Episode 297: Threat Multiplier: Understanding the Climate-Violence Nexus with Peter Schwartzstein

Around the world, more and more communities are finding that climate change isn’t only about rising temperatures or shifting weather patterns, but for many communities, the first signs of climate change appear in far more everyday pressures: a harvest that doesn’t come in, a water source that no longer lasts the season, a job that disappears because the land or sea can no longer sustain it. And where pressures stack up, especially in places where institutions are weak, where inequalities run deep or where people feel excluded, climate pressure can widen fault lines and expose new vulnerabilities and present new risks.

Today, we explore how climate stress becomes violence, and why understanding this nexus between violence and climate stress matters for governments, business, communities and for all of us thinking about future security threats.

To do that, we are joined by Peter Schwartzstein, an award-winning British-American environmental journalist and researcher. He has reported on the conflict-climate nexus across 30+ countries in the Middle East, Africa, and beyond, writing for National Geographic, The New York Times, Foreign Affairs, BBC, Bloomberg, and Foreign Policy. He is a fellow at the Center for Climate and Security, as well as the Stimson Center’s Environmental Security Program.

The International Risk Podcast brings you conversations with global experts, frontline practitioners, and senior decision-makers who are shaping how we understand and respond to international risk. From geopolitical volatility and organised crime, to cybersecurity threats and hybrid warfare, each episode explores the forces transforming our world and what smart leaders must do to navigate them. Whether you’re a board member, policymaker, or risk professional, The International Risk Podcast delivers actionable insights, sharp analysis, and real-world stories that matter.

Dominic Bowen is the host of The International Risk Podcast and Europe’s leading expert on international risk and crisis management. As Head of Strategic Advisory and Partner at one of Europe’s leading risk management consulting firms, Dominic advises CEOs, boards, and senior executives across the continent on how to prepare for uncertainty and act with intent. He has spent decades working in war zones, advising multinational companies, and supporting Europe’s business leaders. Dominic is the go-to business advisor for leaders navigating risk, crisis, and strategy; trusted for his clarity, calmness under pressure, and ability to turn volatility into competitive advantage. Dominic equips today’s business leaders with the insight and confidence to lead through disruption and deliver sustained strategic advantage.

Transcript

The most surprising thing is that it’s not absolute resource scarcity that is most likely to pitch people or communities against one another. It’s the increasing unpredictability of resources that climate change so often brings. Welcome back to the International Risk Podcast, where we discuss the latest world news and significant events that impact businesses and organisations worldwide. 

Hi, I’m Dominic, host of the International Risk Podcast. We’ve heard your feedback and your requests for more episodes, so the International Risk Podcast is now being recorded three times per week. If you enjoy our content, please do subscribe, follow, and like. 

This is really critical for our success. And in return, I promise to do everything that I can to make sure that the content is relevant and interesting for you. And today, more and more around the world, we’re seeing communities finding that climate change isn’t only about rising temperatures and shifting weather patterns. 

It’s the first time of climate change often appears just in everyday pressures. It’s a harvest that doesn’t come. It’s a water source that no longer lasts full season. 

It’s a job that disappears because the land or sea can no longer provide the resources that are necessary. And where these pressures stack up and where institutions are weak, additionally where institutions and inequalities really are coming together, people feel excluded and climate pressures can widen fault lines. They can expose new vulnerabilities and present new risks. 

And today on the podcast, we’re going to explore how these climate stresses can become violence. And we want to understand this nexus between violence and climate stress. And this matters for governments, it matters for businesses and communities, and it matters for all of us that think about future security threats. 

And to do that, we’re joined by Peter Swartzstein. He’s an award-winning British-American environmental journalist and researcher. He’s reported on the conflict climate nexus for many, many years in over 30 different countries across the Middle East, Africa, and Belong. 

He writes a lot for the National Geographic as well as for the New York Times, Foreign Affairs, BBC, Bloomberg, and Foreign Policy. He’s a fellow at the Centre for Climate and Security as well as the Stimson Centre Environmental Security Programme. Peter, welcome to the International Lewis Podcast.

