Note: This transcript is auto generated and lightly edited.
CULLEN: Rather than thinking about a smoking gun, think about climate change as effectively loading the dice and making it more likely on margin that bad things are going to happen. And I think that if you think about us entering a future where the dice are increasingly loaded, it helps us to kind of understand the increasing risk we're facing if we do not take the task of climate mitigation and adaptation seriously.
MONICA: Welcome to Policy for the Planet, a new bimonthly podcast exploring the global response to the climate crisis.
I'm Monica de Bolle, a best-selling author and senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, based in Washington, D.C. My work bridges the fields of economics, science, public policy, and public health–all under an international lens.
In each episode, I speak in-depth with experts to understand how governments are responding to the monumental challenges of the climate emergency. We'll unravel the complex tradeoffs of different policy choices to steer us toward sustainable practices and public well-being.
Welcome to the conversation!
In a world grappling with the far-reaching impacts of climate change, one often overlooked issue is its role in armed conflicts.
How does climate change exacerbate armed conflicts — and how do conflicts get in the way of climate efforts?
Joining me is Cullen S. Hendrix, whose research examines the intricate relationships between international markets, natural resources and conflict — as well as the economic and security implications of climate change.
Cullen is a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, nonresident senior research fellow at the Center for Climate & Security, and fellow at the Payne Institute at the Colorado School of Mines.
Hi Cullen and welcome to the show. We're very fortunate to have you speak about climate change and conflict, a topic you've been studying for a long time. So let's jump right in. Can you tell us about your research expertise and how you got involved studying climate related conflicts?
CULLEN: Oh, goodness. Well, I'd like to think that I was a relatively early adopter in terms of studying the impacts of climate change on armed conflict. I recall very vividly conversation I had with a potential dissertation committee member way back in the mid 2000s when I told them what I was interested in studying and they said, "I don't know, you know, that's kind of a frontier topic. think you might be better off studying something a little bit more mainstream."
And fortunately, I guess for my career, but unfortunately for the world, the topic that I chose to study a couple of decades ago has become relatively top of mind, not just for people in the national security community, but indeed for really anyone who's interested in the future of the planet writ large and the immense challenges that we face as a result of this 250-year uncontrolled experiment in modifying our climate as a byproduct of our efforts to develop a robust modern economy.
MONICA: Can you explain the ways in which climate change can drive conflict and how conflict and exacerbate the effects of climate change? How big of a problem is this going to be?
CULLEN: Sure. So you've asked me to cover a vast amount of territory and in trying to be succinct, I'm not sure I'll get to every element of the question, but maybe it makes sense to start with kind of just generally recognizing that armed conflict obviously has disastrous consequences for the human communities on which it's visited, but it really does have concrete effects for the natural environment as well.
And those effects are almost always uniformly negative. I mean, we could start just by acknowledging that in the context of armed conflict, both big, you know, sort of major wars, but then also smaller wars or civil wars, you have a lot of activities that revolve around deliberate destruction of crops and farmland and infrastructure key to managing natural resources like dams and aqueducts. Some of our older listeners may remember a US military operation during the Vietnam War called Operation Ranch Hand, which was the mass deployment of Agent Orange, which is a defoliant. It causes plants to die. And that has had remarkable long-term effects, not just for the landscape in Vietnam, but obviously for people who were exposed to Agent Orange and the health impacts that that's had on them.
Conflicts also tend to displace people. If you're living in an active war zone, unless you're actively being prevented from leaving, as is the case, unfortunately, facing many Palestinians in Gaza right now, you tend to leave and the people who are displaced by conflict are often wind up in very marginal lands with relatively few kind of sustainable livelihood opportunities and tend to engage in really unsustainable kind of practices in order to meet their daily needs.
So to give you a concrete example of that.
So refugees fleeing the Rwandan Civil War in the Democratic Republic of Congo deforested in an area of about 38 square kilometers in their first two weeks in residence around the city of Goma. And it was deforested largely because there was no alternative energy source for them. So you had the active cutting down of trees in order to make charcoal, in order to provide heat and to provide cooking opportunities.
