September 12, 2024 • 32 mins
Weather patterns have always had an impact on people and civilizations. Historians argue that El Niño may have contributed to the French Revolution, and climate variability could have led to weakening the Ottoman Empire. But as anthropogenic emissions make the planet hotter, faster, Berghof Foundation Executive Director Andrew Gilmour says the risk of conflict is growing. In the 30 years he spent working with the United Nations, Gilmour repeatedly saw how competition over resources such as land and water led to conflict, but he also sees opportunities for aligning peace-building with climate solutions. “The common solutions could be, for example, a solar powered irrigation scheme,” Gilmour tells Akshat Rathi. “It could be joint management of a wildlife reserve, it could be a desalination project.”
Explore further:
- Past episode with Harvard Medical School emergency physician Renee Salas about public policy approaches to mitigating the health impacts of heat waves
- Past episode about the dramatization of the fight to represent developing nations’ interests at COP 3 in a new play called “Kyoto”
- Past episode about the life of climate scientist and activist Saleemul Huq
Zero is a production of Bloomberg Green. Our producer is Mythili Rao. Special thanks this week to Kira Bindrim, Jessica Beck, and Monique Mulima. Thoughts or suggestions? Email us at zeropod@bloomberg.net. For more coverage of climate change and solutions, visit https://www.bloomberg.com/green.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Zero. I am Uctra Drati. This week war
on a Heating Planet. Hello, upshut hi mightily. It's been
(00:20):
six months you've been producing Zero. What's your experience being like?
Speaker 2 (00:24):
When I tell people about this job, I say, this
is a show about climate change and emissions, but I
think very quickly start talking about all the other topics
that this show ends up touching. So we've done just
in the last couple of weeks alone shows about refrigeration,
and talked about tomatoes. We've talked about health policy, We've
talked about.
Speaker 1 (00:44):
Shock skins, shack skins, help farms, and electric transformers.
Speaker 2 (00:49):
Yeah, so there's a wide range, and that I think
is one of the things that has kept this job
really interesting. Obviously, one thing we returned to a lot
is politics.
Speaker 1 (01:01):
Well, also because this has been such an election year,
and I think we will talk about politics a lot more.
Speaker 2 (01:08):
And this week's episode feels particularly timely off the news
we've been reading about from Germany, where the government has
instituted new expanded border patrols after coming under a lot
of pressure to control immigration.
Speaker 1 (01:22):
And it's only weeks after there was a knife attack
where a Syrian man who had been denied asylum went
donn a stabbingspree.
Speaker 2 (01:29):
We mentioned all this because today's guest is Andrew Gilmour.
He's the executive director of the Berghoff Foundation based in Berlin,
and he spent thirty years with the United Nations, and
he's been thinking a lot about how pressure on the
climate can lead directly and indirectly to more migration and
more conflict, particularly as the planet gets warmer. Take a listen.
Speaker 3 (01:54):
Under even the best case scenario, there's going to be
a much higher increase of refugees and migrants coming to
Western Europe and North America. But to do it in
a way that then doesn't lead to such elitical reaction
that the far right is the beneficiary, and that's going
to be an extremely hard balancing lag and it will
(02:14):
require a lot of courage on the part of politicians
to start persuading populations that migrants are not a bad thing.
Speaker 1 (02:23):
And Andrew has distilled all this into a book it's
called The Burning Question, which both of us read. It
addresses climate and conflict and asks why does it matter?
What I really liked is it's a wide ranging look
at this question, which, as climate journalists we've had at
the back of our mind over the past few years,
especially with the wars in Ghaza and Ukraine and Sudan,
(02:46):
and it helped me think through how exactly climate links
to all this.
Speaker 2 (02:51):
Yeah, I thought it was really interesting that the book
starts looking at what took place well before this man
made excel in warming that we're seeing, going back to
how the al Nino effect perhaps played a cause in
contributing to the French Revolution, or how climate variability led
to weakening the Spanish Empire and the Ottoman Empire, things
(03:14):
that we don't really think about, where weather patterns have
a direct impact on how people live and how empires
rise and fall.
Speaker 1 (03:25):
That's right, and that's particularly interesting right now with the
migration patterns and what it's doing to politics. The UN
estimates that nearly three million refugees will need to be
resettled next year. That's from conflicts, economic crises, and climate change,
and that number has gone up twenty percent. So I
(03:45):
learned a lot from speaking to Andrew and drawing on
his insights. We spoke about how much full link can
you really draw between climate and wars happening today and
what can you do to address both climate change and
bring peace to the world. Andrey, you're welcome to the show,
(04:15):
Thank you very much. So it's particularly interesting reading a
book like this and speaking with you now in twenty
twenty four at a time when there are so many
wars going on around the world in Gaza and Sudan
and Ukraine. But the thing that stood out to me
was that few, if any conflicts in the world can
be shown to be caused by climate change. And yet
(04:38):
throughout the book you point out how climate change is
acting as a threat multiplier, often increasing the risk of conflict.
Are there any modern wars that have been directly caused
by climate change?
Speaker 3 (04:52):
To this day, I'm not aware of any war in
history that has been solely caused even primarily caused by
climate change. However, I'm convinced and there is a large
body of evidence to suggest that this is the case.
Not that climate directly causes war, but that it contributes
(05:15):
to war, that it is a major exacerbating factor, that
it complicates matters, that it heightens tensions and makes conditions
so hard that communities find it harder to live with
one another than they did before. There are many parts
of the world I would say, particularly in Central Africa
and the Sahel region, and also parts of the Middle East,
(05:38):
in particular Syria and Iraq, where recent increases of temperature
have almost certainly played a role in making conflict worse
and harder to resolve. What I think is more important, however,
than the academic debate that has taken place so far
(06:00):
regarding whether the one degree of global warming that we've
seen so far has contributed much to conflict, is I
think the projections that the next degree, that is we're
heading quite fast towards reaching the next degree of global warming,
will lead to more conflict.