I’m delighted to join you, Dominic. Peter, whereabouts in the world do we find you today? I am in, well, normally sunny Athens, Greece, where it’s clouded over nicely and we’re hoping for a bit of much desperately needed rain. It’s been a very dry and a very hot summer. 

Were you affected by the bushfires at all? I mean, indirectly, yes. At this point, there’s relatively little untorched woodland in the immediate vicinity of Athens, Greece. I mean, ultimately, miserable short-term payoff as it means that we’re not going to be getting exposed to quite as much smoke from nearby wildfires over the coming years. 

But certainly the past few summers in a row, we’ve been pretty inundated with these calls of black smoke, which make it exceedingly hard to breathe. You know, we know that climate change, it intensifies violence, and there’s multiple indirect pathways that can do that about amplifying existing social, economic, and environmental stresses. And I think it’s safe to say that climate change is a threat multiplier.

I’d love for you to walk us through this relationship between climate change, climate stress, and violence. And what does this nexus help us understand and where, what are its limitations? Absolutely. I mean, just to sort of take a bit of your terminology and broaden it into the definition that I most commonly employ, I look at climate change as amplifying whatever a society’s existing weaknesses are. 

If you’ve got broad, popular, unsatisfaction, unhappiness with public corruption, well, in many instances, climate change will make that impacts of that corruption that bit more debilitating. So for example, farmers the world over are those who are most acutely vulnerable to climate stresses. And a lot of them at their times of greatest need during periods of acute drought are going to be less temperamentally willing or able to deal with state, or specifically speaking, police demands for bribes at checkpoints. 

Equally, in countries where inequalities are particularly pronounced and a source of pretty tremendous popular unhappiness, well, climate change is in many instances aggravating those inequalities again by widening the urban and rural divide. In many instances, rural communities with agriculture at their economic bedrock are getting that bit poorer at the same time as urbanites with a broadly lesser exposure to climate change are either becoming more prosperous or at worst stagnating. So it’s really just taking whatever weaknesses or fissures or metaphorical cudgels there are within a country or a community and making them that bit more tricky to deal with. 

And so from your reporting across 30 countries and the research you’re doing and the people you’re speaking to, what are the patterns or the dynamics that you see on the ground that have most surprised you about that link between climate stress and violence? To me, the most surprising thing is that it’s not absolute resource scarcity that is most likely to pitch people or communities against one another. It’s the increasing unpredictability of resources that climate change so often brings. And that’s pivotal because if there’s an absolute shortage of rainfall, to be sure, communities from the Sahel to South Asia and further afield will suffer, but in many instances, going to suffer without necessarily being drawn into kind of greater degrees of conflict or hostilities. 

It’s when individuals or communities or nation-states can’t plan for, for example, rains that come at the wrong period of the year or can’t plan for extreme weather events that are striking with greater intensity and regularity. That’s when people make ad hoc decisions on the fly that are kind of more likely, in my experience and the experience of many of my colleagues, to lead to violence that nobody necessarily wants, but it’s just the inadvertent, unfortunate outcome of ad hoc decision-making. I think that unpredictability is a really important element to consider. 

And I think beyond the complex ways that vulnerable populations adapt, they cooperate, sometimes they become radicalised in response to climate shocks. But I think it’s the psychological dimension that ripples beyond resource competition that I find particularly interesting. I wonder if you can talk about this psychological exhaustion, the rapid escalation from what sometimes can even seem minor resource stresses, and even that cumulative impact of climate events that has on communities, but particularly on individual people itself. 

Absolutely. I mean, I’m delighted that you asked this because to my mind, it’s probably the most nebulous part of the climate conflict discussion, but arguably, we don’t yet have quite as much evidence as we would like. And this boils down to the fact that on the one hand, human beings, financial markets, pretty much everything for that matter, doesn’t like certainty. 

We can’t plan for uncertainty, or at least we can’t plan with the same degree of precision as we would like. But even more than that, what I’ve found is that in a lot of these rural farming-focused communities where a lot of the worst of climate-related violence is playing out, everything is changing. The surrounding natural landscape no longer looks like it previously did. 