Surveyors who wound up in Afghanistan with boots on the ground after the US coalition invaded that country after the September 11th attacks found that roughly half of that country's natural woodlands, in particular, an important crop, pistachio woodlands, have been cut down for similar types of uses. So it's important to recognize that there are large localized environmental impacts of conflict. Now, moving on to thinking about the kind of the climate footprint, I mean, there are sort of two things I would flag. The first is that all of these kind of changes in the natural environment that are a function of the experience of wartime have negative consequences for the resilience of those territories moving forward. So if you have a loss of tree cover, right, that imposes a double kind of climate burden. In the first instance, right, you're losing that store of carbon that the trees were providing us, a really valuable ecosystem service. And in the second instance, you have a landscape and a terrain that doesn't have those trees in place that are able to help prevent erosion. So you have knock -on effects that are negative in terms of the ability to sustain topsoil and the like.
But, you know, there's also a very large and direct climate footprint of mechanized warfare. So most vehicles and troop transports, with the exception of nuclear powered aircraft carriers and submarines, these are not alternative fuel vehicles. And the carbon footprint of the US military alone and its operations is staggering. During the height of operations in Iraq in 2006 and 2007, the US military was using the same amount of gasoline on a daily basis as the entire country of Sweden.
And then thinking about a more contemporary example, we now have estimates from the initiative on greenhouse gas accounting of war, which suggests that the Ukraine war has produced about 175 million excess tons of CO2 by the start of 2024. So in essentially about 22 months of active war fighting, that's on par with the annual emissions from countries like Argentina, Algeria, and the Philippines.
So it's clear that human activities and warfare have a negative climate footprint. Now, inverting that discussion and thinking about the impact of climate change on conflict, here's where things get interesting and here's why it's important to leverage social science expertise in these kinds of discussions. Saying that any particular conflict was caused uniquely and mostly by climate change is a very difficult thing to establish.
MONICA: Absolutely.
CULLEN: Because we're right, we're not, we don't live in a controlled laboratory environment where we can assess these kinds of things in that kind of, you know, sterile environment where we get to vary the treatment, you know, just conduct experiments. But what we do know from analyzing large data sets of armed conflict and conflict related events like riots and protests and the like, things that we might put under the banner of something called social conflict, we know that climate change and its localized impacts, mostly operating through temperature and changes in precipitation, have a separate, know, analytically separable, which is a fancy way of saying we can isolate the increasing the likelihood of these types of conflicts.
Now, you asked me to talk about an example. I think that, you know, the one of the examples that a lot of people have pointed to would be the conflict in Sudan, not just the most recent conflict, but also the conflict that occurred in Darfur earlier in the 21st century. But I would say if you were to ask people in sort of policy circles in Washington or in the humanitarian response community, they would point to the Syrian civil war as one of the more obvious cases of a conflict that was sparked by climate change. And in this case, it was a historic drought that occurred in the Fertile Crescent that was a multi -year phenomenon that caused crop failure and then led to a variety of kind of adverse outcomes. It left a lot of farmers and people who keep animals out of work. These people crowded into urban areas in Syria, looking for jobs and looking for social safety nets and did not find them.
What they found was a lack of opportunity and an often really draconian response coming from the Assad government. Now, there people who would argue with that particular characterization. I think that the more important thing to focus on is to realize, and this is why it's important that social scientists are investigating this again, that when we talk about the impact of climate change in a particular ecosystem or in a particular country, it's not occurring in a vacuum.
There are specific social, political, and demographic contexts in which these kinds of climate shocks, say a drought or flooding, for instance, are more impactful than in other places. And so in Syria, you had a variety of contextual factors that made it kind of among the more likely cases to see large scale conflict emerge in the aftermath of one of these kinds of natural disasters. And those contextual factors are a relatively high degree of dependence on agriculture for livelihoods, right? It's central to the way that people live and to the economy. And also very exclusionary patterns of rule that often break down on ethnic or religious lines. And so those two conditions, which are really important contextual factors for understanding where climate's most extreme effects are likely to occur, were definitely present in Syria.