Speaker 1 (06:19):
Let's look at what happened in Yemen, going back to
the oil boom in Saudi Arabia of the nineteen seventies.
There are so many variables involved in any conflict. Could
you explain what has happened over the past few decades
in Yemen and how we've ended up in a place
where a terrorist group is able to hold the global
supply chain back in the Red Sea right.
Speaker 3 (06:41):
One of the key points of Yemen is that, quite
aside from the fact that that has been growing desertification
and frequent rout is also the fact that the underground aquifers,
the water supplies underneath the ground have been grown mostly overused,
(07:01):
and paradoxically, it was the use of solar power pumps
for irrigation that has made things worse. That sounds almost
counterintuitive that something as benign as renewable energy can actually
lead to worse effects of climate change, but that has happened.
The use of solar energy has made it easier to
(07:22):
pump water out from the agrivis, which means that the
reserves are now incredibly low, so much so that the
viability of entire communities is at stake now. During the
seventies and eighties, a number of people from the Yemen
went to Saudi Arabia in the oil boom to start
working from there. During those periods, a number of local
(07:46):
terraces for farmland and villages collapsed because there was no
manpower to look after them, which speeded up the erosion
and the collapse of local vegetation and the situation we
are now seeing now. The wars of the last nine
years since twenty fifteen have certainly made things considerably worse
(08:06):
in terms of environmental degradation, but it's not a direct
impact of climate change.
Speaker 1 (08:13):
But are there any lessons that we can draw from.
How over these five decades where there was migration because
of an oil boom that led to lower agriculture and
thus poorer soils. Then that led to lower rainfall droughts
(08:34):
which caused, as you say, use of pumps to draw
from aquifers, and sort of this poor spiral that things
get into until you get at her risk group that
is holding a global supply chain to account. Are there
lessons that we can draw from this conflict to avoid
future conflict?
Speaker 3 (08:54):
Strangely, since Yemen, despite the extent of the environmental degradation
and the overuse of the water supply, I would say
lessons could perhaps more easily be drawn from other countries
that experienced the Arab Spring, such as Libya and Syria.
(09:14):
And what we saw there in Syria but also in
Iraq was a prolonged drought which took place against a
backdrop of a very repressive regime in Syria, and one
also that was corrupt and where local farmers were already
(09:35):
in the very very dire straits indeed as a result
of the desertification, meaning that their farms were no longer viable.
And in fact I was living in nearby Iraq during
the fighting of two thousand and six in two thousand
and eight, and you could see the frequency of sandstorms
(09:56):
which people said they had never seen of such intensity
in and see in their lives before. And this was
actually part of a five year drought that in both
Syria and Iraq came on top of serious human rights abuses,
on top of really strong levels of corruption and leading
(10:16):
to communities having to leave their houses and their abilities
and moved to cities where they lived in terrible conditions
and were actually ripe for discontent. And when the Islamic
State burst upon the scene in both Syria and Iraq,
taking advantage of the discontent, it pushed them into joining
(10:38):
the most extreme group of all, the Islamic State. And
I think that is a particularly strong example of how
the interplay between human rights abuses and bad governance in general,
when combined with a major ecological disaster such as emanated
(11:01):
from the drought, that can lead to something as explosive
as we saw.
Speaker 1 (11:07):
Now let's talk about Ukraine, because you write in the book,
nobody would claim that Russia's motivation for invading, occupying, and
seeking to eradicate the idea of Ukraine as a nation
in February twenty twenty two was related to climate change
directly or even indirectly. But the Ukraine world does have
(11:29):
climate implications.
Speaker 3 (11:30):
Yes it does, and thank you for making that point,
because I would never claim that the major reason for
Putin deciding to invade was anything to do with that.
But there are certainly a number of implications, one of
which was the example the rocketing increased spiral of oil
prices as a result, which led to a positive result
(11:55):
for once it led to a greater determination to find
renewable energies as a cheaper source of fuel. Both Gaza
and Ukraine have very much increased the divide between the
developed world and the lesser developing countries, and this has
also led to more difficulties coming up in climate negotiations.
(12:19):
And this has taken even further when it comes to
example the Russian veto of measures at the United Nations
that could resist climate insecurity.
Speaker 1 (12:30):
And you end the chapter on Ukraine by saying the
entire field of climate insecurity has therefore suddenly taken on
a new and additional meaning, even if policymakers don't seem
to have grasped it yet. But sitting here knowing what
we know about climate and what it's going to do
(12:52):
to the planet with greater certainty than ever before. It
is something that militaries have started to think about, at
least over the past decade or even two decades, and
this phrase that climate change is a threat multiplier is
something that is now talked in security circles. So have
(13:13):
you seen that open the door for better planning and
policy making in the future.
Speaker 3 (13:20):
Yes, I definitely have, and I would encourage this, but
not everybody does. Indeed, the entire expression climate security is
a phrase that some people shy away from because they
believe that even using that phrase encourages a security first
approach to what is not fundamentally a security issue, and
(13:44):
I would take issue with that. I think there is
a strong argument, for example, either using the United Nation
Security Council to get involved in matters relating to climate
change and their impact on dec security, but also involving militaries,
and they can be extremely positive and I myself saw
that in Iraq during the war, where for reasons that
(14:07):
weren't necessarily connected to fear of climate change in general,
but for a very practical desire to save the lives
of US troops. There was a very important initiative that
took place amongst the military who because they needed to
provide diesel fuel to their forward operating basis in large
(14:29):
quantities in order to help their soldiers live under bearable
conditions in the desert using air conditioning. But their great
concern was that their fuel convoys were being targeted to
ambush by groups connected to al Qaeda and later the
Islamic States. So they took the perfectly sensible decision that
(14:53):
to reduce the number of convoys and thereby to reduce
the number of deaths of people on those convoys, they
would start using solar energy. And because they are so
well resourced, militaries can often do things at scale on
a way that civilian agencies do not have the capacity
to do so. So Yes, indeed, I've seen in many instances,
(15:15):
and the US military is clearly whatever that the political
views of the people concerned. They seem to be very
well aware of the climate implications of what can happen
to them as a result of example, rising sea levels,
and they know that obviously their basis that can become
underwaterhare in a few years time, are going to be
(15:36):
completely useless. So there is definitely hope in my view
from engaging with the militaries.