It no longer smells like it previously did. The birds are not migrating the same periods of the year. The flowers, if they blossom at all, are of a different species to what they previously did. 

When more in-your-face things are going wrong, i.e. the crops failing, the fact that some of the few familiar markers around you, some of the few certainties and guarantees in a life that’s totally riven with uncertainty and unpredictability are themselves going out the window is, in my experience and in my estimation, contributing to a lot of wild, deranged, irrational behaviour. I mean, there have been so many instances when, for example, I’ve been working on intercommunal conflict in parts of Mali or parts of Burkina Faso, when the victims of an attack from an adjacent village have really pondered to me in a genuinely bemused manner as to why this numerically inferior, militarily and economically inferior community a few kilometres to their west could have ever thought that it would win a fight of such uneven odds, either directly or just by inferring through their answers. I mean, people, to put it extremely bluntly and simplistically, are losing their minds in many instances. 

You published your recent book, The Heat and the Fury, on the frontlines of climate violence back in September 2024, and this has been described by some as the first from the ground attempt to explain to the casual reader how climate change is contributing to violence around the world. And I like the fact that each chapter focusses on a different country, what they’re experiencing and the distinct climate stress and how it fuels instability. You’ve narrated the book through stories of farmers, fighters and families that have been in this crisis. 

And at the start of the book, you quote Jay Famiglietti, where she says that the water is the stealthy messenger that delivers the bad news about climate change to your town, your neighbour or to your front door. And you also talk about how three quarters of natural hazards are now water related. This is really not surprising. 

Actually, a few years ago, I spoke at the European Risk Management Conference. And out of all the topics I could speak about, I actually spoke about water resource and water resource wars and the risks coming from water resources. But I’d love you to explain to us today how water fits into this climate violence nexus.

Sometimes it’s too little water. Sometimes it’s too much water. Sometimes it’s water that’s too polluted. 

Why is this central to so many of the cases that you talk about in your book? Yeah, water is, it’s everything. As I was putting together this book, the idea was to take as many different geographic areas and show why the range of climate phenomena were contributing to a very wide array of forms of violence and conflict. I realised that I had sort of inadvertently written a book about water. 

And that goes back to precisely how you put it. Water is the vehicle through which climate change manifests itself in most people’s lives. Working across a lot of these struggling, generally quite poor communities in Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere, a lot of them are able to deal with more extreme heat or more prolonged heat waves, even if it contributes to a greater degree of suffering. 

But the thing that people will understandably and unsurprisingly talk my ear off about is the inability to grow any kind of meaningful crop when the rains either don’t come, or again, to go back to the unpredictability and uncertainty component when they come at the wrong time. So this really is a story of too much water, too little water, or water that’s simply coming at unexpected periods. And I wonder, I really want to be able to understand and put this into a context. 

So I wonder, Peter, if you can share an example or a story where you’ve seen climate stress directly exacerbate social, economic, political pressures, and perhaps tipped a situation into violence. I’m going to give you a macro and a more micro level form of instability. So between about 2014 and 2017, I spent a little over half my time in rural parts of Iraq and Syria, trying to better understand how ISIS profited from collapsing agricultural conditions, partly due to climate, partly due to other reasons, to bolster its ranks. 

Now, I was not for a moment suggesting that the jihadi group was born out of climate and environmental drivers alone. What I was ultimately arguing, after several years worth of groundwork, was that this group never would have recruited as broadly and as successfully as it did were rural parts of those two countries not to be in a state of near total chaos. And what I found through interviews in about 120 different villages was that the better water resource to village was, the less likely it was to yield a large number of ISIS recruits. 

So villages that had supplementary sources of irrigation, irrigation canals, municipally accessible deep bore wells, were not as dependent on the rains and the rains alone to irrigate their crops. And in the communities that had those rains and only those rains, the sheer fact that drought was becoming more pronounced meant that their fortunes, which were previously quite similar to those of the better resourced communities, were declining in line with the conditions. So when ISIS recruiters came along dangling the kinds of salaries of sometimes up to $1,000 a month that these impoverished and increasingly bittered farmers and agricultural labourers could only dream of, the effect was not hugely surprising.

