The one-sentence summary

The link between climate change and violence is clear – it has a deep bearing on much global violence.

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WHAT THE BOOK SAYS

  • The book is subtitled: On the Frontlines of Climate Violence. The author is an environmental journalist who conducts on-the-ground exploration of climate change’s contribution to global violence. He investigates in detail:
  • How the water crisis fuelled recruitment for the terrorist organisation ISIS, who weaponized misery as a recruitment strategy. As a top scholar of terrorism noted, the countryside people ticked all the boxes. They were poor, they felt they had less power than they deserved, they felt they were forgotten, and they felt that they had all these riches that Baghdad was stealing. Iraqi commanders call poor visibility “ISIS weather” because they timed many of their attacks during periods of fog, fierce rain and sun-choking sandstorms. Meanwhile, construction schemes to build huge reservoirs when they can barely fill their existing ones are seen as corrupt money-making schemes by militia-affiliated contractors. “This is like a poor man building a massive safe,” said one top environmentalist.
  • How a coastline battered by sea level rise created a group of dominant pirates preying on so-called ‘bandit fodder.’ More than half its people live less than five metres above sea level. The principal pirate lair is in the Sundarbans, the world’s largest contiguous mangrove forest. Here, around a dozen pirate gangs killed hundreds of people, stealing everything in sight. Apart from climate change, locals suffer from upstream dam construction projects.
  • Egypt and Ethiopia. How water wars between the two countries have broken the norm of cooperating over water and escalated tensions. Egypt would not exist without the Nile and has regarded it as very much their own for thousands of years, but the headwaters are in Ethiopia, who embarked on construction of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Damn (GERD) in 2011, which is now open. The possibility that climate stresses might stifle Nile crop cultivation at a time when Egypt already imports more wheat than any other country in the world is seen as nothing less than an existential threat. Indeed, the 2011 revolution in Egypt may have been triggered in part by the long lag of the 2007-8 food price spike. Protesters chanted for “bread, freedom and social justice.”
  • Civic dysfunction created by bad rulers has laid the conditions for such appalling water management that tankermen delivering water are feasting off ordinary people. Climate change is effectively a destroyer of state legitimacy, and the presence of opportunistic tankermen is a symbol of government incompetence in what, ironically, is a water-rich nation.
  • The Sahel region of West Africa. How access to water and land fluctuates and creates conflict between farmers and herders. Sahel means coast in Arabic, as in the shore of a desert, a shifting and possibly advancing sea of sand. Here, conflict between farmers and herders is overlapping with jihadist violence, weakening authorities’ grip on rural areas and contributing to the epidemic of military coups knocking out governments. If herders don’t move, they and their livestock die, but they are increasingly being prevented from roaming where they used to. Those farmers who dream of a sedentary paradise with predictable revenues have no time for pastoral nomads.
  • How the strategy of recruiting unemployed rural men into the military has fallen apart, leaving huge questions about dealing with drought.
  • How rich nations, having exhausted their own water resources, are now seeking food in poor ones, such as Sudan. Foreign mega-farms have often surrounded themselves with an extreme lack of transparency, with investment coming from Gulf Arab countries that have lots of money but little water or arable land.
  • The West and the rest. Western democracies are not immune from climate violence, as examples from Greece and the Mediterranean demonstrate.

WHAT’S GOOD ABOUT IT

  • It is no coincidence that many of the worst climate-related security crises are unfolding in precisely the places that are also battling severe non-climate-related environmental woes. The number of people who could be displaced by climate change by 2050 is roughly equal to the total who lived on earth around the time of Jesus’ birth – about 200 million.
  • Backdraft occurs when well-intentioned attempts to address climate change prompt as much trouble as the initial challenges. For example, large scale electrification seems desirable but requires a lot of new mining for battery components in troubled countries. There is a deep unfairness to much of this, one that goes beyond the fact that it is those that contributed the least to climate change are most vulnerable to its violence.
  • Megaprojectivitis is what one social scientist calls a global obsession with grandiose projects when smaller ones would probably work better.
  • Climate dislocation is what the author calls wild, irrational expressions of possibly misdirected rage.
  • As climate change intensifies, more states are waking up to the possibility of disrupted supply chains in the more politically and economically fraught environment that a warming world will likely bring.
  • By 2025, three-quarters of the world’s food will come from countries susceptible to extreme heat and many are mining groundwater resources unsustainably.
  • The longer the world pursues varying degrees of climate action, the more vulnerable the West and other global emitters will be to Global South fury.
  • On a final uplifting note, environmental peacekeeping (EP) is based on the idea that shared climate and environmental concerns can form attractive entry points for conflict resolution and recovery.

WHAT YOU HAVE TO WATCH

  • Not much. This is a thoroughly researched and highly detailed book that sheds specific local light on what climate violence really looks like.