Climate shocks can lead to violent disruptions.

By Brett Walton, Circle of Blue – December 4, 2024

A warming planet is already a more violent place. How that violence unfolds is not always obvious.

When Islamic State militants blitzed the Iraqi countryside a decade ago, they knew who to target. Poor farmers who were besieged by drought and had few options were more likely to be recruited into the ranks of the brutal militia. Wealthier farmers who had access to supplemental irrigation water when the rains failed had reason to resist. The region’s story of strife was, in part, a story of climate.

Peter Schwartzstein, an environmental journalist, recounts such details about the “weaponization of misery” in The Heat and The Fury, a new book on climate violence. From on-the-ground experience in some 30 countries, his deft reporting illuminates the nuances of a topic that is often discussed in broad strokes.

Violence attributed to blistering temperatures and erratic rainfall is undeniable, Schwartzstein writes. It is often, but not exclusively, local in nature, and it is growing more common. In many respects, it is an indictment of outdated social structures that struggle to adjust to the uncertainties and deprivations of this fevered era. It is a failure of governance.

Schwartzstein compares climate change to a termite “burrowing into the support systems that we as individuals and we as communities and we as nation-states often turn to at times of crisis.”

Despite the gloomy source material, Schwartzstein sees an opening for measured optimism. Violence is not an inevitable outcome, he finds. Conflict resolution and peacebuilding around shared environmental goals have long histories. Targeted climate adaptation projects – infrastructure and insurance programs that provide physical or financial buffers – can “prevent these shocks from spilling into bloodshed.”

“Getting climate adaptation funding to the places where it’s most needed, i.e. many of the conflict zones that are currently being massively under-resourced and basically left behind, is absolutely pivotal,” he says. “And small amounts of money can go a pretty long way in yielding results.”

Transcript

Brett Walton

Welcome to Speaking of Water. I’m Brett Walton, a reporter for Circle of Blue. Today, my guest is Peter Schwartzstein, an environmental journalist and fellow at the Wilson Center. Peter’s also the author of a new book about climate change and human conflict. Peter, thanks for joining us.

Peter Schwartzstein

Thank you for having me on.

BW

The book is titled The Heat and the Fury: On the Frontlines of Climate Violence. And in it, you’ve taken on what I think is one of the most challenging assignments when reporting on climate change. And by that, I mean its connection to violence. We’ll discuss the difficulty in attribution and causation with all of these very interrelated topics a bit later. But I want to start with some scenes so that our listeners have a sense of place and the stakes. So in the places that you reported from, what does climate-related violence, especially water-related violence, look like?

PS

It means, in many places it means insufficient water, in some places it means too much water, but even more than that, it means rainfall and other forms of precipitation that is simply not falling as it once did. I mean, as I found over the course of 10-plus years of reporting, mostly in the Middle East and various parts of Africa and South Asia, it’s more variable or unpredictable water patterns that are intermingling and interacting with other drivers of instability to contribute to violence, rather than the presence of absolute water scarcity. So the very fact that people just aren’t able to kind of rely upon the kinds of water access that they, for the most part, once did is just a bridge too far in many of these communities that are already divided among themselves and already struggling with an array of other non-climate related problems.

BW

Right, you wrote that uncertainty from climate change is just as problematic as absolute scarcity. What are examples that you saw of that playing out?

PS

So I’ve spent – perhaps the most in-your-face one is – I’ve spent a lot of time working on farmer-animal herder conflict in various parts of the Sahel region in Africa. And this is one of the parts of the world that’s often considered something of a ground zero for climate- or environment-related conflict. As is so often the case, it’s a lot more complex than some of the reductionist coverage from some of my media counterparts might have suggested.

But the way that a lot of these farmers and herders put it is they can, for the most part, manage situations in which there is not enough water to go around. But when they simply can’t plan in such a way as to know when to plant up their fields, when they should start migrating with their livestock, then that’s the kind of thing that ensures they can’t even put their coping mechanisms, they can’t even put their support networks into practice. So by that, I mean they don’t even know, for example, among animal herders, whether this is the time when they should start spending some of those scarce savings on supplementary fodder because they simply have no idea how long they would have to tide themselves over. So unpredictability from markets through to human nature, through to climate-related conflict is just no good.

