In a Climate Tinderbox, Migration Can Spark Violence

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CHAPTERS 

[00:02:01]: Localized forms of climate-related violence and their prevalence 

[00:03:06]: How climate pressures interact with existing social and political tensions 

[00:04:09]: Variability in water access and implications for livelihoods and mobility 

[00:05:30]: Migration as a coping strategy and its potential effects on local dynamics 

[00:08:22]: Climate, governance, and conflict dynamics in the case of Syria 

[00:16:39]: Migration as a potential mechanism for reducing resource pressures 

[00:18:51]: How conflict can increase vulnerability to future climate impacts

TRANSCRIPT
[00:00:05.13] 

Climate change can lead to deadly conflict. It can put vulnerable communities into desperate situations and force people to make impossible trade offs. As their homes and livelihoods erode and as competition for scarce resources increases, the risk of violence intensifies. One way that climate related violence erupts and is sustained is because of migration. Large numbers of new arrivals can place additional stresses on already strained social, social and political systems. The story of climate security is actually partly a story of climate migration. I'm Julian Hattem and this is Changing Climate, Changing Migration. Coming from the Migration Policy Institute, this podcast features insightful conversations about the linkages between climate change and migration and what that means for the world. Today, we're looking at violent conflict and how migration can both feed and result from violence. Just like with migration, climate change is rarely a direct driver of violent conflict. But there are many ways in which it is clearly aggravating or adding to underlying factors. My guest today is Peter Schwartzstein, a journalist and researcher who has a book out about climate change and violent conflict called The Heat and the Fury: On the Front Lines of Climate Violence.

[00:01:22.04] 

Peter, thank you so much for coming on. It's a pleasure to have you.

[00:01:24.22] 

Julian, thank you very much for having me on the, on the podcast.

[00:01:28.08] 

So when we talk about violent conflict and migration, I guess just to start us off, we're basically primarily talking here about relatively low level conflict between individuals and small groups, right? As opposed to large scale state versus state warfare?

[00:01:42.04] 

Short answer, yes. I mean, in the same way, the kind of parallel that I often invoke is that despite the kind of significantly greater, the kind of volume of attention that nukes and mega munitions receive, the vast majority of people who are killed with some kind of weaponry are killed with small arms. Equally, in the kind of climate violence space, the vast majority of people who are in some way afflicted or run up against this form of kind of hostility, sustain it at that smallish level, village on village, community on community, individual on individual. Even if, and perhaps we can get into this, that kind of low level violence can quite quickly bleed into forms of violence that are of kind of greater geopolitical significance. But yeah, for the tens or perhaps even hundreds of millions of people across the world who experience some variation of climate related violence on a day to day or year to year basis, it's at a pretty localized level.

[00:02:35.08] 

So how does this work then? Is it basically there is a competition for increasingly scarce resources, especially I assume, water, as people move from one place to another and then different groups fight over those resources or kind of what Are the mechanisms that trigger violence in these situations?

[00:02:49.10] 

Well, I mean, yeah, my book, which you extremely kindly sort of plugged, is sort of a 330 page attempt to get to the bottom of that question. So I would sort of happily babble from now till the end of time if given the opportunity. But a few kind of quick points. One is that think of climate in many instances as kind of applying tremendous pressure to whatever a society or a place's existing weaknesses are. So if you have a country that's kind of already experiencing intense levels of corruption, well, in many instances climate change will kind of exacerbate the impact of corruption and make it that bit more likely to kind of spark fury and possibly kind of violence, spinning kinds of clashes. Equally, if you have a place where misinformation is kind of playing into all sorts of unfortunate dynamics, well, climate change will often add to that. And I'm sort of happy to sort of try and flesh out these kind of rather amorphous sounding terms with some examples. But one point to kind of round out that sort of series of assertions. I mean, as you and sort of perhaps many listeners will be acutely aware, there's been this sort of discourse over the years of kind of supposedly kind of impending or near inevitable water wars.