Speaker 1 (15:45):
And so when it comes to potential solutions that would
try and tackle this nexus of climate conflict and migration,
there are two sets of solutions. One is, obviously we
have to tackle climate change by reducing emissions, and that
is an example you talked about, which is militaries around
the world which are huge users of fossil fuels can
(16:06):
start to reduce their own greenose gas impact. But then
there is a whole set of other solutions that can
be applied on the policy making on climate adaptation, on
environmental peace building that you mentioned that would allow for
reduction in conflicts. Could you talk through these solutions, because
(16:28):
you have mentioned those in your book, but they all
seem to be at quite an early stage.
Speaker 3 (16:34):
That is correct, They are indeed at an early stage,
and I will indeed go through some of them, one
of which is the relatively new practice of environmental peace building.
This I think has great potential, but it has only
been tried in relatively few places to date. It is
based on the thinking that you might be able to
(16:58):
resolve tension between communities if you don't go straight for
the most important issues that has divided them, but actually
focus on some lower hanging fruit, as it were, first
of all, teaching them about the impact of climate change
and how it affects not just them but other peoples.
(17:20):
They know that each time they have a new drought,
each time there is a flash flood, that there may
be an increase in recruitment into extremist radical groups, but
they don't necessarily know that it is even affecting the
whole of their country. I'm talking about places like Somalia
now or Iraq and many other places actually also in
the Sahel Malei, chad Nisia and places. Many of them
(17:43):
of course, are concluding that it is no longer possible
living in areas that are so exposed to extreme heat
and desertification that they have in some cases decided that
there is no point even trying to live there. So
they're going to try to migrate either within their their
own country to cities or further down the road, presumably
(18:04):
to other countries and other continents. So to break that that,
one has to be able to start coming up with
measures in the countries that they are leaving to persuade
them that there's actually a future there, and I think
that environmental peace building and the development measures that would
come with them could be a way of doing that.
Speaker 1 (18:23):
And could you talk through the success stories, even if
they are at a small scale right now.
Speaker 3 (18:29):
Yes, my own organization, the Bako Foundation, of example, we've
been working for three years in Somalia and a bit
less in Iraq, precisely in the conditions that I've been
talking about, working with communities that are very much at
odds with some of their neighbors, whether it's for ethnic reasons,
(18:50):
or for sectarian reasons, or for reasons of competition over
natural resources. But getting them to sit down together and
confronting some of their problems and seeing that actually cooperation
on these issues can actually lead to progress. There, we
are finding successes. The common solutions could be, for example,
(19:11):
a solar powered irrigation scheme. It could be joint management
of a wildlife serve, it could be a desalination project.
We've been doing that most recently in the south of Iraq,
where working with people who have been forced to leave
their farmlands and move into urban areas, where as in
(19:33):
many other parts of the world the urban areas do
not welcome Suddenly a large influx of income is so
very major tensions and violence has broken out between them,
but we are finding that we're able to help resolve
those tensions.
Speaker 1 (19:47):
So a lot of the conflicts that start tend to
start because of resources, either its land or its water.
Now those are cause for creating conflict, but could they
be used to find ways to build peace?
Speaker 3 (20:04):
Yes, I mean what are the main drivers of displacement?
The displacement that is caused as a result of both
conflict and climate change is any country's ability or inability
to feed itself. So I think investing in forms of
agriculture that could be better suited to a change in
(20:28):
climate would help enable that adaptation and thereby remove sources
of tension and also the need to seek life elsewhere.
One example that I think has a lot of promise
is known as the system of rice intensification, which is
an example of targeted as system. It's an agro ecological
approach used in places like Afghanistan or Nigeria and Mali,
(20:51):
which can include tripling grain yield, enhancing incomes, and helping
water conservation as well as lowering meat emission. So it
has many advantages, but in this particular context. By providing
higher incomes to farmers, it can help people a stay
on their lands and feel less of an imperative to
(21:15):
compete with their neighbors.
Speaker 1 (21:20):
After the break, Andrew and I talk about how some
politicians are turning refugees into a wedge issue. If you're
finding this episode insightful, please take a moment to rate
and review the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and even YouTube.
It helps other listeners find the show. One of the
(21:45):
stats that stood out to me from your book was
that as of May twenty twenty two, there are about
one hundred million people who'd been displaced from their countries
as a result of many things, but about a third
of those were because of climate events. Now, with climate
change on the March, we are likely to see that
number grow quite rapidly, and it comes at a time
(22:09):
when evil actors, bad actors, politicians can actually use that
kind of event to their advantage. You write about how
Russia used its influence over Belarus in twenty twenty one
to push migrants from Afghanistan and Iraq into Poland, Lithuania,
and Latvia in a way that was engineered to drum
(22:31):
up fear of migrants and destabilize the politics in those democracies.
Will we see more of this happening as the planet
is being warmed.
