Enviro journalist & researcher, think tanker @ The Wilson Center & @ Center for Climate & Security, Author of 'The Heat and the Fury: On the Frontlines of Climate Violence'
About
Hello!
I’m an environmental journalist, researcher, and author based in Greece, but usually working elsewhere in the Eastern Med, Middle East, or North and East Africa. I was based in Cairo for 5 1/2 years until 2018.
I write about the connections between the environment and politics and security, with a particular focus on the climate-violence nexus. For about a decade, I mostly wrote for National Geographic, contributing dozens of features, but have also published regular articles with Foreign Policy, Bloomberg Businessweek, NYT, Foreign Affairs, and the BBC, among many others. Over the past ~12 years, I’ve reported from more than 30 countries (and, irrelevantly, backpacked around many more!). In an effort to cling to my sanity, I used to contribute semi-regular history and science stories to Smithsonian Magazine.
Since ~2017, I have also consulted for a range of UN agencies and iNGOs, including UNEP, UNDP, Amnesty International, HRW, UNICEF, and the International Water Management Institute (IWMI). In 2018, I joined the Center for Climate & Security, a non-partisan DC-based think tank, as a non-resident research fellow, and, in 2022, I became a Global Fellow with the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change & Security Program. I am a TED fellow. In these capacities and my journalist one, I have given talks or spoken on panels at dozens of conferences and colleges, ranging from the UN Environment Assembly and the State Department, to Yale and Georgetown Universities.
Most recently, in late 2024, I published my first book, “The Heat and the Fury: On the Frontlines of Climate Violence,” which is the first from-the-ground attempt to explain to the casual reader quite how climate change is contributing to violence across the world, while, simultaneously, trying to flesh out some of the causal pathways between climate and violence to members of my own climate security community. Each chapter is centered on a different country in which different climate stresses are fueling different forms of instability, all told largely through the stories of the farmers, fighters, and regular families in the middle of this mess. Among many reasons for writing the book, I’m trying to hammer home the severity of climate change to constituencies who might be more inclined to embrace its national security ramifications than its justice/health/ecological consequences. The FT listed the book as one of the best new ones on climate.
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