BW

Right. We’ll get to some of the coping mechanisms and how to smooth out some of that uncertainty a bit later. But I want to focus again on the violence and the scale of violence, because we talked about violence in the abstract, but it really matters what level we’re talking about. And what we often hear is talk of water wars, which is often quite reductionist. But in the violence that you’re talking about in this book, where does it occur and who is it between?

PS

So most of the violence that I look at in this book, and just to take a very brief step back, I’ve tried to kind of encapsulate the many different forms of violence that climate change is contributing to. Now, most of that, as I was saying, is pretty localized. It’s pretty low level. It’s everything from pirates in the coastal waterways of Bangladesh preying on fishermen, many of whom were farmers until rising sea levels, along with a whole bunch of other problems, claimed their lands. It’s everything from mushrooming crime in previously extremely safe rural communities in parts of Jordan at a time when the local social fabric is crumbling in part due to out-migration for climate-related reasons.

But as you were also alluding to, while most of this is playing out in kind of much less dramatic, much less sort of quote unquote sexy ways than some of that coverage that we’ve previously seen might have suggested, this is bit by bit bleeding into some of the more macro headline-grabbing conflicts as well. And one of the examples, between about 2014 and 2017, I spent many, many months looking at the ways in which ISIS had profited from collapsing agricultural conditions in the rural heartlands of Iraq and Syria to pad its ranks. And in no way was I ever suggesting that ISIS was a kind of climate-born beast alone, but I was strongly suggesting, and I feel that I had the evidence to back that up, that climate-related stresses in these agricultural communities, which were collapsing at the most fearsome pace, padded its ranks and turned it into a much larger animal than it might otherwise have been. So mostly localized violence, but we get a lot of these macro, kind of mega-conflicts that are cropping up more and more as well.

BW

The ISIS example, I think, is a perfect example of some of the nuance that your reporting brings to this topic and the interactions – the often quite complicated interactions – between climate and violence and all of the steps that are between there. I think when you were reporting in Iraq that these communities that are affected by droughts and by violence are not monoliths, that certain people in the communities have different vulnerabilities. How does the water and climate angle play into those vulnerabilities and who is affected or influenced by these sorts of groups?

PS

Definitely. I mean, if you sort of forgive me to go backwards once more for a moment, one of the key takeaways that I hope people get from the book is that we are, to my mind, systematically underestimating the volume of violence that is already happening and that is related to climate change. And that’s mostly because I don’t think we’re adequately taking into account how climate change is intermingling with these other drivers of instability that crop up in conflict zones. And by this, I mean things like corruption, things like misinformation, things like inequality.

But to go back to your question, because I did so much work over a decade and a bit but particularly within that kind of three- or four-year-long period, I found that many of the villages that had yielded the greatest number of ISIS fighters were villages that were dependent on rainfall and rainfall alone to irrigate their crops. While many villages that had very similar kind of ethno-religious profiles and in the years prior to intense drought striking had relatively similar degrees of prosperity, on average yielded many fewer fighters because they had supplementary sources of irrigation to turn to. They had, for example, access to irrigation canals or they had access to kind of municipally owned deep bore wells. And as a consequence, were not as vulnerable to the kind of vagaries of these increasingly and progressively failing rains. So yeah, while intermingling with so many other troubles, this certainly appeared to be instrumental and pivotal in many villages’ decision to throw their lot in with the Jihadists.

BW

A lot of this hinges on what academics call “climate as a threat multiplier,” where it’s not just climate itself, it’s climate plus all of these other things that are going on in communities. Can you describe what threat multipliers you saw and how you saw them working within these places you reported from?

PS

Definitely. I mean, the kind of threat multiplier formulation certainly applies in many instances. And by that, I guess we’re thinking of the metaphor of throwing fuel on an already smoldering fire. But the causal pathway or the sort of slightly mythologized way in which I’ve so often come to see climate change is kind of a little bit more of a termite-like thing, like a phenomenon that is sort of burrowing into the support systems that we as individuals and we as communities and we as nation-states often turn to at times of crisis. So by this, I mean farming and herding communities across parts of the Sahel, or these villagers in an Iraqi or Syrian context, who have often had various financial savings or at least various resources that they can draw upon during difficult times, but whose savings are just being depleted beyond the point of utility when these kind of climate-related droughts and other stresses just replicate themselves year after year after year. But it doesn’t even need to be something as tangible as financial resources.