[00:04:01.17] 

And that has, that's a sort of narrative that is with very good reason, received tremendous amounts of pushback. That being said, what does appear to be kind of pushing people in many different kinds of contexts into various forms of kind of water related trouble is kind of unpredictable water access more than kind of absolute water scarcity. And that's because when you have people who are just basically having to react in real time to rains that are simply not falling as they previously were, when you're a, a farmer who just needs a certain degree of dependability to determine when to plant up your fields, or an itinerant herder who needs to know with a sort of relatively solid degree of clarity when to migrate with your livestock. Well, that kind of extreme unpredictability is a, is a total death knell for your capacity to plan in a fashion that's less likely to kind of have you running up against other people's scheming and initiatives.

[00:04:56.07] 

So kind of the migration component of this is that farmers, herders, people who live off the land and kind of require rainwater, might give up their livelihoods, potentially move to cities, I guess, right. Where they put stresses on local authorities and kind of aggravate authorities and governments that are ill prepared to respond to those people's needs is that kind of a fair summation which then can kind of create a cauldron for violent conflict?

[00:05:18.13] 

Short answer Yes. I mean, in every single one of these chapters of the book, like each one of which will take readers to different parts of the world where you have different forms of kind of climate related violence or instability, migration kind of shows itself in every single context because as you know even better than me, it's the kind of classic go to coping mechanism for people kind of up against crises of different forms. So in the kind of Sahelian context, the context of kind of farmers and herders, that the way in which migration is seemingly contributing to violence there is that you have kind of farmers who in many instances are unable to kind of migrate to their kind of usual dry season, dry season kind of pasture lands because those areas have either experienced such extreme degrees of drought that they're simply not able to support herds of various sizes and or for a whole bunch of like non climate related reasons, you've had farmers who have kind of cultivated lands that were previously sort of open to grazers. And in the kind of former instance, a lot of the time itinerant herders find themselves having to migrate to places they've never previously been to, places where they kind of lack perhaps an understanding of the local mores, the local way of life, perhaps even lack kind of languages in common.

[00:06:31.22] 

And hence all sorts of kind of misunderstandings are just that bit more likely to pan out in these sort of relatively high stakes situation with people already at their kind of wit's end at times of extreme poverty. We can talk a little bit more about how that plays out in an urban setting as well. But yes, just when you have rural peoples who in many instances arrive with slightly different social mores, people who are perhaps of different ethnicities or different religions to those of the kind of long standing residents of the kind of urban neighborhood to which they've gravitated. It's just a kind of environment in which misunderstandings can just so easily proliferate. One of the countries in which I've been working pretty consistently over the past decade and a bit is Iraq. I spent some time in a kind of peripheral, quite poor outer district of Baghdad in which I found that the kind of in-migration of a lot of these kind of poor villagers from the very far south of Iraq for largely climate related reasons had led to the first kind of sectarian issues in that neighborhood for more than a decade.

[00:07:35.05] 

Because at a time when sectarianism between Sunni and Shia communities across the city had lost much of its potency. The arrival of this kind of new group of people who had perhaps incubated some of those sectarian attitudes, having not themselves kind of been exposed to their folks of a different sect or a different denomination, basically kicked off once more forms of conflict that had kind of slowly worked themselves out over a period of time. So again, it varies dramatically from context to context, but it's just wherever there's existing cleavages of various sorts to exploit.

[00:08:10.11] 

And at an extreme is the Syrian civil war. Right?

[00:08:14.02] 

I mean, I know there's been a lot of scholarship kind of on both sides of this, but can you walk me through the role of climate change and migration in kind of the build up to the Syrian Civil War in 2011?