MONICA: To precisely lay out this very complicated intertwining of issues that may increase the vulnerability of a country that's faced with a climate shock, like a drought, to have an outright conflict that becomes this very, very serious conflagration. So I thought a lot of the discussion around that that you just brought up is fascinating and there's so much more that we can continue on here. But before we do that, I did want to ask you this. Why should people from different countries and from distant countries at that? So let's say why should people in the United States care about the vulnerability that climate change poses to armed conflict elsewhere?
CULLEN: Well, I would love it if it were the case that just the simple humanitarian toll of these conflicts were enough to motivate people in the United States living climate controlled lives in relative opulence. I would love it if it were the case that the stark human cost of these conflicts were enough to motivate concern about the role that our lifestyles are playing in making the globe increasingly not uninhabitable, but a more difficult place to live. Having said that, I think it makes sense to tie this into sort of the direct sort of security consequences for people in the United States. And I can focus on, I think, three of them.
The first is that these kind of climate-related disasters create the types of ungoverned spaces in which violent actors can operate with relative impunity. And you don't need to look very much further back in American history to understand that it was precisely a failed state context in Afghanistan where a group like Al -Qaeda was able to develop a base of support and a base of operations that allowed them to fundamentally alter the course of American life in the 21st century.
So, mean there's one reason they should be concerned. Another reason that they should be concerned is that as many places on the earth are becoming less inhabitable, humans are going to be responding. And one of the primary mechanisms through which they'll be responding is through migration. People are not simply going to stay and wither on the vine, so to speak, in the places where they find themselves experiencing climate stress. Some very, very poor people may be trapped there, yes. But one of the big mechanisms by which climate change will be addressed is through migration. Now, most of the time and in most places, migration is an incredibly beneficial adaptation to climate change. It is not the fire underneath the kettle that is causing things to boil. Migration is in fact the release valve for that.
Now, having said that, you don't need to take more than a cursory scan at the headlines or to listen to a lot of the rhetoric coming out of the US presidential election to understand that rapid migration, especially unplanned migration, imposes certain stressors on the host communities that are receiving migrants. And so it's, you know, perhaps not surprising that when the Biden administration released a White House special report on climate change and migration and security implications. It foregrounded specifically the effects that climate change was having via natural disasters and decreased crop productivity and livelihood options in Central America for the migration crisis that the United States is now facing.
And then there's also a third component of this, which is now we see a climate signature and a climate related signature thinking about things like El Nino, for instance, in patterns of competition over trans boundary resources, in particular, marine fisheries. And these types of conflicts are not likely, know, a conflict over a fishing vessel is not likely to be the straw that breaks the camel's back, for instance, in say a Taiwan Strait scenario. But it is the case that these kinds of conflicts are becoming increasingly common under climate change.
And they are increasingly involving major powers like the United States and China and Russia whose actions in the security domain are relevant for every living human on the planet. So if those three reasons don't convince you, I could go on in a little bit more depth, but hopefully those will suffice to get some people's attention.
MONICA: Absolutely. I'm fully convinced, but I don't need to be convinced. I'm very happy that you talked about migration as one of the three motivations that you've spelled out because we in this podcast, we cover migration and climate change and we have done so with Michael Clemens and the gist of what he has said is very much in line with what you've said because he identifies migration precisely as a means towards or a way towards climate adaptation. In other words, what you've said. Climate adaptation is going to happen through various different channels, one of which is migration. And we should not be in the business of trying to stop migration precisely because we need that adjustment mechanism to work. It is an adjustment mechanism for this purpose. But we also know that a lot of people may not be able to migrate. They're gonna be locked in, as you also mentioned, where they are, even if where they are is currently uninhabitable, but they will have to stay where they are because they won't have the resources to migrate, even if it's internal migration and not international migration.
