would still be met by fossil fuel in 2040, especially considering the growing energy demand in countries, such as China and India.

Professor Allam, a Member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), pointed out to recently approved contracts by China to build new coal-fired power stations to produce 259 Gw of energy – the equivalent of the entire energy capacity of the US fleet. Given the long operating life – approximately 40 years – of these power stations, their sustainability could be assured by conversion to power stations using clean technologies, such as oxyfuel, according to the scientist.

Professor Allam is of the opinion that European governments should provide incentives for CO2 storage as they did for renewables, such as wind and solar power. “Given that wind and solar power are volatile and cannot be stored, it would be imperative to develop new technologies for carbon capture, utilisation and storage”, says Allam.

Power plants based on the Allam cycle are already being built in the UK and the US and are expected to be operational in the mid 2020s. This zero-emission plants are expected to produce low-cost electricity estimated at 6 cents per kW. The plants will be run by oxyfuel, created with the injection of a small portion of oxygen into CO2, which circulates in a two-stage compression system under high-pressure with the help of a turbine and a heat exchanger. At the end of the cycle, the CO2 is produced as either a high-pressure fluid for pipeline transportation or as a liquid for shipping in tankers. The British engineer suggests that the liquid CO2 could be exported to oil-exploring countries, which could improve the efficiency of their operations by applying high-pressure CO2 to extract hydrocarbons. The US recently introduced a tax credit to boost the carbon capture and storage or to use CO2 to extract oil from existing wells.

Despite some forecasts claiming that there will be no real penetration for electric cars or hydrogen power cars in the near future, Professor Allam highlighted the possibility to utilise the Allam cycle to produce hydrogen fuel for vehicles. Commending the revolutionary nature of these new technologies, the Nobel prize laureate described them as “individualised power stations” able to provide energy for household and transport needs.

In his view, global protests on climate change led by students might be influential on raising awareness but they would not be meaningful unless sustainable finance to encourage clean investment, including subsidies and tax breaks for CO2 storage, is put in place to keep the global temperature rise below 1,5 degrees Celsius. Especially considering that the rate of the rise in temperatures has been reportedly increasing during the last 4 years.

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An international study assessing the global risks threatening the security of Eurasia macro-region in the framework of the fourth annual meeting of the Astana Club ranked the escalation of tensions between China and the US, and full-scale trade wars as top geopolitical risks in 2019.

Leading experts, Nobel prize laureates, acting and former heads of states, politicians and diplomats from 33 countries across continents, who contributed to the deliberations of the Astana Club, warned against increasing protectionism that risks bringing the globalisation era, marked by a 7-decade-long international liberal order, to an end. This would mean a decline in the growth of the world economy, deepening poverty and increasing unemployment, which in turn could lay the ground for terrorism, migration and separatism. Moreover, the economic interdependence achieved during the globalisation era could be eroded by trade wars and sanctions, the repercussions of which would be dire for the entire world.

The largest platform for dialogue in Central Asia, which took place in Astana, Kazakhstan on 12-13 November 2018, highlighted the world’s rising vulnerability due to tensions in the Middle East, crises in Ukraine, turbulence in the South China Sea, and sanctions against Russia, which may be extended to freeze dollar assets of Russian banks and to ban operations with the Russian state debt.

The consequences of the US withdrawal from a nuclear deal with Iran coupled with sanctions against the country (including on oil trade) could further exacerbate the conflicts in the Middle East, bringing it to the brink of a new round of violence between Sunni and Shiite groups. Instability in the wider Eurasian space could be further provoked by ethnic and religion divisions, which are likely to be fuelled by humanitarian crises in Syria, Yemen and Myanmar. The pessimism caused by these factors could intensify the trade conflicts between the US and its key trading partners, such as China, the EU, Canada and Mexico, while the expansion of protective measures worldwide could potentially render the situation difficult to deal with in the World Trade Organisation (WTO).

As the French philosopher Frederic Bastiat once put it, ‘if goods do not cross borders, armies will’. Hence these trends, reminiscent of the inter-war era in the 1930s, are extremely worrying in the wake of the 100th anniversary of the Armistice ending the World War I and its 4 devastating years of bloody conflict. The forerunner of the United Nations (UN), the League of Nations, which was created in the wake of the World War I to achieve international peace and to stop its members from declaring war, had unfortunately failed to avoid another global bloodshed 20 years later.

Echoing these concerns, the Astana Club stressed the need to update international organisations, such as the UN and the WTO, in accordance with the global shift of the balance of powers and the emergence of a multipolar world. Astana, which will host the ministerial meeting of the WTO in 2020, sees the solution to global trade tensions in the creation of uniform and fair rules for trade and investment cooperation under the auspices of the WTO.

The agreements on elimination of intermediate-range and shorter-range missiles and the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty due to expire in 2021 were also flagged by the Club as two critical issues, which could result in an arms race if they remain unresolved. Moreover, need for a new security architecture, based on the Conference on Interaction and Confidence Building Measures in Asia, to eliminate the mistrust between regional powers and to decrease the geopolitical uncertainty in the Eurasian region (in cooperation with OSCE and ASEAN) was stressed, in addition to calls for a nuclear-free-world.

Albert Einstein had predicted that a world armed with nuclear weapons cannot allow a new blood-stained outcome to begin building a new world order for the third time from the fragments of the old world, as there will be nothing to build and no one to build. Today there are 15,000 nuclear weapons and 2,000 are on high alert according to the International Atomic Energy Agency. Cyber security could pose a major risk for global stability, with power plants, strategic enterprises and e-governments increasingly becoming the targets of cyber-attacks. Losses from the actions of cyber-criminals are growing dramatically and are expected to exceed 1 trillion dollars.

Global stability is threatened by rising populist rhetoric, which uses the practice of scapegoating aimed at migrants, military enemies and, ethnic and religious minorities. Such nationalist and Eurosceptic discourse can already be witnessed in the EU, following the migration crisis, the Brexit referendum and the contradictions between the old and new members of the Union. With the weakening of globalisation, the threat of separatism (i.e. Flanders, Western Catalonia, Scotland) could also become more imminent.

The wider Eurasian space is home to frozen conflicts, such as Eastern Ukraine, Nagorno-Karabakh and Afghanistan. These conflicts could exacerbate relations between major powers, whose interests in the region already diverge over the spiral of sanctions, the escalation of tensions in the Middle East (Syrian crisis, political tensions in Iraq, civil war in Libya), and the renewal of an arms race. The economically fragmented ‘Greater Eurasia’, a term pinpointed by the President of Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev, is divided into different political and economic blocs, such as the European Union, Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union, China’s Belt and Road Initiative, Japan-led Trans-Pacific Partnership, and a neutral India with an increased focus on connectedness.

The Astana Club emphasised unifying initiatives, such as open borders for the free movement of goods and people in a Central Asian Schengen, which could contribute to the integration, growth and wealth of the region. The update of the Helsinki Final Act of 1975 (once a turning point in the Cold War) to continue the dialogue on the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons, was another solution proposed by the Club.

Strategically located on the ancient Silk Road, Kazakhstan is an energy hub at the crossroads of Europe and Asia. It is not surprising that the country, bordering both China and Russia and known for its multi-vector policy as well as its international mediation capacity (i.e. Astana process on Syrian peace), is willing to play an active role to avoid trade wars and other global risks by strengthening political stability, economic cooperation and sustainable development in Eurasia and beyond.

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