We’re also seeing that people and communities’ psychological reserves are being depleted by the very fact that there’s this kind of consistent inconsistency of conditions. The very fact that in communities where hardship has always been the norm, the very fact that some of the few constants in their lives – the bird migrations, the plant blossomings – are no longer resembling what they did during many of these people’s childhoods, is sort of giving rise to a kind of erratic, wild, sometimes deranged form of behavior. I interviewed a lot of captured ISIS fighters, many of whom really struggled to provide a clear-cut rationale as to why they had indeed signed up with the jihadists. I mean, many of them struggled to provide even self-serving narratives. And that, along with kind of large additional amounts of my research, sort of just suggests that people are being driven, I mean, nuts is not quite the right term, their lives are being reworked in such a way on account of climate-related stresses that they just don’t know what to do with themselves anymore.

BW

That’s the overwhelming challenge. Is it too overwhelming for countries to try and reform their basic governance and social structures in the face of all of these other outside pressures that are coming at the same time?

PS

Absolutely. I mean, it’s the nature of the challenge for many of the most climate-battered countries is an absolutely horrific one. I mean, at the same time as, if we look at Iraq for a moment, the same time as it is being more affected by climate-related stresses than the vast majority of other countries in the world, they’ll also have to systematically wean themselves off oil, which accounts for about 95 percent of the Iraqi state’s revenues while also responding to climate stresses at a time when so many of the tools that they need to do so – effective infrastructure, sort of handy or kind of an effective civil service – is being kind of whittled out by low oil prices and by climate-related stresses. So it’s, I mean, the nature of the problem would be terrifying for the most stable and best governed of places and the nature of climate-related stresses is such that they’re mostly playing out in places that are anything but that.

BW

I’ll take a quick aside into a reporter’s-notebook type of question because I think it’s illuminating for the types of stresses that people in these countries are feeling – the challenges that you faced in reporting these stories. One anecdote that stuck out for me from the book is that you had to stop in a grocery store and put your phone in the freezer or the refrigerator to cool it down so that the phone would function. I’m wondering if there’s any stories from your reporting that kind of illustrate the challenges at hand.

PS

Yeah, I mean, to sort of take this in a slightly navel gazing direction for a moment. As you and perhaps many of your Circle of Blue colleagues will be aware of, climate change often complicates coverage of climate stories. I mean, there have been quite a few instances when my photographer colleagues and I have been unable to travel to X place to report on climate stresses, because, for example, a necessary bridge has been washed away by a flash flood in the intervening period.

On a kind of slightly different level, I think one of the reasons why there’s been a certain slowness in recognizing the extent of climate change’s contribution to violence is because of the sheer difficulty and sometimes the danger of conducting the necessary, often qualitative, research in conflict climate settings. I mean, I took an awful lot of probably unjustifiable risks when I was extra young and extra dumb in my twenties, so the kinds of risks that I could absolutely no longer justify to myself or anybody around me. And it was because I got in some instances pretty darn lucky and got away with some of these unjustifiable risks that I’m in a position, I feel, to articulate a lot of what’s playing out in the relevant settings. But no, the sheer challenges and, I mean, on a much more prosaic, much more kind of self-pitying level, the discomfort that comes with reporting in kind of 130, 135 Fahrenheit weather is certainly relevant to the telling or more appropriately the non-telling of this tale.

BW

Who do you hope reads the tale? Who is your audience? Who are you hoping to reach with this?

PS

I think two or three core audiences. I mean, above all the casual reader. Because while even within the kind of circles of people who were pretty well versed in climate issues, I still think there can be a tendency to look at climate change as if it’s a sort of a hypothetical future threat, rather than something that is very much a fixture in the lives of millions, if not tens of millions of people now. So it’s really trying to, on the one hand, hammer home the stakes that are already a problem in so many places.

Secondly, I’m looking to get through to many people within my own climate-security community, many who’ve been in this field for years and years longer than me and many of whom to whom I owe a kind of tremendous debt. But I still think that there’s not quite enough understanding, sometimes due to insufficient time on the ground, as to how climate stress X contributes to bout of violence Y. So by producing this almost entirely groundwork-based book, all told in what I hope is a very approachable manner and mostly through the stories of the fighters and the farmers and the regular families that are at the middle of this mess, hoping to really illustrate that causal process a tiny bit better.

