Climate Change Is Raising the Temperature on Global Conflict

Peter Schwartzstein's first book, The Heat and the Fury: On the Frontlines of Climate Violence, offers a vital and riveting account of how climate change is already pulling societies apart.

Schwartzstein draws on more than a decade of on-the-ground reporting to both distill and humanize these complex conflicts, be they local or national.

Climate change has been destroying, for many foreign communities, the consistencies in the landscape people have always fallen back on.

The fact that everything from temperatures to precipitation patterns is falling out of whack is contributing to trauma.

The professions most vulnerable to climate stresses are agricultural, so rural areas emerge as nodes of instability.

A lot of that excitement, however, is also coming from the fact that at least on a local level, [pulling] environmental levers has been successful in reining in, and sometimes preventing, violence big and small. There’s certainly a recognition among local communities and nation-states alike that environmental issues are not zero -sum, that they demand cooperation. I think it’s a real “watch this space” situation..