Speaker 3 (22:41):
Yes, I think we will. We are seeing a number
of very allowing trends at the moment. One, we are
currently living through a period of more conflicts than at
any time since nineteen forty five. It's estimated that there
are fifty nine separate conflicts going on at the moment. Secondly,
(23:02):
we are seeing an ever increasing rate of global warming
as new records seem to be being reached every week
almost And Thirdly, we are seeing the growth of right
wing parties in the United States and Europe that are
(23:22):
anti immigrants but also to climate change skeptics or more
often deniers. So it's like a perverse irony in a
way that the same people who prevent governments from doing
major measures to help combat climate change are those that
(23:44):
then profit from what they call a flood of migrants
coming in who have been forced to come because the
North hasn't actually taken proper measures to reduce emissions and
do major adaptation measures. So I think these are very
run trends, and the key is to find ways to
understand that there is going to be under even the
(24:06):
best case scenario, there's going to be a much higher
increase of refugees and migrants coming to Western Europe and
North America. But to do it in a way that
then doesn't lead to such a political reaction that the
far right is the beneficiary, and that's going to be
an extremely hard balancing to act, and it will require
(24:27):
a lot of courage on the part of politicians to
start persuading populations that migrants are not a bad thing,
that actually, in an era where there's actually a population
decline in Western countries and indeed many other countries, immigrants
are going to play a very important role in keeping
economies and societies flourishing.
Speaker 1 (24:50):
Now, I'm a reporter who's been covering climate change and
impacts and solutions for the past six seven years, and
what I have noticed is that as a person who
understands the world, who is learning about the world, climate
change is forcing me to be empathetic in ways that
I had not been empathetic in the past. You have,
(25:13):
of course, worked in all sorts of areas. You've worked
in conflict areas and human rights, and now you're focused
on climate. Are you seeing that change come through in
people you meet, is their higher level of global empathy
being grown because these climate events are global, and there
(25:34):
are all these interconnections that you're able to draw from
human rights to conflict to resources in the work that
you do.
Speaker 3 (25:44):
I certainly see that people younger than me I'm sixty
years old, that people twenty thirty forty years younger than
me are much more open to compassion and empathy for
victims of human rights in general, but particularly those forced
(26:05):
to leave their homes as a result of climate change,
because their environmental awareness is so much higher than those
people who are nearer my age. And in that sense,
it is one of the areas of optimism that we
can indeed point.
Speaker 1 (26:18):
To now when we talk about climate solutions, which is
what I do day in and day out, there is
a tendency among many climate activists that holds back some
of the climate solutions because they want it to be
done in a perfect way. But when I take a
step back, and I'm taking a really big step back,
(26:39):
I look at how the world has changed over the
past century, say, and I look at trends which show progress.
So when the Spanish flu happened in the early twentieth century,
you know, fifty million to one hundred million people died.
We had a similar event in the COVID nineteen pandemic,
and of course we still had many millions of people die.
(27:03):
It was nowhere close to the disaster that was the
Spanish globe because of technology but also because of our
ability to communicate at scale. Does not mean there was
no disinformation, but there has been progress. And so when
I look at climate conflict and migration. While reading your book,
it felt to me that many of the solutions are there,
(27:27):
they are sometimes too hard. Trying to get them all
to line up in the perfect way is likely to
be really difficult. Given there are so many variables involved
in getting these solutions to work, I have greater appreciation
for how difficult it's going to be. So rather than
(27:48):
trying to find a perfect solution, do you think the
goal is now just to be less wrong, to not
commit as many mistakes as we did on environment and
on human rights in the pert and does hopefully that
will lead to fewer conflicts.
Speaker 3 (28:05):
Well, I worked for the United Nations for thirty years.
I think I can safely say that quite early on
in my career I lost any hope that I might
have had that there are perfect solutions for anything, so
I certainly don't look for perfect solutions. A great UN
Secretary journal Dicomer Show, once said, the purpose of the
(28:25):
UN isn't to take people to heaven, is to save
them from hell, and and there are many variants of that.
If you can make people's lives a little bit less awful,
then you've achieved your job. Your job isn't necessary to
bring world peace, it is to reduce conflict. Frankly, when
I started getting interested in this about twenty years ago,
(28:46):
I would have been very surprised to see the level
of climate denihalism that there still is, whether it's in
the aspects of the US press or the British press
such as the Daily Telegraph, or any paths of Germany
and elsewhere as well. I didn't think that would happen.
I thought that given the unanimity with which the world
(29:08):
science community recognizes the issues, the fact that there is
such anhalism is surprising to me. But all it shows
is that the struggle is going to be even harder
than one expected it to be, and so whatever one
can do, there are things that we can try to do.
For example, working on finance. Do you know Extraordinarily, according
(29:30):
to a UNTP report a couple of years ago, highly
fragile countries, the most fragile countries such as for example,
Soudan and Iraq, receive only one percent but capita of
the funds going to more stable countries. And one understands
in a way because investors need stability or that's what
they cover it. But there are ways you can encourage
(29:56):
private investors from richer countries to start investing by providing
in guarantees so that you can indemnify the private sector
for some of the potential losses in high risk settings,
because we have to change that figure. If only one
percent per capita is going to the most vulnerable climate
and conflict affected countries compared to others, then we have
(30:17):
a major problem because these are the countries that are
on the front line of climate change, they are on
the front line of conflict, and they're the ones who
are going to be sending forth their populations who can
no longer live there. So we have to find ways,
and there are ways out there. People have come up
with very creative solutions. Gordon Brown, the former UK Prime Minister,
(30:39):
has come up with a number of areas relating to finance,
for example, and the last but one cop there was
the Loss and Damage Agreement that can help mitigate the
major climate in justice, whereby it is the countries that
don't admit that are on the front line of climate change.
So there are many ways, but it is definitely going
to be very very hard road, and we do not
(31:01):
have that much time either.