So I think, you know, the points around climate change and migration and the nuances that we have tried to provide our listeners with, because it is important, there are nuances. It's not a good or bad type of situation. It's a situation that you have to analyze deeply in order to get a sense of what's happening. I think you've brought that nuance in the same with the same spirit that we have been discussing this podcast, is absolutely great. I did though want to come back to El Nino, which you've mentioned, which has been part of your research and your research agenda. But first, can you explain to our listeners what El Nino is? Very basic, just in very basic terms.
CULLEN: Okay, goodness. we spend a lot of time kind of worrying about climate change as this sort of all -encompassing kind of phenomenon. But as I mentioned before, studying the effects of climate change is somewhat difficult because, you know, it's a relatively, I mean, it's not relatively, it is actually an uncontrolled experiment. We only have one experience of this secular increase in, you know, this consistent increase
in the volume of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere and the various ways in which that plays out for the planet. But we can sort of study it and understand it by proxy by thinking about the impacts of El Nino or more properly the El Nino Southern Oscillation.
This is the largest by far driver of year-to-year variability in the global climate system. And so because it changes on, you know, periodic oscillation between cooler La Niña conditions. These are conditions in the central Pacific which radiate out through the globe through what scientists refer to as teleconnections, which are just correlations and relationships between climate phenomenon over massive geographic scales. We can look at oscillations between the La Niña or cool phase, neutral phases, and then the El Niño or warm phase and the effects that that has for global climate.
And the particular effects are kind of highly dependent on where you are in the globe. But in general, the El Nino brings with it a variety of challenges. It tends to be associated with lower crop productivity. It's also associated with increasing risk of flooding in certain geographic regions, but also drought in other geographic regions. And we now know based on a body of scholarship going back about a decade and a half, that there are relatively large impacts on this transition from the La Nina, or cool phase, to the El Nino, or warm phase, for armed conflict. So some scholars, a paper that was led by a scholar named Solomon Chang, who is at UC Berkeley, found that this transition from La Nina conditions to El Nino conditions, resulted in essentially a doubling of the risk of the outbreak of civil war in tropical countries, which are highly teleconnected relative to La Niña conditions.
So we already knew kind of going into thinking about this, that there was an impact on conflict outcomes. Now I've been looking at the impact of El Niño, which is a global phenomenon, on sort of a global indicator of something that's very closely conceptually tied to armed conflict or insecurity, which is geopolitical risk. And using a really nifty data set that is highly granular on changes in geopolitical risk over time, what I found was kind of counterintuitive. And you can, if you're interested and you're wonky enough to wade through some regression tables, you can find the working paper at the Peterson website.
What I found was somewhat consistent with kind of the conventional wisdom. So that La Nina conditions were in fact associated with the lowest levels of political risk. But I found in my analysis that actually it's the neutral phases. It's the periods of transition between La Nina and El Nino that are actually associated with the highest levels of political risk.
El Nino conditions are still somewhat higher relative to La Nina conditions, but they're not as high as during this neutral phase.
And so I think that's an interesting finding in its own right. And at this point, you know, if I'm being completely honest, cards on the table, this is a finding in need of better understanding of the mechanisms that underpin it.
Here's my conjecture. My sense is that yes, so El Nino is associated with all of these kind of bad outcomes, know, poor crop harvests, know, increased food insecurity. It's also associated with an increase in outbreaks of certain pathogens, which I know is a topic near and dear to your heart.
And my conjecture is that actually what might be going on here is that in the midst of these types of crises, governments, civil society, they're kind of taking water over the side, so to speak. These are times when there are really acute challenges that shift the focus away from maybe kind of the high politics of geopolitical strategizing and you know, this sort of kind of Masters of the Universe kind of approach to thinking about geopolitics and thinking about national security and focus attention much more on addressing these kind of discrete impacts that are acute during these El Nino phases. During La Nina phases, you don't have the kind of pressures that are associated with the El Nino phase in terms of factors that would contribute to geopolitical risk.
