Peter
Schwartzstein

published on Center for Climate & Security on Oct 17, 2024

read on original website

Climate Change & Crime: A big, bad, largely overlooked nexus

The greater the impact of climate change, the greater our awareness of the security challenges it’s leaving in its wake. In recent years, there has been a relative deluge of research in this space. However, while most of that work has been timely and essential and has included significant related studies, such as those on the relationship between heat and interpersonal violence, the full spectrum of climate-related security risks has not yet been adequately explored. Crime, though arguably one of the most widely felt of these fallouts, has received relatively little attention to date in the climate security literature.

This brief paper is an attempt to begin redressing that shortfall. While crime, as a form of insecurity, might seem low stakes in comparison to terrorism and inter-state conflict, its sheer breadth ensures that many more people have likely suffered from it compared with more ‘macro’ forms of climate-related violence. From petty theft to not-so-petty assaults, climate change is leaving its mark on almost every category of crime.

Furthermore, while existing climate impacts aggravate poverty, inequality, and the other forces that at least partly underlie lawbreaking, there is evidence to suggest that there might be much worse climate-related crime in store. After all, the messier, more disorderly world that climate change is stoking may be tremendously beneficial for criminals, especially as climate stresses shrink some states’ capacity and thereby their ability to tackle ne’er doers. At the same time, various types of crime may both undermine climate action and exacerbate climate stresses themselves. We may be overlooking a key plank of the conflict-climate nexus to our considerable collective peril.

A relative dearth of research complicates attempts to articulate the extent and essence of the challenge. As with other forms of climate-related insecurity, the precise nature of climate’s contribution to crime is often hard to pin down, given the messy interplay of climate and other drivers of instability. However, through an analysis of the limited existing studies, a collation of the researcher’s own extensive fieldwork in this space, and three short case studies, each of which also draws off the researcher’s prior work, this is an attempt to get the ball rolling. Ultimately, the hope is that this short and summary briefer might serve as a springboard to––and an entry point for––future work.

Rural Petty Crime

Though generally perceived as safer than their urban equivalents, many rural communities are experiencing dramatic upticks in non-violent crime as the lifeblood of their economies ebbs due to climate and other stresses. In fieldwork across dozens of countries on four continents, interviewees reported increased housebreaking and other sorts of robbery in villages where locking homes was previously a rare, if not almost unheard of, precaution. The common denominator in most of these places is climate-induced collapse in agriculture and pastoralism, the livelihoods that are uniquely vulnerable to climate stresses but that, in rural areas, are often the only large-scale sources of local employment.

CASE STUDY - In recent years, herders across the Sahel have experienced unprecedented outbreaks of livestock rustling. Some owners of small stock in Senegal are losing up to 100 sheep or goats a year, many snatched by opportunistic young men on motorbikes and then sold on to dishonest butchers willing to ignore their revealing brand marks. Cattle drovers from Chad to northern Burkina Faso face the loss of their entire herds. Amid severe breakdowns in law and order, bands of armed men have taken to pilfering hundreds of animals apiece and then spiriting them across borders. Altogether, this crime wave is pushing thousands of families who lack the resources to replace lost stock deeper into penury while also contributing to more violence between farmers and herders. Many of the latter feel that their governments are far too invested in farmers’ interests to bother protecting livestock.

Though there are many reasons behind this surge, police and the victims themselves are united in pinning at least some of the blame on deteriorating economic conditions connected to climate change. With fewer strong crop yields or rich pasturelands to go around, desperation is mounting. A nice fat sheep, sellable for at least $100, can be too enticing to resist.

Urban Violence

That extreme heat sometimes equates to surges in aggression is not a new finding. In the United States, for example, more than 85 percent of all mass shootings in 2022 fell between the months of June and September; violence in generally un-air-conditioned American prisons increases almost 20 percent on hot days. From Sydney to San Francisco, violence both indoors and out appears to rise in line with temperatures. However, as heat and other climate stresses intensify and proliferate, many cities appear set for more severe run-ins with violent criminality.