Speaker 1 (31:03):
Thank you, Andrew, Thank you very much. Thank you for
listening to Zero. And now for the sound of the week.
That's the sound of a container ship leading port, probably
(31:26):
carrying your next Amazon order. Small things that all adapt
to big impacts on the planet. If you like this episode,
please take a moment to rate and review the show
on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Share this episode with a
friend or with a peacebuilder. You can get in touch
at zero pod at Bloomberg dot net. Zero's producer is
(31:47):
Mighty li Rao, Bloomberg's head a podcast is Sage Bowman
and head of Talk is Brendan Newnan. Our theme music
is composed by Wonderly Special Thanks to John fra Kira
Bindrim and Monique Molima. I am extracty back soon.
Welcome to Zero. I am Uctra Drati. This week war
on a Heating Planet. Hello, upshut hi mightily. It's been
(00:20):
six months you've been producing Zero. What's your experience being like?
Speaker 2 (00:24):
When I tell people about this job, I say, this
is a show about climate change and emissions, but I
think very quickly start talking about all the other topics
that this show ends up touching. So we've done just
in the last couple of weeks alone shows about refrigeration,
and talked about tomatoes. We've talked about health policy, We've
talked about.
Speaker 1 (00:44):
Shock skins, shack skins, help farms, and electric transformers.
Speaker 2 (00:49):
Yeah, so there's a wide range, and that I think
is one of the things that has kept this job
really interesting. Obviously, one thing we returned to a lot
is politics.
Speaker 1 (01:01):
Well, also because this has been such an election year,
and I think we will talk about politics a lot more.
Speaker 2 (01:08):
And this week's episode feels particularly timely off the news
we've been reading about from Germany, where the government has
instituted new expanded border patrols after coming under a lot
of pressure to control immigration.
Speaker 1 (01:22):
And it's only weeks after there was a knife attack
where a Syrian man who had been denied asylum went
donn a stabbingspree.
Speaker 2 (01:29):
We mentioned all this because today's guest is Andrew Gilmour.
He's the executive director of the Berghoff Foundation based in Berlin,
and he spent thirty years with the United Nations, and
he's been thinking a lot about how pressure on the
climate can lead directly and indirectly to more migration and
more conflict, particularly as the planet gets warmer. Take a listen.
Speaker 3 (01:54):
Under even the best case scenario, there's going to be
a much higher increase of refugees and migrants coming to
Western Europe and North America. But to do it in
a way that then doesn't lead to such elitical reaction
that the far right is the beneficiary, and that's going
to be an extremely hard balancing lag and it will
(02:14):
require a lot of courage on the part of politicians
to start persuading populations that migrants are not a bad thing.
Speaker 1 (02:23):
And Andrew has distilled all this into a book it's
called The Burning Question, which both of us read. It
addresses climate and conflict and asks why does it matter?
What I really liked is it's a wide ranging look
at this question, which, as climate journalists we've had at
the back of our mind over the past few years,
especially with the wars in Ghaza and Ukraine and Sudan,
(02:46):
and it helped me think through how exactly climate links
to all this.
Speaker 2 (02:51):
Yeah, I thought it was really interesting that the book
starts looking at what took place well before this man
made excel in warming that we're seeing, going back to
how the al Nino effect perhaps played a cause in
contributing to the French Revolution, or how climate variability led
to weakening the Spanish Empire and the Ottoman Empire, things
(03:14):
that we don't really think about, where weather patterns have
a direct impact on how people live and how empires
rise and fall.
Speaker 1 (03:25):
That's right, and that's particularly interesting right now with the
migration patterns and what it's doing to politics. The UN
estimates that nearly three million refugees will need to be
resettled next year. That's from conflicts, economic crises, and climate change,
and that number has gone up twenty percent. So I
(03:45):
learned a lot from speaking to Andrew and drawing on
his insights. We spoke about how much full link can
you really draw between climate and wars happening today and
what can you do to address both climate change and
bring peace to the world. Andrey, you're welcome to the show,
(04:15):
Thank you very much. So it's particularly interesting reading a
book like this and speaking with you now in twenty
twenty four at a time when there are so many
wars going on around the world in Gaza and Sudan
and Ukraine. But the thing that stood out to me
was that few, if any conflicts in the world can
be shown to be caused by climate change. And yet
(04:38):
throughout the book you point out how climate change is
acting as a threat multiplier, often increasing the risk of conflict.
Are there any modern wars that have been directly caused
by climate change?
Speaker 3 (04:52):
To this day, I'm not aware of any war in
history that has been solely caused even primarily caused by
climate change. However, I'm convinced and there is a large
body of evidence to suggest that this is the case.
Not that climate directly causes war, but that it contributes
(05:15):
to war, that it is a major exacerbating factor, that
it complicates matters, that it heightens tensions and makes conditions
so hard that communities find it harder to live with
one another than they did before. There are many parts
of the world I would say, particularly in Central Africa
and the Sahel region, and also parts of the Middle East,
(05:38):
in particular Syria and Iraq, where recent increases of temperature
have almost certainly played a role in making conflict worse
and harder to resolve. What I think is more important, however,
than the academic debate that has taken place so far
(06:00):
regarding whether the one degree of global warming that we've
seen so far has contributed much to conflict, is I
think the projections that the next degree, that is we're
heading quite fast towards reaching the next degree of global warming,
will lead to more conflict.
Speaker 1 (06:19):
Let's look at what happened in Yemen, going back to
the oil boom in Saudi Arabia of the nineteen seventies.
There are so many variables involved in any conflict. Could
you explain what has happened over the past few decades
in Yemen and how we've ended up in a place
where a terrorist group is able to hold the global
supply chain back in the Red Sea right.