But at the extreme conditions that you would find in a really bad El Nino, governments are too busy worrying about their problems in -house to be in much of the mood, so to speak, for foreign wars or adventurism, to use some euphemistic terminology there. And this is somewhat consistent with some of the pre -existing research on the impacts of droughts on conflict.
One of the interesting factors that co-authors of mine and I about 10 years ago kind of discovered was that, you know, if you look at patterns of conflict and cooperation between countries that share rivers, for instance, this is an important transboundary resource. I probably don't need to sell your listeners on the importance of rivers and freshwater to our lives and livelihoods. That actually the conflict risk between these countries that share rivers tends to go down during periods when they're experiencing acute water stress created by drought. It's actually in relatively more abundant times in terms of the availability of fresh water that these countries are likely to come into conflict. And to use somewhat kind of jargony economics terms, I think that's because in the midst of a crisis, the opportunity cost of sending your military and a lot of blood and treasure into a neighboring country is extremely high because those are resources that can't be used to build resilience or to engage in disaster response on the home front. And so if you ask me to conjecture, that would be the direction I might take.
MONICA: Yeah, no, I would agree with you. And I was thinking in those terms precisely when I asked you when I asked you the question, because that is, think for us as well for me as an economist, for you as a political scientist who has a lot of interaction with the economies, it would be it makes sense. Right. I mean, if you're in the middle of dealing with a very serious drought or a very serious, let's say, situation of widespread fires, forest fires. Countries in South America have recently been through this. There was a massive forest fire that affected Brazil and affected other neighboring countries, and all of that was extremely serious. The fires are still burning. Nonetheless, you could see how governments in the region became extremely focused on, okay, what do we do about this situation? And therefore, you know, other things that might have been going on in those countries were put aside for a while in order for governments to have that focus.
So I think, you know, your conjecture, which our listeners should know is a conjecture from both of us, because here we are deviating a little bit from the scientific evidence to provide people with some clues as to what might be happening. But certainly, you know, that the fact that these the conflict arises when the crisis is not acute is a phenomenal one and one that we should understand, underscore and keep in mind at all times because we are going to be potentially seeing more and more of this, correct?
CULLEN: I don't think there's any question about that. Yes. So we are, you some people have, have, have turned this, the conditions we're living in currently a poly crisis, right? It's a crisis related to climate change. It's a crisis related to the breakdown of the institutions or the, less efficient functioning of the institutions that have governed, global economic cooperation for decades and it's also a crisis that is related to the changing nature of our relationship with our energy systems, right? So that we, in order to address the climate crisis, we first have to address our dependence on fossil fuels and the challenges that are inherent to that. I've spent a lot of my career as well thinking about the geopolitics of conventional energy and a transition to a less carbon intensive global economy, less carbon intensive energy systems is going to bring a lot of benefits, but it's not without its own risks as well.
MONICA: So Cullen, you also do a lot of research on the geopolitics and politics of natural resources, including critical minerals. And these are resources that are needed to manufacture EVs, electric vehicles, for instance. EVs were a topic covered in another episode with Mary Lovely. And many countries that produce these critical minerals are in Africa, in Asia, in Latin America, and they are politically fragile and prone to conflict. So how can we ensure the sustained availability of these resources in world markets given the extreme fragility of the countries where we find those minerals, and how should major economies address this?
CULLEN: Well, you've identified, I think, the $64 billion question, if I can add a couple of orders of magnitude to the old saw there. Well, you know, I think it's important to kind of reflect on where we've come from. So for the last several decades, when we think about stability of supply for these minerals ranging from lithium to cobalt to nickel to graphite, that are key for energy transitions, the answer was China is solving the problem for us. So China had developed immense kind of capacity to mine both at home and abroad and process these kinds of minerals at relatively low cost in order to provide the basic building blocks for creating green energy systems. That situation from the perspective of both advanced economies, but then also many of the mineral rich developing and middle income countries that you referred to is no longer tenable.
