Environmental journalist @NatGeo, @NYT, @bbc etc. Global Fellow @ The Wilson Center, Fellow @ Center for Climate & Security
published on New Security Beat on Dec 1, 2022
There’s a scene near the climax of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express when Hercule Poirot starts to plot out the possible murderers. There’s Colonel Arbuthnot, who had opportunity and motive. There’s Mr. McQueen, suspicious in his transparent attempts to misdirect the detective. There’s even the haughty, toad-faced Princess Dragomiroff. Like practically everyone on the train, she had good reason to wish the evil Ratchett dead.
In the end (spoiler alert, etcetera), Poirot deduces that all dozen or so suspects are killers, each propelled by a shared revulsion for the victim. It’s simultaneously shocking and clever in its exploitation of the limits of our imagination—and the reason that this is one of Christie’s best-known works. I also remember feeling very annoyed when I first finished the book as a tween. How could a detective novel possibly have such a big and complicated range of culprits, while still somehow coming across as more plausible than many more conventional thrillers of its kind?
In trying to spell out the nature of climate security risks for broader audiences, it can seem as if media and climate security practitioners are doomed to a similar mismatch in narrative expectations. Journalists like—and, for the edification of readers, often need—clearcut storylines. Climate security scenarios seldom offer wholly linear, easy comprehensible causations (“killers” and “victims”) of the sort that are found in more garden variety murder mysteries. Trapped in this unsatisfying no-man’s-land, the climate-instability nexus has struggled to attract adequate coverage.
As senior German official and ex-Greenpeace head Jennifer Morgan put it at the recent Berlin Climate and Security conference, we need to better link “data with reality on ground.” Implicit in her comments is the fact that government increasingly recognizes climate’s destabilizing potential, but that many officials aren’t yet convinced enough by the existing body of evidence to deploy more resources. It bears examination as to why media hasn’t helped furnish as much proof as it arguably could.
Some, or even much, of the challenge is likely inherent to the nature of climate security risks themselves. Many of climate change’s most devastating contributions to violence and instability are exceptionally amorphous, such as how it fuels increased intolerance of state corruption and sometimes foments tetchier urban-rural relations.
These kinds of causation can be even trickier to prove than more headline-grabbing destabilizers, like prolific rural-to-urban migration, and they frequently require extensive and hard-to-collect qualitative data. As I’ve previously argued in New Security Beat, this reality has undermined efforts to illustrate the magnitude of climate-related instability across all platforms.
But in apportioning “blame,” an awful lot of this failure to better communicate climate security to the wider public can be attributed to the nature and limitations of media, too. That need for detailed, heavily contextualized evidence often runs up against the spatial constraints imposed by some editors and TV bosses. No manner of concise writing can effectively condense most climate security scenarios into 800-word articles—or two-minute news segments. Believe me, I’ve tried…. It’s all led to a situation whereby climate security examples are frequently best detailed in think tank and research institute reports, where brevity (not always mercifully) isn’t necessarily a consideration.
And even when time and space are no obstacle, many editors remain unconvinced of climate security’s significance and hence entitlement to more column inches. This, too, is arguably a direct consequence of the nature of climate risks, with their lack of ‘smoking gun’ evidence (to labor that murder mystery analogy a little more), It has also undoubtedly reinforced the impression in some editorial circles that the science is less certain than it actually is. As with past discussions of the severity of climate change at large, debate over the extent of climate change’s contribution to insecurity has sometimes been misconstrued as doubt about it having any role at all.
Many news outlets still feel burnt by the blowback from early reporting on the war in Syria, much of which overemphasized climate change’s role in sparking the revolution. But there’s been little reckoning with the reasons why many reporters mishandled that case, which included tight nuance-killing word counts, a lack of access to relevant areas on the ground, and, at the time, insufficient familiarity with climate change among the Middle East press pack. Relatedly, many publications like to use statistics to buttress points and show how the issues described in a particular place are generalizable further afield. Qualitative-heavy climate security offers relatively little data that’s non-context-specific and so convincing enough to “travel.”
Climate security is also ill-suited, or at least perceived to be ill-suited, to media’s embrace of “solutions journalism.” Emerging, in part, as an effort to dissuade readers from tuning out of miserable news cycles, this trend, which is having a particular moment in the sun among environmental news desks, emphasizes coverage of efforts to solve the planet’s biggest challenges. However, illustrations of climate-related violence can be unavoidably dispiriting and sometimes boast few viable or non-trite-sounding answers. “Reduce corruption” and “bolster governance” are hardly helpful takeaways. Ultimately, no degree of ‘hopium’ or the invocation of well-meaning but essentially inadequate individual efforts can sidestep that reality.
Then, most importantly perhaps, there’s the money—a major problem but also a possible solution. Even when outlets are interested in covering climate’s grimmest fallouts, media’s broken finances can frustrate. Developing a deep understanding of climate’s all-important interaction with local dynamics generally requires lengthy and repeat visits to afflicted areas—not least because many of their residents don’t necessarily talk about climate devastation in terms that outsiders might immediately recognize.
None of this kind of journalism comes cheap, of course. In Iraq, one can easily spend $500 a day on food, fuel, accommodation, and translation (if required) to report in rural parts of the country. That figure can climb well into the thousands of dollars for Western TV crews, many of whom employ security advisors to work in areas they deem risky. As a general rule, the more you visit and longer you spend at the same locations, the higher the security risk as word of your presence spreads to potentially nefarious actors.
Costs can spiral even more when both conflict and climate change itself complicate reporting efforts. The very violence that climate and other drivers of conflict unleash unsurprisingly endangers anyone looking to work in relevant places, like Syria and Sudan—in no small part because security forces habitually question the journalistic bona fides of anyone reporting on the environment, a perceived ‘soft’ topic, at a time of war. For example, friends and colleagues who compiled the Key Biodiversity Areas of Iraq book were frequently detained and had their equipment confiscated time and again as they hurried to document the country’s disappearing flora and fauna during ISIS’s surge through vital habitats.
In a similar vein, those climate shocks are also increasingly hobbling attempts to document them. How, for example, can you do justice to drought-related farmer-herder violence in Ethiopia’s Somali region when the area wilts under fierce unseasonal rains shortly before you’re due to arrive, as photographer Nichole Sobecki and I found when confronted with that dilemma a few years ago? There’s nothing like tracts of sodden land to undermine the visuals of a story about drought, even if that aseasonality is itself a manifestation of climate change and often a source of tremendous trouble for predictability-craving agrarians. It was a bitter and, in that instance, assignment-killing irony.
So, what to do about this? In some ways, this feels like a discussion that snowballing climate changes will soon render moot. The more obvious the links with insecurity become, the more willing media outlets likely will be to dedicate the resources to cover this part of the climate discourse.
But until then – and, for that matter, in the long run, too – there needs to be more investment in journalists who live and work in places suffering from climate-related instability. This beat’s highly context-specific nature means that these people are even more important to the telling of the climate security story than other beats. We’re already seeing some relevant programming, like the Clingendael Institute and Free Press Unlimited’s work in Iraq. We need much more.