Some of this is a consequence of the direct physical and psychological impact of more heatwaves in urban areas, many of which are built in such a way as to inadvertently maximize temperatures for those who lack artificial cooling, and most of which are vulnerable to climate-induced dangers to the systems on which even the affluent rely. The experience of Chicago during its 1995 heatwave, during which water pressure failed, and police clashed with residents over the use of fire hydrants for cooling, or the spree of looting that accompanied the NY summer blackout in 1977, could form eerie previews. Cities may one day face worsening public safety and law enforcement challenges as sea level rise eats away at coastal infrastructure, and extreme heat and wildfires overtax electricity provision, among many other threats. In short, nothing good is forecast to come from more uncomfortable conditions, more threatened livelihoods, and more erratic municipal responses.

Particularly in poorer cities, much of this violence is also wrapped up with the large-scale in-migration of climate-battered farmers and authorities’ consequent failure to manage the housing, employment, infrastructure, and other pressures that are arising out of those swelling numbers. Cities, such as Kathmandu and Baghdad, are experiencing more frequent fights between existing and newly arrived cohorts of day laborers on construction sites. Officials in other cities, such as Port Moresby, partly attribute more intense gang activity to newly arrived and jobless young men, many of whom are desperate for income and lack local social ties or safety nets, and so prove easier pickings for recruiters.

Drugs

As the impact of climate change on large parts of the global workforce becomes more pronounced, it may be bleeding into more drug consumption and resulting shifts in drug production and markets. Many farmers, construction workers, and others whose labor requires regular exposure to high heat and other inclement conditions are emerging as leading consumers of cheap, synthetic drugs, such as Captagon (see case study below). These drugs can temporarily dull pains, boost energy levels, and act as psychological ‘crutches’ through challenging circumstances, all while eventually fueling financial and health woes.

Further, anti-narcotics officials suggest that underemployed day laborers may be some of the most active drug pushers and runners. In countries such as Afghanistan, opium poppy cultivation picked up in part because of the low yields and hence minimal profitability of traditional crops staples at times of drought. Ultimately, many climate-battered countries, which already have insufficient budgets and which are being badly squeezed by costly climate disasters, appear less likely to dedicate necessary resources to drug treatment and effective prevention techniques, even as the need for them increases.

CASE STUDY – Not so long ago, drug use in rural Jordan was almost entirely limited to hashish. Things are very different now. Fueled by smuggling from Syria, where regime-affiliated businesses have taken advantage of the country’s decade-long civil war to mass produce Captagon and similar substances, many villagers have become thoroughly hooked on these highs. Where previously about 5 percent of the drugs that were trafficked through the country were kept for domestic consumption, that figure is now around 15 percent, according to an official from Jordan’s Anti-Narcotics Department, with some of the biggest increases outside the cities.

As ever, the causes are complicated. But, at its heart, this, too, is a tale of climate-related struggle. The difficulty and disagreeableness of working long hours in intolerable outdoor temperatures is seemingly fortifying an appetite for new coping mechanisms. So, too, is the increasing meagerness of farmers’ returns. To add tedium to despair, the out-migration of thousands of rural Jordanians, many of whom are moving to cities due to those troubles, is firing an epidemic of loneliness among those who remain behind––one in which drugs can constitute something of a momentary escape.

Gender-Based Violence

Whenever climate conditions worsen, women often suffer first and suffer most. Climate-related crime appears to be no different. While the relationship between gender-based violence (GBV) and climate stresses hasn’t yet been fully explored, there is significant anecdotal evidence to suggest that it surges during or after extreme weather events. For example, women’s shelters in the Houston area experienced a surge in calls following Hurricane Beryl in July 2024. Women from southeast Asia to central Africa routinely report more attacks during both periods of drought, when they might have to walk further in pursuit of water, and during periods of excessive rainfall of the sort that climate change is making more likely. Among those latter instances, grasses may grow taller and thereby enable sexual predators to more easily launch assaults. Women uprooted by climate-related or other stresses may be acutely vulnerable to violence when they are displaced into positions of precarity and deprived of community.

Hate crimes

Historically, times of crisis have often led to the targeting of minorities and other vulnerable groups. Here, too, climate stresses appear to be contributing to similar bursts of bigotry.

