This chapter looks more qualitatively at Asia as a single region and focuses more speculatively on the longer run. It is also more personal, since views of the 2025, like beauty, depend inevitably on the eyes of the beholder. The chapter begins by running history backwards via a thought experiment. Suppose in 1975 that one had been predicting the contours of the Asian maize economy in 2000. What variables and parameters would forecasters have missed in significant ways? This procedure turns out to be a very sobering exercise for anyone now predicting events in 2025.

(From the introduction) For more than a decade, international lawyers and international relations scholars have been fascinated by an ever-increasing number of international courts and tribunals. These are producing more international case-law, thereby replacing the traditional scarcity of international law precedents embodied in a few celebrated ICJ and PCIJ cases. Today, there is a host of frequently highly specialized international dispute settlement mechanisms like the WTO Dispute Settlement Body, the International Tribunal for the Law of The Sea, the International Criminal Court, various investment tribunals acting under The International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) Convention or other arbitration rules. All apply, interpret and probably ‘make’ international law. One question frequently raised in this context is whether these institutions contribute to the development of a single uniform body of international law or whether they make ‘their own’ ever more fragmented law. To the extent that they must apply specifically agreed upon rules, such as the WTO agreements, various bilateral investment protection treaties or the Law of the Sea Convention, etc., this is of course largely a false problem. In so far as they rely on common rules of international law, coherence vs. fragmentation does indeed arise and is a serious issue.

Scholars of international law have intensely debated these problems mostly under the heading ‘fragmentation’ of international law or ‘proliferation’ of international courts and tribunals. Gerhard Hafner has significantly contributed to this scholarly debate in a number of articles, and most importantly in a report prepared for the International Law Commission (ILC), which triggered the Commission’s work on fragmentation and was further pursued by Gerhard Hafner’s successor on the ILC, Martti Koskenniemi.

It thus appears appropriate to dedicate a few modest thoughts about these issues to a great international lawyer with whom I have had the privilege to work at the Department of International Law and International Relations at the University of Vienna during the last twenty years. Gerhard Hafner will understand that due to the space allotted in this liber amicorum, I must limit the scope of my remarks on fragmentation and proliferation to a specific subfield of international law. He will also appreciate that the chosen field is investment law and arbitration, which, in many respects, may be viewed as a test laboratorium of international law where many of the pertinent problems mentioned above have appeared in particularly visible form.

Biofuels from land-rich tropical countries may help displace foreign petroleum imports for many industrialized nations, providing a possible solution to the twin challenges of energy security and climate change. But concern is mounting that crop-based biofuels will increase net greenhouse gas emissions if feedstocks are produced by expanding agricultural lands. Here we quantify the 'carbon payback time' for a range of biofuel crop expansion pathways in the tropics. We use a new, geographically detailed database of crop locations and yields, along with updated vegetation and soil biomass estimates, to provide carbon payback estimates that are more regionally specific than those in previous studies. Using this cropland database, we also estimate carbon payback times under different scenarios of future crop yields, biofuel technologies, and petroleum sources. Under current conditions, the expansion of biofuels into productive tropical ecosystems will always lead to net carbon emissions for decades to centuries, while expanding into degraded or already cultivated land will provide almost immediate carbon savings. Future crop yield improvements and technology advances, coupled with unconventional petroleum supplies, will increase biofuel carbon offsets, but clearing carbon-rich land still requires several decades or more for carbon payback. No foreseeable changes in agricultural or energy technology will be able to achieve meaningful carbon benefits if crop-based biofuels are produced at the expense of tropical forests.

Converting forest lands into bioenergy agriculture could accelerate climate change by emitting carbon stored in forests, while converting food agriculture lands into bioenergy agriculture could threaten food security. Both problems are potentially avoided by using abandoned agriculture lands for bioenergy agriculture. Here we show the global potential for bioenergy on abandoned agriculture lands to be less than 8% of current primary energy demand, based on historical land use data, satellite-derived land cover data, and global ecosystem modeling. The estimated global area of abandoned agriculture is 385-472 million hectares, or 66-110% of the areas reported in previous preliminary assessments. The area-weighted mean production of above-ground biomass is 4.3 tons/ha^-1 /y^-1, in contrast to estimates of up to 10 tons/ha/yr in previous assessments. The energy content of potential biomass grown on 100% of abandoned agriculture lands is less than 10% of primary energy demand for most nations in North America, Europe, and Asia, but it represents many times the energy demand in some African nations where grasslands are relatively productive and current energy demand is low.

» Article in the Stanford Report on Campbell et al. 
» Video by the Stanford News Service.

For many centuries, Europe had been a battleground. Finally, after World War II, a number of European leaders came to the conclusion that closer economic and political cooperation of their countries could secure peace in the region. This consensus led to the formation of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) in 1951 with six members, Belgium, West Germany, Luxembourg, France, Italy, and the Netherlands. Since then the integration of European countries has progressed exponentially, engendering formal institutions such as the Council of the European Union, the European Commission, and the European Parliament. Currently, the European Union (EU) comprises already 27 member states. Yet, Europe is a patchwork of many nations with strong national, regional, ethnical, and even religious identities. Thus, in spite of the institutional proliferation of symbols of a united Europe, the strength of a European identity at the individual level and its relations to other identities have been a matter of debate. Especially, since the formation of the EU, coupled with growing immigration to and within Europe (Quillian, 1995; McLaren, 2003) gave also rise to a resurgence of nativist political movements in spite of the efforts to promote a European identity. Identities, their development, and their relation to each other are discussed within different disciplines. Their common denominator is that identities are seen as fluid, influenced by the context and dependent on the previous and expected identities. In this paper we are, thus, focusing on the effect of contextual variables at the country level on the individual affiliation to Europe and the nation and the changes between 1995 and 2003. In a twin paper, we are focusing on the processes at the individual level and the relationship between different layers of identities.

The effect of elevated carbon dioxide (CO2) on crop yields is one of the most uncertain and influential parameters in models used to assess climate change impacts and adaptations. A primary reason for this uncertainty is the limited availability of experi- mental data on CO2 responses for crops grown under typical field conditions. However, because of historical variations in CO2, each year farmers throughout the world perform uncontrolled yield experiments under different levels of CO2. In this study, measure- ments of atmospheric CO2 growth rates and crop yields for individual countries since 1961 were compared with empirically determine the average effect of a 1 ppm increase of CO2 on yields of rice, wheat, and maize. Because the gradual increase in CO2 is highly correlated with major changes in technology, management, and other yield controlling factors, we focused on first differences of CO2 and yield time series. Estimates of CO2 responses obtained from this approach were highly uncertain, reflecting the relatively small importance of year-to-year CO2 changes for yield variability. Combining estimates from the top 20 countries for each crop resulted in estimates with substantially less uncertainty than from any individual country. The results indicate that while current datasets cannot reliably constrain estimates beyond previous experimental studies, an empirical approach supported by large amounts of data may provide a potentially valuable and independent assessment of this critical model parameter. For example, analysis of reliable yield records from hundreds of individual, independent locations (as opposed to national scale yield records with poorly defined errors) may result in empirical estimates with useful levels of uncertainty to complement estimates from experimental studies.