How Climate Change Tears Societies Apart

 How Climate Change Tears Societies Apart

In his first book, The Heat and the Fury: On the Frontlines of Climate Violence, political correspondent Peter Schwartzstein offers a vital and riveting account of how climate change is already pulling societies apart, feeding violence across the globe. Each chapter presents a nuanced case study: Across the Sahel, farmers and herders fight one another over access to limited water and fertile land. By the coast of Bangladesh, impoverished farmers turn to fishing to supplement inconsistent harvests and face capture by ransom-seeking pirates. Across Jordan, climate-related poverty turns villagers against their overwhelmed government and appears to boost recruitment in terrorist and non-state-armed groups. Schwartzstein draws on more than a decade of on-the-ground reporting to both distill and humanize these complex conflicts, be they local or national.

Scientific American spoke with him about the ways climate change ignites existing societal powder kegs, the mechanisms by which it distorts people’s decision-making and the risk climate-change-associated violence poses in wealthier, Western countries.

[An edited transcript of the interview follows.]

In many of the communities you have covered, you were one of few reporters raising questions about the links between climate change and conflict. How did you land on this angle? Do you think policymakers now see its significance?

I kind of fell into the field because the more straight political reporting space was saturated. But then the more I worked in the general climate and environment space, the more important I found it to be. I quickly realized I didn’t need to try hard to see the intense overlap—that I could tell the story of a country better by looking at it through the prism of water [access] and the environment than by a relatively superficial examination of the political scene. I mean, why, for example, does Iraq have water problems? For some of the same reasons it has problems across the board: a legacy of conflict, meddling by countries near and far, incompetence, corruption and an array of other troubles.

In 2015 I was quite literally laughed out of a room in the Iraqi Ministry of Interior when I broached with a senior Iraqi police general the possibility that climate troubles might be contributing to jihadi recruitment. To his mind and the mind of many of his contemporaries, this was just silly. But over the course of the past decade, there’s been an extraordinary sea change in attitudes, both in the wider Middle East and parts of Africa where I work but also further afield. I’m still not convinced that many of these civilian and security officials that we see talking the talk on climate security see the linkages to the extent that their words might suggest, but there’s an understanding now of the need to at least pay lip service to the importance of climate change.

One difficulty seems to be that it’s hard to quantify the impact of climate change, and there are also so many different, overlapping factors that give rise to conflict. How do you disentangle these?

Yeah, I’d argue it’s almost impossible to effectively quantify the effect of climate change. What I try to do in this book and in my work is show that climate change is part of the equation rather than put a dollar amount to the contribution. This gets at the heart, though, of why it’s taken so long for climate change’s destabilizing potential to be accepted to the extent that it has. It’s kind of a victim of its own nitty-grittiness.

Can you lead me through one of the examples in the book of how climate change might exacerbate or produce violence?

At no point am I claiming that climate change alone leads an individual to, say, join a terrorist group or attack a herding community in an adjacent village. But in Iraq, I met farmers who had suffered through [back-to-back] years of climate-induced drought. Many of these people eviscerated whatever meager financial savings they previously had, and that kind of desperation provided savvy [recruiters for the terrorist group] ISIS with some pretty powerful levers to pull as they made their pitches. When you have farmers who are deeply in debt, both to their extended family and in some cases to agricultural banks, and you dangle the kinds of salaries in front of them that they could only otherwise dream of, as ISIS did, you’re more likely to get a return on your recruiting investment. And against a preexisting backdrop of sectarian troubles, recruiters presented climate-related phenomena such as drought as instances of the government out to get Sunni Muslims, rather than fallouts from global conditions. For instance, I met two villagers in very different parts of the country who recounted instances in which ISIS recruiters portrayed drought as a consequence of cloud seeding and various forms of geoengineering across the border in Iran. [Editor’s note: Iran and Iraq are both Shia-majority countries, whereas these farming communities were largely Sunni.] Whether people actually believed these kinds of outlandish takes was never clear to me, but at a time when animosities ran deep, it was an effective way of presenting the broader problem.

Several chapters suggest climate change causes us to sometimes act in ways we’d never expect. What’s known about how climate change shapes the ways we think and feel?

Climate change has been destroying, for many foreign communities, the consistencies in the landscape people have always fallen back on. Much of that has been central to people’s sense of belonging, sense of community and sense of self. The fact that everything from temperatures to precipitation patterns to bird migration trajectories is falling out of whack is contributing to kinds of trauma. I see this in basically every conflict-ridden climate setting in which I work.

Of course, lots of people globally experience all sorts of horrors, and they don’t end up joining terrorist groups. But when I go back to folks’ village and talk to their friends and relatives, I can’t help but think there’s something to this.

Another theme of the book seems to be that even small conflicts eventually spiral outward. Is this just the nature of climate change?

Definitely. The other factor is that we live in a thoroughly interdependent world, so there’s no such thing as a neat, self-contained crisis. The professions most uniquely vulnerable to climate stresses are agricultural, so rural areas emerge as nodes of instability. But then prolific migration from those villages into already overburdened urban areas means that a crisis in a rural area is not inclined to remain a crisis in a rural area. On an international level, too..., one country’s climate response can easily leave another country impoverished, either through neglect, foolishness or outright malevolence.

It makes sense to focus on poorer countries in Africa because they’re experiencing more of the brunt of climate change. But what are some of the ways climate-related violence already shows up or could show up in wealthier countries in North America or Europe?

There is a pretty significant uptick in basically every form of crime and violence within Western countries at times of extreme heat. For example, here in Athens, Greece, I’ve been working with women’s [nongovernmental organizations] ... that have seen a roughly 250 to 300 percent increase in the various forms of domestic violence between the months of June and September relative to other periods of the year. Now, that’s not caused by extreme heat alone. Nevertheless, [in] every one of the instances that we’ve looked at, it certainly appears as if there are some causal connections. The frequency of shootings in the U.S. also picks up in less hospitable climate conditions.

In more indirect terms, too, a lot of climate-related violence in Europe and North America is a reflection of how governments are responding to climate-related difficulties across our borders. In Europe, for example, there’s a lot of violence against migrants, sometimes with the tacit or, in some instances, explicit consent of governments.

If climate-related instability is one ingredient in the recipe for conflict, what are some others? To what extent do they appear in the American context?

Corruption isn’t as much of a factor in the Western context as it is in some poorer places, but one that certainly leaps out to me is inequality. Some of the greatest crime hot spots are in places on the periphery between areas of affluence and areas of deprivation. It’s thought that an element of that is the resentment that arises when you have in-your-face illustrations of differences in fortunes and in state responses. When I see reports of private firefighting units in parts of California or instances in which wealthy communities erect seawalls to redirect coastal erosion towards poorer communities down the shoreline, I do think it’s possible to see some tension in the future.

You end the book by highlighting a possible solution: environmental peacebuilding, the approach of using climate concerns as an entry point for conflict resolution or peaceful collaboration. How successful do these efforts tend to be?

I wanted to close out the book on a slightly hopeful note, partly for the sake of my own sanity but also so the average reader wouldn’t come away just even more dispirited than [they] perhaps already [were].

Environmental peacebuilding is something that’s getting a lot of people in the climate world quite excited. Now, there’s the kind of cynical viewpoint that this is because so many traditional forms of peacebuilding appear to be failing at the moment. A lot of that excitement, however, is also coming from the fact that at least on a local level, [pulling] environmental levers has been successful in reining in, and sometimes preventing, violence big and small. There’s certainly a recognition among local communities and nation-states alike that environmental issues are not zero-sum, that they demand cooperation. I think it’s a real “watch this space” situation.