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.”
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Welcome to Zero. I am Uctra Drati. This week war on a Heating Planet. Hello, upshut hi mightily. It's been six months you've been producing Zero. What's your experience being like?
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.
Shock skins, shack skins, help farms, and electric transformers.
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.
Well, also because this has been such an election year, and I think we will talk about politics a lot more.
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.
And it's only weeks after there was a knife attack where a Syrian man who had been denied asylum went donn a stabbingspree.
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.
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 require a lot of courage on the part of politicians to start persuading populations that migrants are not a bad thing.
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, and it helped me think through how exactly climate links to all this.
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 that we don't really think about, where weather patterns have a direct impact on how people live and how empires rise and fall.
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 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, 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 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?
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 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, 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 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.
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.
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, 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 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 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 in terms of environmental degradation, but it's not a direct impact of climate change.
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 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?
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. 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 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 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 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 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 from the drought, that can lead to something as explosive as we saw.
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 climate implications.
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 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. 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.
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 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 you seen that open the door for better planning and policy making in the future.
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 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 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 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 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, 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 completely useless. So there is definitely hope in my view from engaging with the militaries.
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 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 you have mentioned those in your book, but they all seem to be at quite an early stage.
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 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. 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 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 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.
And could you talk through the success stories, even if they are at a small scale right now.
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, 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, 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 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.
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?
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 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, 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 compete with their neighbors.
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 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 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 up fear of migrants and destabilize the politics in those democracies. Will we see more of this happening as the planet is being warmed.
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, 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 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 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 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 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.
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, 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 are all these interconnections that you're able to draw from human rights to conflict to resources in the work that you do.
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 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.
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, 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. 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, 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 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.
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 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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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 have that much time either.
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 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 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.