What Everyone Gets Wrong About The Link Between Climate Change And Violence

Vox - Brad Plumer

John Cantlie/AFP/Getty Images

During the Democratic presidential debate on Saturday night, CBS moderator John Dickerson brought up the recent terrorist attacks in Paris and then asked Bernie Sanders if he still believes climate change is our greatest national security threat. (Sanders had said as much in a previous debate.)
Sanders didn't back down:

Absolutely. In fact, climate change is directly related to the growth of terrorism. And if we do not get our act together and listen to what the scientists say, you're going to see countries all over the world — this is what the CIA says — they're going to be struggling over limited amounts of water, limited amounts of land to grow their crops, and you're going to see all kinds of international conflict.

Much snickering ensued on Twitter, especially over that bolded sentence, with the prevailing sentiment that Sanders' argument was self-evidently silly.
I'd say Sanders' reply was a little off-base — but the outraged reaction was absurd. The truth about climate change and conflict is far more complex and nuanced than a short soundbite can allow, but it's foolish to dismiss the entire topic out of hand.
Sanders was going too far when he said that climate change is "directly related" to the growth of terrorism. It's hard to find any climate or security experts who would make that strong or straightforward of a causal link.
But it's fine to raise the broader issue. What experts will often say — and what the Pentagon has been saying — is that global warming has the potential to aggravate existing tensions and security problems, by, for instance, making droughts or water shortages more likely in some regions. That doesn't mean war or terrorism will be inevitable in a hotter world. Climate will typically be just one of many factors involved. Still, climate change could increase the risk of violence, which is why many military officials now take it seriously.

The complex, indirect links between climate change and Syria's war

An explosion rocks the Syrian city of Kobani on October 20 during a reported suicide car bomb attack by ISIS. (Gokhan Sahin/Getty Images)

One place to see this dynamic at work is in Syria's ongoing civil war. Few experts would argue that climate change "caused" the horrific violence in Syria (much less the rise of ISIS). That's way too simplistic. But environmental factors arguably do figure into the story here.
The short version goes like this:

• The Fertile Crescent region (which includes Syria and Iraq) has experienced periodic droughts for many centuries.
• In recent decades, global warming appears to have increased the odds of more severe, persistent dry spells in the region. (See this recent study, led by Colin Kelley of the University of California, Santa Barbara.)
• From 2007 to 2010, Syria suffered an especially brutal drought that, when combined with other social and political factors, helped foster civil unrest — unrest that later became the war that's still raging today.

For the slightly longer version, I'll quote from this 2013 interview I did with Francesco Femia and Caitlin Werrell of the Center for Climate and Security. Here's how Femia described the chain of events:

We looked at the period between 2006 and 2011 that preceded the outbreak of the revolt that started in Daraa. During that time, up to 60 percent of Syria's land experienced one of the worst long-term droughts in modern history.
This drought — combined with the mismanagement of natural resources by [Syrian President Bashar] Assad, who subsidized water-intensive crops like wheat and cotton farming and promoted bad irrigation techniques — led to significant devastation. According to updated numbers, the drought displaced 1.5 million people within Syria.
Around 75 percent of farmers suffered total crop failure, so they moved into the cities. Farmers in the northeast lost 80 percent of their livestock, so they had to leave and find livelihoods elsewhere. They all moved into urban areas — urban areas that were already experiencing economic insecurity due to an influx of Iraqi and Palestinian refugees.

Notice how many moving parts there are here. Climate change likely raised the odds of a severe drought occurring in Syria. But even without global warming, a drought might still have occurred — if perhaps less severe. So climate change wasn't strictly necessary for disruptions to occur. At best we might say it made the situation worse.
It also wasn't sufficient for conflict. A severe drought, by itself, simply isn't enough to trigger a bloody civil war. (Note that California hasn't descended into armed frenzy.) You also have to mix in poverty, the Syrian government's squandering of water resources, the influx of Iraqi and Palestinian refugees, and a whole web of political and social factors. Syria is an autocratic regime with a long history of human rights abuses. Then you have the fact that Assad responded to the unrest in Daara and elsewhere with extreme violence. There was a lot of tinder in this tinderbox.
"We can't say that climate change caused the civil war," Femia emphasized to me. At best, it might be one factor among many that deserves careful study. "It would be hubris to say that we can precisely disentangle those factors right now, particularly in Syria, where there's an ongoing conflict."
That said, it'd be equally rash to dismiss climate change and environmental stressors entirely. Before the Syrian civil war broke out, Femia explained, a lot of security analysts wrongly believed that the country was stable and immune from Arab Spring unrest — precisely because they were overlooking the effects of the drought. "What [those analysts] had missed," he said, "was that a massive internal migration was happening, mainly on the periphery, from farmers and herders who had lost their livelihoods completely."

