Peter
Schwartzstein

Introduction

For nearly two decades, the connections between climate change and security have been debated and discussed in a diverse array of fora—from universities, think tanks, and the Pentagon, to the National Intelligence Council, NATO, and United Nations. While consensus exists that climate impacts can exacerbate tensions and foster instability, the precise mechanisms linking climate change to insecurity—and appropriate responses—continue to be debated.

A significant limitation in climate security analysis has been the scarcity of firsthand research beyond desk studies and limited interviews. Conflict zones present formidable barriers to researchers, with access constraints and safety concerns impeding comprehensive fieldwork for both researchers and local participants.

Journalists, however, often venture where academics hesitate. ECSP Global Fellow Peter Schwartzstein has spent over a decade on the frontlines, documenting climate-security connections across dozens of countries and numerous conflict zones. His book, The Heat and the Fury: On the Frontlines of Climate Violence, draws on this extensive field reporting to reveal how climate change fuels violence worldwide in ways that remain largely underrecognized. These are the stories that are laying the groundwork for the headlines to come.

In this ECSP report, Schwartzstein distills 15 essential insights from his work for policymakers and practitioners seeking to understand the climate-violence relationship, identify emerging instability hotspots, and inform effective interventions and responses.

1 We are seriously underestimating the volume of violence related to climate change. In every conflict-climate setting I’ve explored, I’ve come away from periods of extended groundwork convinced that climate and other environmental changes were responsible for a much greater share of that country’s chaos than was broadly accepted.

Much of this misreading hinges on our failure to adequately account for how climate change is acting on other drivers of instability (see below for more on that). Much of that deficiency, in turn, is due to both distrust of the qualitative research that is generally required to show how climate and other troubles interact—and the complications inherent in conducting that kind of work in conflict zones or otherwise complicated areas. I had innumerable ‘messy’ experiences while researching this book, ones that I would not be inclined to repeat and a few of which I’d put down to classic young-man-who-thinks-he’s-invincible behavior.

2 There are increasingly fewer forms of violence that don’t have some sort of climate component. It’s never the sole driver. Sometimes it’s a relatively tangential one. But from Ukraine to Gaza, even major, headline-grabbing conflicts feature climate as a cause, weapon, and/or victim of war.

In Sudan, for example, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), one of the civil war’s two principal protagonists, have benefitted tremendously from flows of cheap, heavily subsidized oil from Libya. Without that fuel, it would have been difficult for fighters to range their vehicles across an enormous country with the same facility. Importantly, the revolution that toppled the regime of Omar al-Bashir and that gave rise to the power vacuum that these generals are now vying to fill was turbocharged by public anger at sometimes-violent, largely Gulf Arab land grabbing, which was itself partly motivated by fears of food insecurity in those climate-affected countries.

3 There are, of course, umpteen different pathways from climate stress X to bout of violence Y. The pathway that has cropped up most frequently over my reporting is how climate stresses can undermine coping mechanisms, how they’re burrowing, in a ‘termite-like’ manner, through the support systems on which individuals, communities, and even nation states rely. By this, I mean everything from the depletion of financial savings and psychological reserves when drought and other intolerable conditions replicate themselves year after year, through to the out-migration of leading citizens, many of whom are extra inclined to move away by dint of their greater talents and in whose absence local conflict resolution bodies are much less likely to function.

In Burkina Faso, for example, I met Boubacar, a very quiet, sensitive young man, who appeared woefully ill-suited to any kind of military service and who for years had resisted the entreaties of the VDP, a government-affiliated militia with a well-earned reputation for brutal behavior. But when the harvest on his small family farm failed for the fourth time in five years (and with it his “last hope” of earning a living from the land), he said he felt powerless to resist their appeals any longer. I’m told he died in battle with jihadists months later.

4 As reflected in a growing body of research, my reporting has shown that, generally, it is unpredict able resource access, rather than absolute resource scarcity, that is fueling violence. In conversations with farmers and herders across dozens of countries, many of them emphasize that they can generally manage anticipated shortages, or at least manage them in a way that is less likely to translate into hostilities. What they cannot contend with, though, is the uncertainty of not knowing when to plant up their fields or migrate with their livestock.

Among the many instances of farmer-herder conflict in the Sahel that I investigated, most of them were seemingly partly triggered by improvised and ad hoc responses to unexpected inclement conditions. “I cannot plan like this,” one Mauritanian herder told me. “People make mistakes when responding to events in real time on the fly,” a humanitarian worker in eastern Ethiopia said.

Please email me for a copy of the rest of the report