Speaker 3 (06:41):
One of the key points of Yemen is that, quite
aside from the fact that that has been growing desertification
and frequent rout is also the fact that the underground aquifers,
the water supplies underneath the ground have been grown mostly overused,
(07:01):
and paradoxically, it was the use of solar power pumps
for irrigation that has made things worse. That sounds almost
counterintuitive that something as benign as renewable energy can actually
lead to worse effects of climate change, but that has happened.
The use of solar energy has made it easier to
(07:22):
pump water out from the agrivis, which means that the
reserves are now incredibly low, so much so that the
viability of entire communities is at stake now. During the
seventies and eighties, a number of people from the Yemen
went to Saudi Arabia in the oil boom to start
working from there. During those periods, a number of local
(07:46):
terraces for farmland and villages collapsed because there was no
manpower to look after them, which speeded up the erosion
and the collapse of local vegetation and the situation we
are now seeing now. The wars of the last nine
years since twenty fifteen have certainly made things considerably worse
(08:06):
in terms of environmental degradation, but it's not a direct
impact of climate change.
Speaker 1 (08:13):
But are there any lessons that we can draw from.
How over these five decades where there was migration because
of an oil boom that led to lower agriculture and
thus poorer soils. Then that led to lower rainfall droughts
(08:34):
which caused, as you say, use of pumps to draw
from aquifers, and sort of this poor spiral that things
get into until you get at her risk group that
is holding a global supply chain to account. Are there
lessons that we can draw from this conflict to avoid
future conflict?
Speaker 3 (08:54):
Strangely, since Yemen, despite the extent of the environmental degradation
and the overuse of the water supply, I would say
lessons could perhaps more easily be drawn from other countries
that experienced the Arab Spring, such as Libya and Syria.
(09:14):
And what we saw there in Syria but also in
Iraq was a prolonged drought which took place against a
backdrop of a very repressive regime in Syria, and one
also that was corrupt and where local farmers were already
(09:35):
in the very very dire straits indeed as a result
of the desertification, meaning that their farms were no longer viable.
And in fact I was living in nearby Iraq during
the fighting of two thousand and six in two thousand
and eight, and you could see the frequency of sandstorms
(09:56):
which people said they had never seen of such intensity
in and see in their lives before. And this was
actually part of a five year drought that in both
Syria and Iraq came on top of serious human rights abuses,
on top of really strong levels of corruption and leading
(10:16):
to communities having to leave their houses and their abilities
and moved to cities where they lived in terrible conditions
and were actually ripe for discontent. And when the Islamic
State burst upon the scene in both Syria and Iraq,
taking advantage of the discontent, it pushed them into joining
(10:38):
the most extreme group of all, the Islamic State. And
I think that is a particularly strong example of how
the interplay between human rights abuses and bad governance in general,
when combined with a major ecological disaster such as emanated
(11:01):
from the drought, that can lead to something as explosive
as we saw.
Speaker 1 (11:07):
Now let's talk about Ukraine, because you write in the book,
nobody would claim that Russia's motivation for invading, occupying, and
seeking to eradicate the idea of Ukraine as a nation
in February twenty twenty two was related to climate change
directly or even indirectly. But the Ukraine world does have
(11:29):
climate implications.
Speaker 3 (11:30):
Yes it does, and thank you for making that point,
because I would never claim that the major reason for
Putin deciding to invade was anything to do with that.
But there are certainly a number of implications, one of
which was the example the rocketing increased spiral of oil
prices as a result, which led to a positive result
(11:55):
for once it led to a greater determination to find
renewable energies as a cheaper source of fuel. Both Gaza
and Ukraine have very much increased the divide between the
developed world and the lesser developing countries, and this has
also led to more difficulties coming up in climate negotiations.
(12:19):
And this has taken even further when it comes to
example the Russian veto of measures at the United Nations
that could resist climate insecurity.
Speaker 1 (12:30):
And you end the chapter on Ukraine by saying the
entire field of climate insecurity has therefore suddenly taken on
a new and additional meaning, even if policymakers don't seem
to have grasped it yet. But sitting here knowing what
we know about climate and what it's going to do
(12:52):
to the planet with greater certainty than ever before. It
is something that militaries have started to think about, at
least over the past decade or even two decades, and
this phrase that climate change is a threat multiplier is
something that is now talked in security circles. So have
(13:13):
you seen that open the door for better planning and
policy making in the future.
Speaker 3 (13:20):
Yes, I definitely have, and I would encourage this, but
not everybody does. Indeed, the entire expression climate security is
a phrase that some people shy away from because they
believe that even using that phrase encourages a security first
approach to what is not fundamentally a security issue, and
(13:44):
I would take issue with that. I think there is
a strong argument, for example, either using the United Nation
Security Council to get involved in matters relating to climate
change and their impact on dec security, but also involving militaries,
and they can be extremely positive and I myself saw
that in Iraq during the war, where for reasons that
(14:07):
weren't necessarily connected to fear of climate change in general,
but for a very practical desire to save the lives
of US troops. There was a very important initiative that
took place amongst the military who because they needed to
provide diesel fuel to their forward operating basis in large
(14:29):
quantities in order to help their soldiers live under bearable
conditions in the desert using air conditioning. But their great
concern was that their fuel convoys were being targeted to
ambush by groups connected to al Qaeda and later the
Islamic States. So they took the perfectly sensible decision that
(14:53):
to reduce the number of convoys and thereby to reduce
the number of deaths of people on those convoys, they
would start using solar energy. And because they are so
well resourced, militaries can often do things at scale on
a way that civilian agencies do not have the capacity
to do so. So Yes, indeed, I've seen in many instances,
(15:15):
and the US military is clearly whatever that the political
views of the people concerned. They seem to be very
well aware of the climate implications of what can happen
to them as a result of example, rising sea levels,
and they know that obviously their basis that can become
underwaterhare in a few years time, are going to be
(15:36):
completely useless. So there is definitely hope in my view
from engaging with the militaries.