And just to sort of round that out, because I want to go back to what I said at the beginning about how climate change can aggravate a lot of a society’s existing weaknesses. I found that some of the greatest rates of ISIS recruitment were in the villages on the periphery of Mosul in northern Iraq, the largest city that fell under ISIS control. And that was a really interesting and to me extremely surprising finding because those communities were by no means the poorest of the poor. 

They had amenities like fridges and air conditioning units that a lot of more isolated, poorer villages could only dream of. Again, to go back to the inequality component, what they did have was a proximity to the city of Mosul and hence a strong awareness of growing gulf between their fortunes, which were getting worse as agricultural prospect dipped, and the fortunes of the urbanites, which again were either advancing or at worst stagnating. And that just provided a sense of resentment, a sense of grievances that ISIS recruiters very expertly weaponised. 

And then to give you a more micro level example, because while there’s an understandable fixation on climate change’s contribution to quote unquote, sexier or nittier or grittier forms of violence, the reality is that most of this is playing out at a lower level, forms of conflict that have no serious geopolitical significance. I did a lot of reporting and research in the Sundarbans area of Southwestern Bangladesh, which is a part of the country that is being battered both by sea level rise and by more intense cyclones. And as those climate phenomena and an array of environmental troubles worsen, farmers down on the very far southern coast are finding that their lives are becoming untenable. 

Their fields are salinising, the water is essentially seawater at this point. Some of them are upping sticks and moving to Dhaka and moving to Bangladesh’s other fast mushrooming metropolises. But many of them don’t want to leave their home communities. 

And in their instance, one of the few, if not the only immediate economic alternative is fishing. But fishing there takes them deep into the Sundarbans, which is the world’s largest contiguous mangrove forest, which have been inhabited for on and off for hundreds of years by various sort of bandit or pirate groups. They’re full of these tiny little inconspicuous waterways, and hence they’re extremely hard to patrol. 

And as the number of fishermen increases, you have just more people sailing into these pirate lairs, more potential lucre for these pirates who derive their main living by kidnapping them and holding them for ransom. And as the potential number of hostages increases, so too is the number of pirates, because there’s just more money to go around and hence more of a willingness on the part of these bandits to put up with the extremely miserable, extremely tough living conditions that come with engaging in that kind of criminal activity. So yeah, this is a form of violence with no immediate geopolitical import, and hence one of the reasons why the Bangladeshi authorities were seemingly pretty slow in recent decades to sort of fully engage with the threat. 

But it’s an issue that’s no less miserable for the thousands, and it is many thousands of fishermen and honey collectors and others who are held for ransom and only released when they pay crippling fees that their families are often paying off decades later. They’re fascinating examples. So thanks very much for sharing those. 

I’d love to unpack the ISIS example in a little bit more detail, because I think many of our listeners will recall, and of course, ISIS is still functioning in many countries today, but certainly back in the 2014s and 15s, it controlled huge parts of Syria and Iraq. We know that ISIS was doing a lot of early age recruitment. They were relying on family influence, children and youth that grew up in jihadist Salafism families. 

There was a lot of radicalism from prisons. I remember when some of the prisons were broken out in Syria and Iraq, and we remember the Assad regime in Syria deliberately in the early starts of the civil war, actually releasing some of the more radical prisoners. Groups like ISIS were excellent at their social media, their online presence and their recruiting tools. 

But as you started to talk about this psychological and sociological factors, I think what you talked about with Mosul’s the haves and the haves not. I’d love to hear a little bit more about the ways that ISIS and groups like them, and that you found in your studies, have been able to weaponise the drought, been able to use the current climate crisis. How has ISIS been able to actually weaponise it and use it as a recruitment tool? And what should we be watching out for today? So in an Iraqi context, as in every other part of the world, just the nature of the weaknesses, the nature of those kind of exploitable fissures differs, differed from community to community. 