[00:08:22.15] 

Happily, I mean, I mean, as you alluded to, this has been a tremendous and sometimes quite painful back and forth in the climate security community. And that's because, yeah, certainly in the early years of the war there was a certain amount of quite sensationalist, quite simplistic coverage, particularly within sort of pockets of media, about the ways in which climate change had contributed to the uprising against the Assad regime, which itself then kind of bled into a civil war which is seemingly only just resolved itself. And according to the kind of classic narrative, years of kind of climate related drought in the rural heartlands of the country had led to huge people movements, to the kind of impoverished, unhappy outer slum districts of Damascus and Aleppo and other cities across the country. And many of these people, as is so often the case with kind of rural to urban migration, lacked the skills to adapt and succeed in an urban workplace and struggled mightily. And hence when you had these kind of initial protests, they were among the first to kind of get out on the streets and a little later among the first to take up arms.

[00:09:25.13] 

There's certainly an element of truth to that kind of classic narrative, though the kind of evidence based there is not as strong as many people might like it to be. I mean, what I found over my own sort of four or five or with six reporting trips to Syria was a kind of slightly more corruption centered pathway to climate related violence. I'll try and flesh out what's, what's a sort of confusing term there. And that's that many of the farmers who I spoke to, who had themselves joined some of the kind of anti regime rebel groups had in the years kind of running up to the revolution, grown as tired as Syrians of other stripes with the extraordinary demands for bribes that any kind of official would come out with whenever a farmer was engaging with the state. So for example, whenever a farmer would go to receive the seeds or fertilizer that he was theoretically entitled to receive for free or for heavily discounted rates, he was sort of forced to pay all kinds of bribes. And so far, so normal, so unhappy. But then when the intense kind of multi year drought struck from 2008, the very fact that of as many farmers saw it, that these officials were kicking them when they were already down, the very fact that these officials were actively hurting them rather than helping them at their time of greatest need, was that kind of proverbial bridge too far.

[00:10:45.05] 

And so in my research and the research of some others, it was that particular causal pathway that was extra likely to push some of these climate battered farmers into the ranks of many of the rebel groups from kind of an early period in the war. So it's not to kind of negate the classic narrative per se, both might be correct, but it's certainly one that seems to come with a slightly greater weight of evidence on its side.

[00:11:08.01] 

To what extent is there kind of a feedback loop here? Right. If climate change and migration can not in and of themselves, but can contribute to underlying state grievances against the state, which can manifest in terms of violent conflict, conflict itself obviously can create more migration as people flee, you know, as refugees or other forcibly displaced people, presumably fleeing themselves into climate affected areas with scarce resources and its own pressure cauldron. I mean, is there just kind of, is it just build on itself here where one batch of migration leads to another, leads to conflict, leads to another, and so on and so forth?

[00:11:42.08] 

100%. I mean, it's a doom loop building on a doom loop. And by this I mean that when you have drought and various other kind of manifestations of climate change replicating themselves year after year, more and more villagers, as we're seeing almost across the world, understandably decide that enough is enough and they up sticks and they move to cities or they move further afield. But what often happens then to these communities is that they themselves kind of end. They kind of settle into a bit of an economic and ecological death spiral. Because a lot of the time the people who have left are among the best and the brightest. They're the kind of leading citizens. I mean, as we know extremely well, it's the wise old heads or the leading lights who are extra likely to have the boldness and perhaps the resources to migrate in greatest numbers and to migrate first. And in their absence, a lot of these communities then lack the top level personnel Quality people that they need to sort of keep the peace and sort of preside over these either official or non traditional forms of conflict resolution mechanism. Equally, some of these villages just lose the numbers required for to sustain small businesses.

[00:12:48.15] 

And as a consequence you have additional people who might not want to leave, but who really feel they have absolutely no choice because for example, the small store that they once operated is no longer functional. And to compound this, and to give you another real world example, I found I spent a period of years just in rural parts of Iraq and Syria exploring how ISIS had benefited from collapsing agricultural conditions to bolster its ranks. And a lot of the time the villages where they were most successful in recruiting were those where the kind of out migration of the best and brightest and the out migration of a sizable portion of the population had meant that the community was a community in name only. By that point it was basically more of a cluster of individuals in which there were just fewer obstacles to these kind of jihadi recruiters when they came along and just sort of hoovered up a lot of these desperate and hopeless and in many instances quite unprincipled left behinds.