Climate change can be a security threat — but it doesn't make conflict inevitable

Photo by China Photos/Getty Images

Over the past decade, a growing number of analysts and policymakers, including the Obama administration, have started to look more closely at the ways in which climate change could contribute to conflicts and security problems around the world.
They typically acknowledge that the linkages are complex, multifaceted, and often difficult to tease out precisely. Here, for instance, is how the White House describes the relationship between climate change and conflict/terrorism:

Many governments will face challenges to meet even the basic needs of their people as they confront demographic change, resource constraints, effects of climate change, and risks of global infectious disease outbreaks. These effects are threat multipliers that will aggravate stressors abroad such as poverty, environmental degradation, political instability, and social tensions — conditions that can enable terrorist activity and other forms of violence. The risk of conflict may increase.

On this account, climate change is a "threat multiplier," and one of many things that can lay the groundwork for conflict. That doesn't mean more war is guaranteed in a hotter world: consider that the 2000s were the warmest decade on record, but they also managed to be "the least conflict-ridden decade since the 1970s." In many places, geographic or political or economic factors will end up mattering far more. Still, climate is one potential driver to take into account.
As both Femia and Werrell pointed out in our interview, there are quite a few places around the world where climate change has the potential to make already volatile situations even more volatile. Here's one example, picked at random: "The South China Sea is a traditional choke point for shipping," Femia noted. "But now the warming ocean is changing the dynamics of fishing in that area. So beyond the food security issues, it’s also a disputed area. And climate change could exacerbate that."
That helps explain why more and more military officials are coming out and saying it'd be a good idea to figure out how we're going to deal with global warming, how we can make sure that the inevitable stresses and dislocations caused by climate change foster cooperation rather than conflict and violence. It's why the CIA has tried to study climate change and its potential impacts. (Republicans in Congress are trying to prevent both agencies from doing this.)
It's also strange to continually obsess over whether climate change or terrorism is a "bigger" security threat. They're two very different things, working in very different ways, and not strictly comparable. It's a bit like asking whether the floor or the sink is the most important part of the house. There's no reason we can't pay attention to both.

Further reading

• Will climate change lead to more war? It's not that simple.
• This interview on Syria's drought has much, much more on the nexus between climate and conflict. Andrew Freedman also wrote a great piece on the issue.
• What Obama means when he calls climate change a national security threat
• Here are some good poli-sci papers on climate and conflict in the 2012 issue of the Journal of Peace Research. Work in this area is still very much ongoing and hasn't yielded a lot of easy answers just yet.

Extreme Weather, Human Error And Why The World Floods

The Guardian - John Vidal

Since 2007, Gideon Mendel has photographed lives turned upside down by floods. What do his latest images reveal?

• See more images from Gideon Mendel’s flood project

Gideon Mendel at work in the US in October 2015. Photograph: Mark Pointer

Hein Thi Tran’s house in southern Vietnam floods several times a year. When she and her husband built it 15 years ago in Number 1 Village, Khanh Hoi, it was protected from the sea by a low dyke. But the land is slowly tilting, the storms in the gulf of Thailand seem to get stronger, and the village’s concrete and rock barrier is now regularly topped by waves. She is helpless, she says.
Number 1 village is a slow-motion crash. The seawater that intrudes on the community’s paddy fields from the tidal surges makes it impossible to grow rice, water supplies are becoming saltier and, little by little, the village is becoming uninhabitable. Hein Thi Tran can just about live with the waves and erosion now, but in a generation or two, scientists say, much of this part of the Mekong delta may have returned to the sea.
The village is being killed by one sort of flood but, paradoxically, it and thousands of others in the Mekong delta have always survived because of another. The summer monsoon sees south-east Asia’s rivers carry fine silt and nutrients down from the Himalayas to be deposited on their fields. The pattern of planting after flooding is as old as farming itself, and without benign annual floods, millions of the world’s small farmers, who cannot use irrigation, would go hungry.
Like Hein Thi Tran, much of the world is witnessing unusual flooding. Flash floods, rising fast after heavy rains, have this year torn through parts of Israel, the French Riviera and Hawaii. River flooding has inundated great areas of cities, including Saigon, Sochi, Tbilisi, Accra and Manila, that never used to flood. Heatwaves and droughts in Pakistan, India, Bangladesh and Africa have been followed by unusually intense rains, swamping vast areas. Many, such as those that inundated northern Chile in March and that devastated Malawi in January, forcing 150,000 people to move, were seen as one in 100- or even 500-year events.
Gideon Mendel, the South African photographer who has taken these pictures, started documenting floods in 2007, when a series of summer downpours led to much of mid- and northern Britain being under water. Within weeks, 30 million people in India, Bangladesh and Nepal had to escape floods that were much deeper than usual. The two were not comparable, but the idea of making portraits of flood-affected people returning home was born. Since then, Mendel has taken his waders to Haiti, Pakistan, Australia, Bangladesh, Brazil, South Carolina and Kashmir.
Mendel, whose work crosses documentary and art, says he makes no distinction between people caught in “normal” or unusual floods, but is aware that extreme weather has become more common. Wherever he goes, people tell him the rivers have reached their highest ever levels.

