BRICS energy push: 7 South Asian nations hit by climate and war

For climate-vulnerable economies, energy security is no longer a separate conversation from adaptation — it is the same conversation. From the Himalayas to the Indian Ocean, seven South Asian nations named at the 81st UN General Assembly are absorbing the costs of a climate they did not warm and wars they did not start, through fuel, fertilizer, food, and finance simultaneously. The BRICS push for 'undisrupted flows of energy' is a test of whether multilateral rhetoric can become resilient infrastructure before the next shock.

For the Global South, energy security has moved from policy abstraction to a question of survival, and the events of September 2026 make that urgency impossible to ignore. At the 81st session of the UN General Assembly, Indian External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar joined leaders from developing economies in describing a deepening, compounding crisis spanning energy, food, fuel, fertilizer, finance, and logistics. Nepalese Prime Minister Balen Shah delivered the session's most quoted line: "We have built a world with flawless logistics for war and broken logistics for food." The framing matters because it links two crises the Global South insists it did not create — climate disruption and war — into a single threat to national stability.

“

Drone attacks disrupted Saudi Arabia's East-West pipeline, the route that carries crude to the Red Sea port of Yanbu while bypassing the Strait of Hormuz.

Weeks earlier, BRICS leaders meeting in New Delhi had already translated that anxiety into diplomatic language. Their summit declaration called for stable energy markets, "undisrupted flows of energy from diverse sources," and stronger protection of critical infrastructure. On paper, the grouping is now uniquely positioned to deliver: since its expansion it includes several of the world's largest oil producers alongside its biggest importers and fastest-growing demand centers. The reality, however, is that membership does not confer supply security. When markets tighten, producers can sell to the highest bidder or the most strategic partner, and importers compete on price and logistics rather than bloc solidarity.

The vulnerability was stress-tested almost immediately. Drone attacks disrupted Saudi Arabia's East-West pipeline, the route that carries crude to the Red Sea port of Yanbu while bypassing the Strait of Hormuz. With loadings affected, Riyadh began offering more crude to Asian buyers through ship-to-ship transfers off Oman — a workaround that keeps barrels flowing but adds cost, complexity, and new points of failure. The episode is instructive precisely because the East-West pipeline was itself designed as an alternative to a chokepoint. When the backup route becomes a target, the entire concept of resilience through redundancy requires reconsideration.

Three implications follow. First, energy resilience for the Global South is inseparable from logistics and finance: a country can secure a supply contract and still fail if shipping is disrupted, insurance costs spike, or hard-currency reserves run short. Shah's list of squeezed systems — energy, food, fuel, fertilizer — describes an integrated supply chain in which a single failure cascades. Fertilizer is made from gas; food is moved with fuel; finance clears both. Second, the crisis is fundamentally asymmetric. Developing countries absorb the inflation and shortages generated by conflicts and climate shocks in which they had little hand, while their fiscal space to respond is narrower. Third, the policy gap is widening between what multilateral forums declare and what they actually operationalize.