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NewSecurityBeat

The blog of the Wilson Center's Environmental Change and Security Program
Showing posts by Peter Schwartzstein.
  • How We Misunderstand the Magnitude of Climate Risks – and Why That Contributes to Controversy

    ›
    Guest Contributor  //  January 12, 2021  //  By Peter Schwartzstein
    shutterstock_79914109

    For years, analysts have disputed the extent of climate change’s role in conflict. But the nature of climate risks can stifle those looking to define them.

    The Syrian civil war has raged for almost a decade now, and in the climate security community it can feel as if we’ve spent at least that long arguing about its causes. For every claim about the impact of extreme drought in the lead up to 2011, there’s been blowback, with some scholars arguing that the climate angle has been exaggerated at the expense of other causes of the conflict. And for every argument about rural-to-urban migration, there have been suggestions that its impact in precipitating protests has been overstated. Amid some overly forceful media assertion about the significance of climate change—and valid fears that invoking the environment might be seen as absolving guilty parties, despite efforts to highlight the regime’s ultimate culpability—climate security analysts have struggled to fully pinpoint climate’s precise contribution to the conflict. Cue uncertainty, controversy, and sometimes fierce academic polemics.

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  • “You Are Asking About Pollution?”: One Journalist’s Perspective on the Mid East’s Environmental Crisis

    ›
    Guest Contributor  //  November 14, 2016  //  By Peter Schwartzstein
    Cairo-skyline

    It was some point in May last year, shortly after ISIS surged into the city of Ramadi, and I was working on a story about Iraq’s fast-disappearing Mesopotamian Marshes. Keen to fact-check a few statistics with the Ministry of Water Resources and to hear the government line on the wetlands’ struggles, I dialed its Baghdad offices. After being passed from official to official like a hot potato, a young employee, Hussein, finally gave it to me straight. “No, no, we don’t have this sort of information,” he said, clearly impatient to get off the phone. “There are much more important things in Iraq right now.”

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