[00:13:43.18] 

I want to drill down on that because I think that's a really interesting point. And on this podcast before we've talked about these so called left behinds, sometimes in the literature we call them trapped populations. Whom, for whom for whatever reason, people do not or cannot leave in the face of environmental changes and other pressures. And I think it's interesting this notion that not only are these people who are left behind then condemned or suffering the aggravating environmental and other threats, but they're also, as you say, contributing potentially to an outbreak of violence that can make things even worse. Right. So it's not, it's not only bad for them, it's better for the broader community for these people to be left behind and then vulnerable to.

[00:14:23.11] 

Exactly. Exploitation to, to, to non state armed recruitment to. I mean of course I'm not trying to deny them agency in many instances they've just made deliberately terrible decisions. But yeah, again we're going back to these, to these doom loops because a lot of the time those who get left behind, these trapped populations feel varying degrees of resentment against state, which they feel correctly or not, is not helping them at their time of greatest need. They have a sense a lot of the time that their resources are being exploited either in the form of mining or oil or kind of agricultural goods without themselves kind of benefiting in turn. And that's a kind of series of grievances that non state actors like ISIS in Iraq are kind of grimly expert at exploiting. Additionally, and to go back to the doom loop component to this, the more that these areas are treated as objects of suspicion by kind of central governments, the more likely, of course it is that the people will become that bit more enticed and that bit more vulnerable to the entreaties of these groups. I mean, so to take you back for a moment to rural Iraq or rural Syria, the very fact that swathes of kind of northern and central and western Iraq showed themselves to be at least somewhat amenable to ISIS's advances has meant that a lot of kind of Iraqi security forces have been inclined ever since they regained control of these areas to treat almost everybody as guilty by association, thereby ensuring that many of those who remain within these areas are sort of treated as a second class citizens that are exposed to kind of abuses of various sorts, thereby making it that bit more likely that, I don't know, an ISIS 2.0 or a kind of beast of a slightly different nature, but a pretty unpalatable one, will come along and just sort of replicate a variation of these unhappy circumstances at some point in the future.

[00:16:13.16] 

Then I guess, I wonder, to kind of continue with that logic, is there a way in which, because of some of the environmental impacts of climate change, in which emigration or outmigration away from an affected area is something of a release valve that could prevent or reduce the likelihood of violent conflict, even if on the one hand, in some situations in migration can exacerbate those tensions, if outmigration can alleviate them. Is that a case we have ever seen?

[00:16:39.19] 

Yes. I mean, certainly in parts of the Sahel where you have this extremely unpredictable resource access which is kind of, kind of intensifying by the year in many instances. Yeah. The very fact that population is not growing as swiftly as it is in other parts of the country is reducing pressure on land. It is ensuring that whatever kind of meager pasture there is is not necessarily having to be subdivided between quite as many people as it might in a kind of "migrationless" alternative universe. Equally, it means that in many farming communities that those who do remain behind those tract populations are less likely to kind of resort to sort of chronically short-termist, quite sort of destructive policies to kind of alleviate their current difficulty. And by this I mean things like deforesting kind of deeper into the adjacent woodland in order to free up more land for cultivation. I mean, if there's just less pressure on whatever land is available, you're going to be less likely to lop down trees. You're in some instances perhaps going to be less likely to marry off your daughters at younger ages, which is what some pastoralist families do in order to gain their dowries at a time of particular financial pressure, but also as a means of passing on to another family the cost of feeding and providing for their daughter.

[00:18:00.03] 

Something which is often kind of acknowledged as a kind of unhappy, undesirable outcome for which many of these pastoralist families at their times of tremendous difficulty, feel kind of powerless to resist.