And then finally, and this is perhaps me at my most quixotic and ultimately least successful, I’m also hoping that this book can cut through to maybe some political constituencies who are perhaps repelled by many of the lenses through which climate change often arrives – through the lens, through the prism of human rights, of justice, of ecology – but who are nevertheless perhaps interested in national security and the ramifications that can have for the U.S. and other rich parts of the world. Now I say that’s perhaps me at my most idealistic because thus far I’m not getting much of a sense that that particular crowd are keen to hear from me. Nevertheless in my own blinkered way, I will continue beavering on in the hope that there’s some utility to be had there.

BW

Well it is a wide-ranging book and deeply reported. You’re all over the place from water profiteers in Nepal to dam building politics in the Nile basin to ISIS aftermath in Iraq to pirates off Bangladesh. A lot of these places involving drought and changing water supplies and movement of people or obstruction of movement of people and prevention of livelihoods. We talked a bit about coping with all of these things. I want to come back to that here at the end. Drought, personal capacity to adapt, societal capacity to adapt, government ability to be able to facilitate these things. You saw a lot of the challenges. Did you see any places where interventions to prevent conflict were working or had the potential to work?

PS

I certainly did. I mean, you get it at the kind of nub of the matter, which is that for the most part, this isn’t a super hopeful sounding book. At the same time, I hope that readers will come away with a sense that there are real kind of shoots of optimism to grab hold of. One of which is that, yeah, in so many of these places, parts of the Sahel, parts of the Middle East, parts of South Asia, where perhaps the most localized climate and water-related violence is playing out, we’re also seeing how well-conceived and well-implemented interventions can massively reduce and in some instances stifle that violence altogether.

So here I’m thinking for example of many of these sort of NGO-led initiatives in places like Senegal, places like Mali, places like Chad that have brought farmers and herders together and ensured that they’re living in relative degrees of peace, while miles away where there are no effective mediation mechanisms, people are really at one another’s throats. But more than that – and this is a perhaps slightly kumbaya-like takeaway – the thing that struck me is that even though I have spent 10, 11, 12 years reporting on environment- and climate-related violence, and have written a book all about that, I’m still struck that there isn’t perhaps more violence than there actually is.

My takeaway from that perhaps is that despite the idea that we live in this supposedly Lord of the Flies-esque world in which when you strip away that thin veneer of civilization, we’ll all be at one another’s throats with pitchforks in a second, the reality is that once you give communities the tools and the mechanisms to prevent violence, they will in most instances leap at them no matter how much circumstances and, in some instances, officialdom are indeed pitching them against one another. So getting climate adaptation funding to the places where it’s most needed, i.e. many of the conflict zones that are currently being massively under-resourced and basically left behind, is absolutely pivotal. And small amounts of money can go a pretty long way in yielding results.

BW

Well, there’s the old saying that hope is not a strategy. And it’s good to know that the tools are there and available and are being developed to help prevent the worst of our angels from coming to the fore. And your book, Peter, is a timely reminder of what is at stake if we don’t use them.

PS

Thank you. Yeah. I mean, I struggle with this a bit because when you look at the facts themselves, you look at this kind of breakdown in global multilateral action, the kinds of cooperation that is so desperately needed to really combat climate change globally, it can be a little tricky to kind of maintain the degree of hope. But I also see within so many of these villages that people are remarkably resilient. And a lot of the time they will quite correctly push back at that narrative saying that, well, they’re resilient because they have no choice but to be resilient. They’re stoic because in many instances, the only alternative is simply withering away.

But it just doesn’t take much in the way of assistance to help people who are really at the coal face, at the sharp end of climate-related violence. And as perhaps my final refrain on this and what I look to kind of hammer home in the penultimate chapter of the book is that while climate-related violence is something that’s mostly playing out in poorer countries at the moment, we are in bits and pieces starting to see kinds of climate-related violence quote unquote at home as well in North America, in Europe, in parts of East Asia. We already have much greater degrees of violence against women in summer months for reasons that does indeed appear to be at least partly caused by climate-related heat waves and an array of other climate stresses. And so, yeah, if we don’t care about things that are playing out in distant lands, in places where we struggle to conceive of people’s livelihoods, well, soon enough, these are troubles that will be visited upon us as well. So there really ought to be a self-centered element to caring as well.

BW

It’s a resonant note to end on. I’ve been speaking with Peter Schwartzstein, author of The Heat and The Fury: On the Frontlines of Climate Violence. It’s available from book stands now. Thanks, Peter, for your work. Thanks for talking with us.

PS

Thank you, Brett. I was delighted to come on the show.

This transcript has been edited for clarity.