But just to give you a few additional examples, at a time when the Sunni Shia split had a good deal of potency, particularly in these rural communities, where there was just much less cross denominational mixing than there was in urban areas at that point, the various ISIS recruiters, when they came to these Sunni villages, would take the sectarian sentiment that many villagers felt and apply that to the climate phenomena that were kind of battering these agrarian villages. So for example, the very fact that the rain was not falling, was in the words of one particular ISIS recruiter, a consequence of cloud seeding by the government in Iran, which being a Shia majority power was sort of the enemy par excellence for many of these Sunni centric villages. Equally, the very fact that the irrigation canals servicing some of these villages were running empty was not a consequence of drought, as indeed it was, but was cast in the language of these recruiters, a consequence of the Shia dominated government in Baghdad, redirecting water away from Sunni areas and putting them more towards their own confessionalists.

An additional example, allow me to sort of unpack this a little bit. One of the reasons why communities are seemingly become that bit more vulnerable or that bit more susceptible to the entreaties of various non-state armed groups is when they lose their wise old heads that will prevent a lot of stupid behaviour and act as a sort of moderating influence on the sort of the lonely and the lost and the stupid among the villagers. The problem is that as climate stresses are intensifying, we’re getting more prolific out migration from many of these villages, largely to cities near or far. 

We know, and this is a very global thing, that those who migrate first and those who migrate in greatest numbers are most likely to be the village leading lights who are extra involved in the local governing bodies, the informal and informal ones, and extra likely to be able to kind of exercise their influence in a positive manner. In the absence, in so many instances of these leading village lights, ISIS made a particular effort to target communities that were actually much less communities than they were clusters of individuals, that it’s lost their leading lights, that it lost their capacity for resolving small disputes before they mushroomed into something less containable. When you’re coming into a village that has lost its sense of self, lost its sense of identity, it just makes it much, much easier to recruit than in places which have that degree of togetherness. 

I like your point about the moderating influences and think wherever there’s a risk, there’s also an opportunity. They’re really two sides of that same coin. So I’d love to hear from you with your research studies and your travel, Peter, can you talk us through an example where, despite very significant climate pressures, violence didn’t erupt, where the communities were resilient, where the responses were resilient, that stopped escalation, and what made the difference in these communities? Yeah, I mean, we’ve been dwelling on the misery side of the ledger, which is extremely worthy, and I and many others do mostly fixate on that for good reasons, and perhaps a few bad ones.

I mean, as you say, it’s not all doom and gloom, and it’s extremely important to emphasise that. On the one hand, climate-related violence is almost always a sort of miserable marriage of climate stresses and poor quality governance. And in places where authorities display a superior degree of management, those climate stresses are much, much less likely to bleed into any degree of sort of active hostility, or at least any active hostility on a utterly destructive level.

So for example, Jordan is a country that is exposed to a laundry list of utterly horrific climate and environmental troubles. And yet, for the most part, there’s a certain amount of climate-related unhappiness playing out at a local level. But for the most part, the authorities have succeeded in ensuring that those climate stresses are not bleeding into macro-level troubles in a way that the authorities in Syria and Iraq and a number of other countries absolutely failed. 

So even if the Jordanian authorities’ idea of quality governance would not be the same as many of the Jordanian state citizens, they have nevertheless maintained enough of a presence, enough of a welcome influence, as to sort of not actively stoke a lot of these climate-related troubles into some worse outcome. One of the things that I’ve forever been surprised by in a positive way over the course of this work is that there’s not more violence than there actually is. When one considers quite how miserable, quite how destitute the lives of so many largely rural but also some urban peoples are, when you look at the degree of corruption and state incompetence that they’re up against and the ways in which those forces are so often pitching people against one another, it’s extraordinary that there’s not a lot more inter- and intra-communal violence than there is. 

And for me, the big takeaway from that is that if people are granted the tools to avoid having their climate-related troubles bleed into violence, they will, in the vast majority of instances, seize upon them. And to give you another real-world illustration of that, a part of Senegal and a part of adjacent Mali, which is sort of totally riven by conflict between farmers and herders for a bunch of climate- and non-climate-related reasons, I found these so-called pastoral units, which were basically mediation mechanisms that enabled farmers and herders to come together and hash out their differences, agree compensation that would be paid by a herder to a farmer if his livestock happened to trample the farmer’s crops, to agree on maximum herd numbers within areas that have previously been overgrazed, among an array of other things, and the long-standing system which had broken down on account of the lack of trust between these communities and which had been built back up through the relatively small-scale assistance of an NGO. In that instance, these folks were collectively crying out for the reinstitution of this long-standing mediation mechanism, but it required the involvement of an external, mutually-trusted party in order to bring the parties back together.