Speaker 1 (15:45):
And so when it comes to potential solutions that would
try and tackle this nexus of climate conflict and migration,
there are two sets of solutions. One is, obviously we
have to tackle climate change by reducing emissions, and that
is an example you talked about, which is militaries around
the world which are huge users of fossil fuels can
(16:06):
start to reduce their own greenose gas impact. But then
there is a whole set of other solutions that can
be applied on the policy making on climate adaptation, on
environmental peace building that you mentioned that would allow for
reduction in conflicts. Could you talk through these solutions, because
(16:28):
you have mentioned those in your book, but they all
seem to be at quite an early stage.
Speaker 3 (16:34):
That is correct, They are indeed at an early stage,
and I will indeed go through some of them, one
of which is the relatively new practice of environmental peace building.
This I think has great potential, but it has only
been tried in relatively few places to date. It is
based on the thinking that you might be able to
(16:58):
resolve tension between communities if you don't go straight for
the most important issues that has divided them, but actually
focus on some lower hanging fruit, as it were, first
of all, teaching them about the impact of climate change
and how it affects not just them but other peoples.
(17:20):
They know that each time they have a new drought,
each time there is a flash flood, that there may
be an increase in recruitment into extremist radical groups, but
they don't necessarily know that it is even affecting the
whole of their country. I'm talking about places like Somalia
now or Iraq and many other places actually also in
the Sahel Malei, chad Nisia and places. Many of them
(17:43):
of course, are concluding that it is no longer possible
living in areas that are so exposed to extreme heat
and desertification that they have in some cases decided that
there is no point even trying to live there. So
they're going to try to migrate either within their their
own country to cities or further down the road, presumably
(18:04):
to other countries and other continents. So to break that that,
one has to be able to start coming up with
measures in the countries that they are leaving to persuade
them that there's actually a future there, and I think
that environmental peace building and the development measures that would
come with them could be a way of doing that.
Speaker 1 (18:23):
And could you talk through the success stories, even if
they are at a small scale right now.
Speaker 3 (18:29):
Yes, my own organization, the Bako Foundation, of example, we've
been working for three years in Somalia and a bit
less in Iraq, precisely in the conditions that I've been
talking about, working with communities that are very much at
odds with some of their neighbors, whether it's for ethnic reasons,
(18:50):
or for sectarian reasons, or for reasons of competition over
natural resources. But getting them to sit down together and
confronting some of their problems and seeing that actually cooperation
on these issues can actually lead to progress. There, we
are finding successes. The common solutions could be, for example,
(19:11):
a solar powered irrigation scheme. It could be joint management
of a wildlife serve, it could be a desalination project.
We've been doing that most recently in the south of Iraq,
where working with people who have been forced to leave
their farmlands and move into urban areas, where as in
(19:33):
many other parts of the world the urban areas do
not welcome Suddenly a large influx of income is so
very major tensions and violence has broken out between them,
but we are finding that we're able to help resolve
those tensions.
Speaker 1 (19:47):
So a lot of the conflicts that start tend to
start because of resources, either its land or its water.
Now those are cause for creating conflict, but could they
be used to find ways to build peace?
Speaker 3 (20:04):
Yes, I mean what are the main drivers of displacement?
The displacement that is caused as a result of both
conflict and climate change is any country's ability or inability
to feed itself. So I think investing in forms of
agriculture that could be better suited to a change in
(20:28):
climate would help enable that adaptation and thereby remove sources
of tension and also the need to seek life elsewhere.
One example that I think has a lot of promise
is known as the system of rice intensification, which is
an example of targeted as system. It's an agro ecological
approach used in places like Afghanistan or Nigeria and Mali,
(20:51):
which can include tripling grain yield, enhancing incomes, and helping
water conservation as well as lowering meat emission. So it
has many advantages, but in this particular context. By providing
higher incomes to farmers, it can help people a stay
on their lands and feel less of an imperative to
(21:15):
compete with their neighbors.
Speaker 1 (21:20):
After the break, Andrew and I talk about how some
politicians are turning refugees into a wedge issue. If you're
finding this episode insightful, please take a moment to rate
and review the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and even YouTube.
It helps other listeners find the show. One of the
(21:45):
stats that stood out to me from your book was
that as of May twenty twenty two, there are about
one hundred million people who'd been displaced from their countries
as a result of many things, but about a third
of those were because of climate events. Now, with climate
change on the March, we are likely to see that
number grow quite rapidly, and it comes at a time
(22:09):
when evil actors, bad actors, politicians can actually use that
kind of event to their advantage. You write about how
Russia used its influence over Belarus in twenty twenty one
to push migrants from Afghanistan and Iraq into Poland, Lithuania,
and Latvia in a way that was engineered to drum
(22:31):
up fear of migrants and destabilize the politics in those democracies.
Will we see more of this happening as the planet
is being warmed.
Speaker 3 (22:41):
Yes, I think we will. We are seeing a number
of very allowing trends at the moment. One, we are
currently living through a period of more conflicts than at
any time since nineteen forty five. It's estimated that there
are fifty nine separate conflicts going on at the moment. Secondly,
(23:02):
we are seeing an ever increasing rate of global warming
as new records seem to be being reached every week
almost And Thirdly, we are seeing the growth of right
wing parties in the United States and Europe that are
(23:22):
anti immigrants but also to climate change skeptics or more
often deniers. So it's like a perverse irony in a
way that the same people who prevent governments from doing
major measures to help combat climate change are those that
(23:44):
then profit from what they call a flood of migrants
coming in who have been forced to come because the
North hasn't actually taken proper measures to reduce emissions and
do major adaptation measures. So I think these are very
run trends, and the key is to find ways to
understand that there is going to be under even the
(24:06):
best case scenario, there's going to be a much higher
increase of refugees and migrants coming to Western Europe and
North America. But to do it in a way that
then doesn't lead to such a political reaction that the
far right is the beneficiary, and that's going to be
an extremely hard balancing to act, and it will require
(24:27):
a lot of courage on the part of politicians to
start persuading populations that migrants are not a bad thing,
that actually, in an era where there's actually a population
decline in Western countries and indeed many other countries, immigrants
are going to play a very important role in keeping
economies and societies flourishing.