Hilal Ahmad Shaikh and his mother, Shameema Shaikh, in Jawahar Nagar, Srinagar, Kashmir, India, photographed by Mendel on 24 September 2014

Mendel says he was struck by the “shared vulnerability” of flood victims. “Life is suddenly turned upside down and normality is suspended. I often follow my subjects as they return home through deep waters, and work with them to create an intimate image there. Though their poses may be conventional, their environment is disconcertingly altered. Often, they’re angry about their circumstances or the inadequate response from the authorities. Many want the world to know what has happened to them.” Floods, Mendel says, are now universal, affecting rich and poor, high and low land, cities and countryside.
But Mendel works on other levels, too. The flood is an ancient myth in hundreds of cultures: similar stories of a destructive force of nature that renders humans powerless have been passed down among Indigenous Australians, Inuits, Cheyennes, Lithuanians, Celts, Assyrians, Zoroastrians, Egyptians, Christians, Chinese and others. Most cultures have a deep sense that they once were, or will be, drowned; the theme of waters rising and endless rains leading to disaster is widespread.
These days, man is more likely to blame man than the gods, and much of the damage done is clearly a consequence of foolish human actions. Coastlines naturally erode and rivers have always flooded, so if you build houses on a cliff or flood plain, you can expect them one day to end up in the drink. If you strip the hillsides of forests, water will run off faster and lead to flash floods. If you do not dredge rivers, silt will build up and water may break the banks. Damming rivers, meddling with natural drainage systems and paving over land all increase the risk of local flood damage.
But the sense of global forces at work is also a powerful story for today. The consensus of science is that, as greenhouse gases in the atmosphere increase, so will temperatures and sea levels, and extreme floods will become more likely and more frequent. We do not know if there are more floods today, or if more rain falls than before, but there is evidence that some rains are heavier than they were and more people are being affected by floods.
Looking ahead just 50 years, scientists expect low-lying Pacific islands and atolls to become uninhabitable. It will be harder to grow food on the great, populous flood plains of countries such as Egypt and Vietnam. Vast coastal cities such as Lagos will be at greater risk of major flooding; millions of people in Bangladesh will have to move.
Much of that is in the future, but for the next 12 months the risk of flooding is greater than ever, as the naturally occurring phenomenon known as El Niño gathers pace. This sees equatorial Pacific Ocean temperatures rise and extreme storms, droughts and floods occur around the world. Already it is being blamed for a drought in Somalia and the Horn of Africa, and for vast fires in Brazilian and Indonesian forests. Pacific nations are expecting their most extreme weather in decades, while California could see its long drought end in violent rainstorms and floods.
In two weeks, diplomats from 195 countries will meet in Paris to negotiate a new global agreement to reduce climate emissions, and so reduce the risk of unusual flooding. Unless temperatures are held to a 1.5-2C increase worldwide, scientists warn, the waters will inevitably rise. In which case, Mendel may have to keep putting on his waders.

In Too Deep: Gideon Mendel's Photographs Of Global Flooding – In Pictures

The Guardian - Gideon Mendel

For eight years, Gideon Mendel has travelled the globe, photographing people whose lives have been devastated by floods. Here are his images of a drowning world