And in an era of extreme funding cuts, in an era where public sector funding from Western countries towards places that are suffering most from climate and conflict is at something of a premium, this is heartening because these projects can be implemented on an absolute shoestring. They don’t require bricks-and-mortar construction in many instances, two people in a hut and their dog hashing out these difficulties. Yeah, that’s fantastic. 

That’s really positive to hear, Peter. And I’ll also take an opportunity to remind our listeners that the International Risk Podcast is now available on YouTube. So, if you prefer to watch your podcast, please go to YouTube and search for the International Risk Podcast. 

And please remember to subscribe and like our content. That’s really critical for our success. Peter, at the start of September, you wrote an article that was published in the New York Times, and it was titled, When Climate Change Blurs Border. 

Can you tell us what we’re communicating when you wrote that piece in the New York Times? A lot of what I’m trying to do is just illustrate the full range of ways in which climate change is complicating our maintenance of peace and stability. And this was one that had received, as far as I could see, next to no coverage or attention. And that’s the ways in which, to take a brief step back, so many borders are, of course, demarcated by arresting physical markers, whether it’s a river, whether it’s an inlet, whether it’s a mountain ridge. 

And under the pressure of an array of climate stress, so many of these physical demarcators are warping or changing in ways that are not conducive to maintaining good country-to- country relations. Borders are, by their very nature, quite tense, quite sensitive places, especially when you have contested territory, especially when you have complicated interethnic relations, and especially when you have authoritarian states, many of whom can derive a degree of legitimacy by encroaching on the territory of a neighbour. And so the very fact that so many of these border markers are becoming muddied or less clear is just creating a degree of uncertainty in the worst of possible places that these states would very happily live without.

In your book, Peter, you focus a lot on local conflict, but I’m wondering about interstate tensions, tensions and conflict between nations. Are we seeing that too? We know that the Egypt, Ethiopia, Sudan dispute over the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, it’s often hyped as a potential water war, especially with a significant rhetoric used by all sides. How realistic, how significant do you see the potential conflict between nation states, whether it’s Egypt, Ethiopia, Sudan, whether it’s Pakistan, India over the Indus Treaty, whether it’s Palestine and the water shortage caused by Israel? What are some of the concerns that you see when you look at potential interstate conflict about water? Water experts have been down for quite some time on the idea that water could be a or even the dominant contributor to conflict between nation states. 

And as evidence, they’ve had a tremendous array of examples to point to of where water has been much more of a source of cooperation than a source of conflict between transboundary states. You mentioned India-Pakistan. Until relatively recently, India and Pakistan’s success maintaining the Indus water sharing treaty through multiple conflicts was seen as, that example par excellence of separating water from a messy relationships wider dynamics. 

However, I and I think many others are much less certain that that will remain true over time. And there’s a number of reasons for this. One is that you have all sorts of countries with relatively little history of water scarcity that are all of a sudden experiencing degrees of severe water shortages.

But lacking that kind of history of water shortages, like Egypt, for example, it means that there isn’t necessarily a capacity to easily climate proof economies, especially farmers for the greater degree of scarcity to come. Equally, there can be a, for want of a better way of putting it, a temperamental inability to accept much greater flows of water than that country has historically received. But there’s something else that’s important to go back to the Nile River dispute, which was a disagreement that I covered extensively when based in Egypt for about five, six years, and when working quite a lot in Sudan and Ethiopia, and that’s misinformation and disinformation. 

