Quad Leaders’ Summit

On 24th September, the first-ever in-person Leaders’ Summit of the Quad was held. In the Summit, the leaders put forth ambitious initiatives that deepen ties and advance practical cooperation on 21st-century challenges.

Major Highlights

Afghanistan

• The countries have agreed to deepen their cooperation in counter-terrorism, humanitarian assistance and called on the Taliban to abide by UN Security Council Resolution 2593 (Security Council demands that Afghan territory not be used to threaten or attack any other country or to shelter and train terrorists).

Terrorism

• The group emphasized the importance of denying any logistical, financial or military support to terrorist groups which could be used to launch or plan terror attacks, including cross-border attacks.

COVID-19 and Global Health

• Quad Vaccine Initiative: Under this, the Quad countries have pledged to donate more than 1.2 billion COVID-19 vaccine doses globally, in addition to the doses financed through Covax.
• Build Back Better Health Security: The group supported the call for a "global pandemic radar” to improve viral genomic surveillance and expand the WHO Global Influenza Surveillance and Response System (GISRS).

Infrastructure

• Building on the G7’s announcement of Build Back Better World (B3W), the Quad decided to launch the Quad Infrastructure Coordination Group for coordination in technical assistance and capacity-building efforts to meet infrastructure demand in the Indo-Pacific.

Climate

Quad members agreed to-

• Form a Green-Shipping Network: Greening and decarbonizing the shipping value chain.
• Establish a Clean-Hydrogen Partnership: Reduce costs across all elements of the clean-hydrogen value chain, leveraging existing bilateral and multilateral hydrogen initiatives in other fora.
• Enhance Climate Adaptation, Resilience, and Preparedness: Increase the Indo-Pacific region’s resilience to climate change by improving critical climate information-sharing and disaster-resilient infrastructure.

Critical and Emerging Technologies

• Members committed to working together to foster an open, accessible, and secure technology ecosystem. They will cooperate on Advanced Communications, Artificial Intelligence, 5G technology advanced biotechnology, genome sequencing etc.

Cybersecurity

• Quad Senior Cyber Group will be launched to promote cooperation in areas including adoption and implementation of shared cyber standards; development of secure software; building workforce and talent; and promoting the scalability and cybersecurity of secure and trustworthy digital infrastructure.

Space

In the field of space technology, the members decided to:

• Share Satellite Data to Protect the Earth and its Waters: To better adapt to climate change and to build capacity in other Indo-Pacific states that are at grave climate risk, in coordination with the Quad Climate Working group.
• Enable Capacity-Building for Sustainable Development: Capacity-building in space-related domains in other Indo-Pacific countries to manage risks and challenges.

People-to-People Exchange and Education

• Quad Fellowship: The Fellowship will sponsor 100 students per year—25 from each Quad country—to pursue masters and doctoral degrees at leading STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) graduate universities in the United States.

Conclusion

• The Quad nations should articulate, more clearly, the Indo-Pacific Vision in an overarching framework with the objective of advancing everyone’s economic and security interests. This will make the group’s approach more holistic and it can then become a force for global good.