Lucas Williams, Lawshe Plantation, South Carolina, US, 11 October 2015 I went to bed on a Friday night and everything was fine. Three days later, my whole life was under water. We’ve had years when the swamps got high from rain, but nothing like this. I went to sleep at 11pm and there was still 30ft (9m) to go before the water would come into the house. I woke at 6.30 and it was ankle deep. We got our stuff and we got out. Our farm has about 1,300 acres, and 1,000 were under water. We lost everything – our immediate losses are close to half a million dollars. We did not have flood insurance.	Ripon Islam and Tarajul Islam, Chandanbaisa village, Bogra District, Bangladesh, 13 September 2015 Tarajul says: I was leaving my shop when a little water came into the village. I felt the earth getting wet. We stayed awake and at dawn I took my wife and two kids and our belongings to the new embankment, Ripon took my mother and the goat. The water was only a few inches deep, but we ran because we didn’t know how fast it would rise. My father lost everything years back in a flood. We know the village will be flooded again, but what can we do? I’ve moved nine times already.
Francisca Chagas dos Santos, Rio Branco, Brazil, 10 March 2015 It often floods here, almost every year, so most of our homes are on stilts. But nobody can remember a higher flood. We are all camping now. We have no choice but to be in the water, even though the snakes make it dangerous. I’ve heard the government has plans to move us away and turn this area into a park. But I’ve heard this for years and we are still here. It’s not a big deal: when the floods come, we take our stuff and leave for a while. The only problem is the thieves; we have to visit almost every day to protect our homes.	JB Singh, Jawahar Nagar, Srinagar, Kashmir, India, 24 September 2014 I feel lucky to be alive. I live in one of the most damaged areas, where most of the homes were under water almost up to the roof. I have repaired my own home and my truck, but it was a financial disaster for me and I got no help from the government.
Kate Nesbitt, Andrews, South Carolina, US, 10 October 2015 It came suddenly. We had a rainstorm that weekend and a few dams breached and all the rivers flooded. On Monday morning I was waist deep in water; the next day I had 17ft (5m) of water in my driveway. Nobody knows what caused it. I have lived in this house for more than 40 years and raised three boys here, and I’ve lost everything. All the walls have had to come out, all the insulation, the light fittings. I’m having to start from scratch and for now I’m living in a camper in a friend’s yard. I’m just going to take it a day at a time.	Mushaq Ahmad Wani and Shafeeqa Mushtaq, Jawahar Nagar, Srinagar, Kashmir, India, 25 September 2014 The authorities said there was no need to worry, but we ignored them – water was entering our home. We had no time to save all our possessions; we rescued some documents, a few of our children’s books, artworks, then moved upstairs. The view was horrific: water was washing into every house and most of our neighbours had fled. We were stuck on the third floor for days. These are big old houses, held together by mud mortar, so the water caused a lot of damage; our home was on the brink of collapse.
Valdenir Lima da Silva, Rio Branco, Brazil, 9 March 2015 This is my uncle’s home. My brother and I have come to help him clean up. It is a very tough job: we have to use this dirty water, while it is still here, to do the cleaning. Once it’s gone, it will be harder. Scrubbing walls is hard work, but good exercise – I am trying to build up my body.	David Morris, Andrews, South Carolina, US, 9 October 2015 There was a lot of rain, so I knew a lot of water was coming. I used my boat to help people get their stuff out. It was one terrible experience, but it brought the community together. Everyone was involved. It was cool. And people came from out of state, church groups. They cleared out insulation, moved furniture, anything to help. I’m back in my house now, but all my neighbours lost their homes. I’ve got a saying: ‘Country boys will survive.’ We are just going to rebuild and get stronger. That’s all I know, just keep moving forward.
Jameela Khan Bemina, Srinagar, Kashmir, India, 23 September 2014 For an old couple like us, there was no chance of escape when the floods came. We had several warnings and local people begged us to leave the house when the water started to enter it, but we decided to stay because we thought if we leave, thieves will rob us. We brought as much as we could to the upper floor and stayed there more than a week until the water receded. But that was just the beginning of the chaos. It had gone but it had left all the mud and silt. It took us a month to clean everything with our bare hands.	José Alcides dos Santos and Erenilce Lima e Silva, Rio Branco, Brazil, 10 March 2015 Over the last five years, every year we have had to move with our three children to the shelter, because this district often suffers from flooding. But this time the water went really high, I have never seen it that way. We have come back to our home to clean the mud off the walls. It is difficult for us, with such young children, to have our lives so often disturbed in this way. But we thank God the house is still here, we have our health and our kids are fine. We take life as it comes and hope for the best.
David and Elaine Samios, Summerville, South Carolina, US, 9 October 2015 It definitely was a surprise. On the first day the water just covered part of our garden, and nobody thought it was going to come much higher. On the second day it rose all the way up to the house and we started getting nervous and moving our stuff upstairs. By day three it was inside. It’s a surreal experience: you see it coming and there is nothing you can do about it. But it brought our community closer. The whole neighbourhood pulled together. It was really nice to see complete strangers coming in to lend a hand.	Johora, Chandanbaisa village, Bogra District, Bangladesh, 15 September 2015 I was asleep when the water came. First it wet the floor, then it rose to my bed. I was frightened. We used to live in a decent house and had land we could cultivate. The river has taken it all. Now I am a widow and earn a little money doing domestic work. When the village flooded, I couldn’t find shelter. We tried to go to another place, but the people did not want us. Instead, I sleep in a little boat that leaks. I have no food for my children – people don’t need domestic help because their houses are under water.
João Pereira de Araúj, Rio Branco, Brazil, 14 March 2015 I have seen many floods in my life, but never this high. My home is built on stilts, but now the lower floor is submerged. I look out of the window and see street after street under water – so many homes and shops. All we can do is wait for the water to go down, clean up and continue.	Gideon Mendel’s Drowning World was shortlisted for this year’s Prix Pictet global award in photography and sustainability. It will be at the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris until 13 December, and on billboards as part of Artists 4 Paris Climate 2015.