During the 2013-2014 period, when it really looked as if Egypt and Ethiopia might actually end up in some kind of hot war on account of Ethiopia’s construction of the Renaissance dam, I would interview senior Egyptian and Ethiopian policymakers. And the thing that really terrified me was the falsehoods and in some instances, the outright conspiracy theories that some of these senior officials would parrot. They had minimal understanding in some instances of the precise nature of the motivations of their adversary, and hence a far from clear-cut capacity to make a decision that was wholly premised on actual facts. 

I mean, we’re speaking, I guess, a few months after India theoretically, that practically might be a different matter, but theoretically ripped up the Indus River Treaty. And a lot of that was seemingly a response to a domestic Indian political demand for muscular rhetoric, muscular dealings in all of its associations with Pakistan. So a lot of these water disputes turn not on developments related to the river itself, but on unrelated developments within a country’s domestic political scene.

Yeah, that’s really interesting. And you also argue that climate violence isn’t just a developing country issue. It’s not just something we see in the Middle East or in South Asia, but it’s potentially something that we could experience in much more developed and advanced economies across Europe in North America. 

So I wonder, Peter, what could climate breakdown look like in Europe or in the USA? And why might wealthy democracies be much more vulnerable than we might assume on face value? I mean, if you’ll forgive me a fameless plug, a colleague and I published a report, which is called A Distant Problem No Longer, how climate change is fuelling crime and fraying the social fabric across Europe. And this is the first exploration of the ways in which climate change is already contributing to much greater degrees of instability across Europe than is broadly understood. Spoiler alert, it’s not a pretty picture. 

So even if many of the forms of violence are a lot more low level in Europe thus far than they are in other parts of the world, there’s very few forms of instability on this continent that don’t have some kind of climate component. So to give you a few examples, again, you’ve got the micro and the macro level ones. On a micro level one, drought across the Mediterranean in recent years has massively pushed up the prices of olive oil. 

Between 2023 and 2024, price of olive oil in Spain, Greece, Italy, which account for most of the world’s olive oil production, went up by up to 70%. And as a consequence of that surge, due to wavering rainfall in the key production areas, you had everybody from established criminal gangs, opportunistic individual thieves, who were all of a sudden incentivised to steal large quantities of olive oil or even just branches right off olive trees in ways that they previously weren’t. The stats on this are a bit unsettled, but it may well have been that up to several hundred million euros worth of olive oil and olive products were stolen because all of a sudden this was a commodity worth pilfering. 

I mean, even now in Puglia, the heel of Italy, trucks transporting olive oil from production facilities to distribution facilities are quite often accompanied by two police cars, because in the eyes of many thieves, these are akin to bank fans. To go back to, I guess, the thrust of your question, and that’s the more macro level thing. And this is the area that really worries me. 

Across parts of the world, citizens have grown used to, and perhaps entitled to, high levels of government service and high levels of government performance. We’ve got used to quality freshwater emerging through our taps without any stoppages here or there. We’ve grown used to wastewater being taken away without us barely noticing it. 

And we’ve got used to varying degrees of quality infrastructure. Due to climate stresses and of course an array of other problems, our state’s capacity to continue providing services of that quality to perform at the same level may well, and arguably already is to an extent, be compromised by climate stress eating into government resources. So when, for example, you’ve got to recover from a devastating flood that has caused 50 billion euros worth of damage, as with the Valencia torrents roughly a year ago.

Well, that’s going to eat into your capacity to spend money on things like health care, things like education.And so if government performance and if government service provision drops off even a little bit, really quite worried about our capacity as citizens to tolerate that without, don’t know, playing into the hands of of all sorts of political extremist actors to a greater extent than we already have.

it’s very interesting. And  during the research in preparation for this interview, Peter, i came across a statistic that really surprised me. And that’s that that Europe is actually the fastest warming continent. It’s facing rapid climate change impacts such as frequent heat waves, droughts, floods and other extreme weather events that ultimately are threatening food, water and and energy security across the continent.

NI think you and I have successfully articulated the environmental stresses can exacerbate social vulnerabilities, they can exacerbate inequalities, they can lead to risks such as unrest, migration, and strain on critical infrastructure and ultimately government capacities. Now, fortunately, the European Union has recognised and articulated that climate change is a threat multiplier. But I haven’t seen the corresponding responses from nation states across Europe. So what would you like to see? How do you recommend that that countries and businesses should be preparing for climate-related instability across Europe?