Speaker 1 (24:50):
Now, I'm a reporter who's been covering climate change and
impacts and solutions for the past six seven years, and
what I have noticed is that as a person who
understands the world, who is learning about the world, climate
change is forcing me to be empathetic in ways that
I had not been empathetic in the past. You have,
(25:13):
of course, worked in all sorts of areas. You've worked
in conflict areas and human rights, and now you're focused
on climate. Are you seeing that change come through in
people you meet, is their higher level of global empathy
being grown because these climate events are global, and there
(25:34):
are all these interconnections that you're able to draw from
human rights to conflict to resources in the work that
you do.
Speaker 3 (25:44):
I certainly see that people younger than me I'm sixty
years old, that people twenty thirty forty years younger than
me are much more open to compassion and empathy for
victims of human rights in general, but particularly those forced
(26:05):
to leave their homes as a result of climate change,
because their environmental awareness is so much higher than those
people who are nearer my age. And in that sense,
it is one of the areas of optimism that we
can indeed point.
Speaker 1 (26:18):
To now when we talk about climate solutions, which is
what I do day in and day out, there is
a tendency among many climate activists that holds back some
of the climate solutions because they want it to be
done in a perfect way. But when I take a
step back, and I'm taking a really big step back,
(26:39):
I look at how the world has changed over the
past century, say, and I look at trends which show progress.
So when the Spanish flu happened in the early twentieth century,
you know, fifty million to one hundred million people died.
We had a similar event in the COVID nineteen pandemic,
and of course we still had many millions of people die.
(27:03):
It was nowhere close to the disaster that was the
Spanish globe because of technology but also because of our
ability to communicate at scale. Does not mean there was
no disinformation, but there has been progress. And so when
I look at climate conflict and migration. While reading your book,
it felt to me that many of the solutions are there,
(27:27):
they are sometimes too hard. Trying to get them all
to line up in the perfect way is likely to
be really difficult. Given there are so many variables involved
in getting these solutions to work, I have greater appreciation
for how difficult it's going to be. So rather than
(27:48):
trying to find a perfect solution, do you think the
goal is now just to be less wrong, to not
commit as many mistakes as we did on environment and
on human rights in the pert and does hopefully that
will lead to fewer conflicts.
Speaker 3 (28:05):
Well, I worked for the United Nations for thirty years.
I think I can safely say that quite early on
in my career I lost any hope that I might
have had that there are perfect solutions for anything, so
I certainly don't look for perfect solutions. A great UN
Secretary journal Dicomer Show, once said, the purpose of the
(28:25):
UN isn't to take people to heaven, is to save
them from hell, and and there are many variants of that.
If you can make people's lives a little bit less awful,
then you've achieved your job. Your job isn't necessary to
bring world peace, it is to reduce conflict. Frankly, when
I started getting interested in this about twenty years ago,
(28:46):
I would have been very surprised to see the level
of climate denihalism that there still is, whether it's in
the aspects of the US press or the British press
such as the Daily Telegraph, or any paths of Germany
and elsewhere as well. I didn't think that would happen.
I thought that given the unanimity with which the world
(29:08):
science community recognizes the issues, the fact that there is
such anhalism is surprising to me. But all it shows
is that the struggle is going to be even harder
than one expected it to be, and so whatever one
can do, there are things that we can try to do.
For example, working on finance. Do you know Extraordinarily, according
(29:30):
to a UNTP report a couple of years ago, highly
fragile countries, the most fragile countries such as for example,
Soudan and Iraq, receive only one percent but capita of
the funds going to more stable countries. And one understands
in a way because investors need stability or that's what
they cover it. But there are ways you can encourage
(29:56):
private investors from richer countries to start investing by providing
in guarantees so that you can indemnify the private sector
for some of the potential losses in high risk settings,
because we have to change that figure. If only one
percent per capita is going to the most vulnerable climate
and conflict affected countries compared to others, then we have
(30:17):
a major problem because these are the countries that are
on the front line of climate change, they are on
the front line of conflict, and they're the ones who
are going to be sending forth their populations who can
no longer live there. So we have to find ways,
and there are ways out there. People have come up
with very creative solutions. Gordon Brown, the former UK Prime Minister,
(30:39):
has come up with a number of areas relating to finance,
for example, and the last but one cop there was
the Loss and Damage Agreement that can help mitigate the
major climate in justice, whereby it is the countries that
don't admit that are on the front line of climate change.
So there are many ways, but it is definitely going
to be very very hard road, and we do not
(31:01):
have that much time either.
Speaker 1 (31:03):
Thank you, Andrew, Thank you very much. Thank you for
listening to Zero. And now for the sound of the week.
That's the sound of a container ship leading port, probably
(31:26):
carrying your next Amazon order. Small things that all adapt
to big impacts on the planet. If you like this episode,
please take a moment to rate and review the show
on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Share this episode with a
friend or with a peacebuilder. You can get in touch
at zero pod at Bloomberg dot net. Zero's producer is
(31:47):
Mighty li Rao, Bloomberg's head a podcast is Sage Bowman
and head of Talk is Brendan Newnan. Our theme music
is composed by Wonderly Special Thanks to John fra Kira
Bindrim and Monique Molima. I am extracty back soon.
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