In direct terms, communities that are deemed undesirable by sections of society may be scapegoated for specific climate-related stresses, such as migrants at times of prolific wildfires in Greece or pastoralists during droughts in West Africa. Accordingly, they have sometimes been targeted with violence within or around those countries’ borders. More broadly, if very relatedly, the increased presence of migrant populations in Europe, North America, and other richer parts of the world for reasons that include climate change has bolstered violence-spinning political movements, such as white supremacism and hardline political populism across richer regions. Many of these entities, such as the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party, which came third in Greece’s election at the height of the migrant crisis in 2015, derive part of their popularity from their clarity of message––and, sometimes, clarity of scapegoats––in a ‘perma-crisis-afflicted’ world which offers ever-more uncertainty.

Trafficking

Climate change is a growing contributor to migration, including irregular migration, which can empower criminal elements. Intent on harnessing the desperation of people who often lack legal means of moving––and who may be willing to pay considerable sums for assistance, smuggling outfits have derived significant profits––possibly well in excess of $6 billion a year––from illicit migration. In some instances, climate-related difficulties may also incentivize traffickers to engage in this kind of criminality in the first place (see case study). This is seemingly sometimes true of other forms of smuggling, such as wildlife trafficking, a trade that frequently thrives in places where rural economies have been hollowed out by climate stresses.

CASE STUDY – To journey through the villages of Egypt’s northern Nile Delta is to see up close the impact of climate-related disaster. The rising sea is eating into the freshwater aquifers on which some farmers depend. The warming waters are ailing fishermen, who are already up against a laundry list of difficulties, including overfishing, as some of their farmer peers trade in their wellies for waders. The Mediterranean region is warming up to 20 percent faster than the global average. Unsurprisingly, in this pea soup of problems, many residents have had enough, and they’re gravitating en masse to nearby Alexandria and Cairo.

However, for a small minority of locals, the high demand for berths in boats bound for Europe represents a cash-spinning opportunity that they are not inclined to forgo. Some fishermen here have sold their trawlers to smugglers. Others still have allegedly participated in the trade, using their knowledge of the sea and coastline to maximize profits. Others still have secured positions of their own on these boats. For them––and so many thousands of others, the frequently rough seas and gauntlet of Egyptian and European security forces are risks worth running for the chance at a better life.

White Collar Crime

Climate change presents considerable opportunities for criminals whose activities may appear relatively far removed from changes in the natural world. These range from online scams designed to rob sometimes-unworldly migrants of their savings by purporting to offer visas or jobs to fraudulent or misappropriated fundraising in the aftermath of natural disasters, through to corruption in the carbon credit and wider climate finance markets. Experts warn of ‘climate-washing,’ acts that sometimes illegally downplay or misrepresent businesses’ contribution to climate change. The more that countries and entities introduce green tariff systems, such as the European Union’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM), which is designed to render uncompetitive goods produced in an emissions-heavy manner, the more incentivized people and organizations will be to obfuscate the origins of their wares as a means of avoiding undesirable charges.

Crime associated with climate action

To compound it all, the green transition and other forms of climate mitigation and adaptation present potentially rich opportunities for criminal activity. The potential fortunes to be made from reworking much of our global economy are naturally attractive to gangs, such as Mexican drug cartels, who are reportedly trying to muscle in on lithium extraction. On the other side of the coin, those who look set to lose out in this transition are themselves incentivized to turn to illicit means to safeguard their livelihoods. From Lebanon, where the country’s diesel generator ‘mafia’ has allegedly stifled the rollout of solar facilities, to the water-less Greek islands, where those with interests in the bottled water and water shipping industries have been implicated in the sabotage of new desalination facilities, there are a lot of places where lots of people have a lot of reasons to break the law.

Finally, European governments, in particular, have adopted heavy-handed police and judicial responses to disruptive climate protests. They have consequently sentenced many of those involved in blocking roads and occupying power plants, among other acts, to years-long prison sentences.

Conclusion

Few people stand to benefit from our hotter, more complicated world. Criminals appear to be some of the rare exceptions. With the poor getting poorer and inequalities intensifying, conditions may incentivize and create more opportunities for lawbreaking. At the same time, authorities who are already overwhelmed by direct and indirect climate stresses will likely struggle to maintain law and order as they previously did. Though additional research in this space is urgently required, the contours of the climate-crime challenge are slowly becoming clearer.