[00:18:11.12] 

We're coming up on the end of our time, but I wanted to ask one last question in which we've basically been talking about climate change in the run up to conflict and climate change and migration in the run up to conflict. But I want to jump forward in the life of a conflict moving away from kind of the initial outbreak of violence to some of the long lasting repercussions of conflict, in undermining a community's ability to adapt or to climate pressures or mitigate future impacts. Is there a case in which you can think of a country, Syria, Iraq, that's a hell I don't know, or a region that has been experiencing conflict and then a disaster occurred or climate pressures became more extreme and then what happened?

[00:18:50.03] 

As we know, the countries that are kind of most exposed to conflict or most vulnerable to conflict in the world are almost exactly those that are most intensely susceptible to climate stresses. I mean, if you look at the, the Afghanistan's, the Malis, the Yemen's, the Libyas of the world, it's sort of, that Venn diagram is, is an almost perfect circle. And I mean, yeah, this phenomenon was, was perhaps kind of most dramatically brought home to us in, in 2023 when we had the Tropical Storm Daniel, which passed over Greece, where I live, kind of inflicting tremendous damage, but in a kind of country with higher levels of, of state capacity, I think only about 12 or 13 casualties before crossing the Mediterranean and striking the eastern Libyan city of Derna, where you'd had at that point about a decade and a bit of conflict which had led to, I mean, not only the sort of direct damage that warfare leaves in its wake, but also tremendous neglect of infrastructure, including that of several dams just a little upstream from Derna on Awadi, which had received so little in, in the way of maintenance that when exposed to a kind of torrent of water like this, they quite quickly kind of collapsed like, like something of a house of cards.

[00:20:01.17] 

Almost two years later, Derna is a pale shadow of its of its former self. I mean, many of those who left in the immediate aftermath of the disaster have, have yet to return. And that's because in many instances they had migrated from other parts of the country to begin with. And as we know, I mean, when people end up being moved from place to place to place, they're that bit more likely to kind of make energetic, sweeping moves. And to return once more to a theme that I'm sure has cropped up a million times in your show, we know that when people migrate, they're significantly more likely to go to a nearby city within the borders of their own country, as opposed to kind of crossing the US's southern border or cruising across the Mediterranean, to put it euphemistically. But the more that kind of people are kind of displaced, the greater their fury and dissatisfaction with the local authorities, the more likely it is that they will go for this kind of trans boundary cross border forms of migration that we know have taken place with such sort of dramatic political consequence in Europe and the US.

[00:21:04.11] 

We talked about doom loop. Perhaps that's the kind of buzzword de jure for our particular episode, but here too, it rears its ugly head.

[00:21:13.01] 

That's basically all the time we have. So we will have to wrap things up. But Peter, thank you so much for coming on. This was great, really informative. Thank you for your time.

[00:21:19.13] 

Thank you, Julian.

[00:21:20.12] 

Peter Schwartzstein is an environmental journalist and a fellow with the center for Climate and Security and a fellow with the Wilson Center's Environmental Change and Security Program. His book, which I very much recommend, is called The Heat and the Fury: On the Frontlines of Climate Violence. It's available now. Thanks for tuning in to this episode of Changing Climate, Changing Migration. You can find all of our episodes on MPI's website at migrationpolicy.org/podcasts. If you enjoyed this conversation with Peter, you might be interested in my discussions with retired U.S. navy Pacific Fleet commander Admiral Scott H. Swift, former U.S. homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, or UNHCR Special Advisor on Climate Action Andrew Harper. Make sure to subscribe to the podcast so you can catch all of our new episodes. We're on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and all the other major services. And while you're subscribing to things, check out our free bi weekly newsletter from MPI's Migration Information Source. It provides top insights and data on migration trends worldwide. The sign up link is on our website at migrationinformation.com. This episode of Changing Climate, Changing Migration was produced by Elizabeth Navarro, Michelle Mittelstadt provided editorial oversight and additional assistance came from Lisa Dixon.

[00:22:39.10] 

Our theme music is Touch by Patrick Patrikios. Thank you again for listening. I'm Julian Hattem. See you soon.