This is a ah tricky one, and this is something that I and I think a lot of my colleagues wrestle with when we come to sort of putting together recommendations to accompany our snazzy reports. And that’s because on the one hand, the solutions are take meaningful climate action and bolster your quality of governance, solutions which are so big as to be almost useless or trite to articulate. which doesn’t necessarily reduce the the accuracy. I mean, ultimately, if the world continues warming at its current pace, no degree of adaptation or no degree of savvy governance will be sufficient to prevent some of those intensifying climate stresses from yeah bleeding into all sorts of unfortunate outcomes.

But i mean, if we bring this back down to the so the level of what is politically and economically feasible right now, we need a lot more awareness raising. And it feels really hollow and quite pathetic to be saying this late stage. But the reality is that there still is nowhere near enough understanding at either a popular level or even ah a political decision-making level of the extent to which climate change is already contributing to  unsavory things here at home.

We need a lot more um kind of solidarity. And I mean that actually in aa practical sense, not in a kumbaya, let’s all be friends type sense. As Europe suffers from more and more frequent and more and more intense extreme weather event, the capacities of individual nation states within the continent to respond in a satisfactory manner to more floods, more wildfires, more drought, more heat wave will increasingly be found wanting. And this is where  the deployment of one another’s resources, one another’s firefighting units, one another’s firefighting planes, one another’s disaster response units will be more important than ever.

Now, the EU already has a variation of this. There’s something called rescEU, kind of rescue with EU at the end, which calls for the deployment of kfirefighting planes to the hardest hit Southern European countries during those riskiest summer months.

But that scheme needs to be taken a lot further. To paraphrase a US politician in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene last year, North Carolina doesn’t have a horrific disaster every year, but the United States does. The idea being that it’s  beyond the capacity of individual states to manage this kind of relative deluge of troubles coming our direction, but it’s not beyond the capacity of the EU if some of those kind of necessary resources are pooled to a greater extent than they already are.

Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. Collectively, we can do a much better job with preparedness and, of course, response when these risks materialise. And Peter, you travel quite a lot. You speak to a lot of people. You work and live in conflict-affected countries for quite a lot of your career. When you look around the world today, what are the international risks that concern you the most?

Poor quality governance. So much of what we’re up against, certainly on a climate level, is eminently manageable. It’s hard. It will require resources. And yet the self-interested imperative to tackle this A to Z of worsening climate stresses could not be clearer. We know and we have concrete rafts of scientific and financial proof to this effect that the costs of preparing for climate change are a tiny fraction of those that would emerge from allowing climate change to run riot. And the very fact that we have this inability or perhaps unwillingness at a political level almost across the board to contend with that and to recognize those facts is discouraging in the extreme.

And honestly, I’m not a kind of temperamental pessimist, but looking around, probably shouldn’t be ah any kind of surprise that the world is in less than ideal position when one considers that the very same kind of leadership class that are failing to deal with climate change despite the tremendously self-interested and despite the tremendously obvious imperative. It shouldn’t really be a surprise that they’re mismanaging an array of non-climate related issues as well.

Well, look, Peter, thank you very much for coming on the International Risk Podcast ah and exploring all those topics with us.

Pleasure to join you, Dominic.

Well, was a great conversation with Peter Schwartzstein. He’s an award-winning environmental journalist and researcher who’s reported and researched in over 30 countries. And he’s a recent author of The Heat and the Fury on the Frontlines of Climate Violence. I really appreciated hearing Peter’s insights on the pathways from climate stress to violence, what makes communities either vulnerable or resilient, and its interaction with international risk. and And not to forget that it certainly is manageable and we can avoid conflict if we take the right risk mitigation actions today.

Please remember to subscribe to our mailing list to get our newsletter in your inbox every second week. You can do that on the International Risk Podcast website. Today’s podcast was produced and coordinated by Anna Kummelstedt. I’m Dominic Bowen, your host. Thanks very much for listening. We’ll speak again in the next couple of days.