And so I don't think that the status quo is going to continue moving forward. And what that means is that the advanced economies, the United States in particular, are engaged in a project of de -risking or what's come to be called de -risking, of attempting to diversify these supply chains and bring more of that production outside of the People's Republic of China and then in some instances into the advanced economies themselves as a means of addressing market volatility.
And also concerns about supply disruptions. I think that the challenge that you've highlighted in the question is that China may have been the processor of choice for these minerals, but many times these minerals were found in countries with relatively unstable kind of politics. And so one of the challenges that the United States is facing is it attempts to diversify these supply chains is interacting more with these types of economies. I'll just do a very brief example on this.
So one of the places that the United States has targeted for as an alternative source of supply of graphite, which is this key input for the active anodes in EV batteries, is the Cabo Delgado region of Mozambique. The graphite that is found there, the natural graphite is wonderful. It is very high grade. The mine is owned by a company that has processing capacity here in the United States. But to the extent that many of your listeners have heard about the Cabo Delgado region, what they probably know about it is that it's been a place where the Mozambican government and a coalition of African forces has been fighting a vicious counterinsurgency against Mozambique's local franchise of the Islamic State. This is a challenge that is going to be confronted, I think, on a multitude of fronts moving forward.
Now, what can be done to best assure that these supply chains are stable? Well, mean, one of the things that I think is very important is much more direct engagement by the advanced economies themselves with these countries in order to develop credible alternative business models to the business model that has been put on the table by China and Chinese firms.
And in doing so, hopefully these Western firms, which have learned a lot from their checkered past with mining operations in developing and middle income countries, can hopefully put on the table more socially and environmentally sustainable practices that will address some of the big challenges that have come with mining in the past. mean, we can't dodge the fact that mining has significant local impacts and that many of the benefits of mining often don't accrue to the communities where it takes place. And so we need a better model. I think that we do have better models for that. The next challenge is going to be unlocking the billions, if not trillions of dollars in climate finance that are going to be necessary, not just to build out these supply chains, but to make these developing and middle income countries overall more resilient to climate change. And providing a solution to that challenge is beyond the wisdom of Solomon. I'm sure it's also beyond my wisdom as well.
MONICA: Well, but nonetheless, you brought us a somewhat optimistic message, right? In saying that, you know, the involvement of advanced economies can be very beneficial to all. It can be beneficial to advanced economies and to the other economy, the critical mineral supplier, which is going to be probably a much less developed economy as well.
Which brings me to the final question I wanted to ask you about, you know, having room for optimism. I guess the response to that is, yes, there is some room for optimism in some fronts, but I'd like you to react to that. Can we be somewhat optimistic? Should we be somewhat optimistic? And what should we be looking for as signs that governments and international organizations are addressing the problems properly.
CULLEN: I am in fact optimistic. That doesn't often come out when you read my work directly, but I am optimistic and I'll give you two reasons and then bring it to a more meta contextual level, if you will. The first is that the technology that we need to transition our energy systems is here. It is here now and the increasing kind of tech competition between the global north or the west or the United States or the advanced economies and China is likely in the medium term and longer term to drive down the cost of adopting that new technology to transition away from fossil fuels even more rapidly in the future.
The second reason is that there are lots of, all you have to do is turn on the news to be horrified by the pockets of extreme violence that exist in the world. Having said that those pockets of extreme violence exist against a backdrop of a historic decline in the number of people in the world who are experiencing extreme poverty. If you are an average person living in an average developing country, your prospects for living a long, prosperous and healthy life are better now than they have ever been.
And if I can move to the meta kind of contextual level, the history of humanity is a history of running a race against the constraints and obstacles that have been put in front of us by our environment. And over and over again, for hundreds of thousands of years now, humanity has proven itself equal to that challenge. So in any context, no matter how dire the circumstances may seem, I'm betting long on humanity because we've been through very challenging times before and have come out of it better for it, more secure, better able to deploy technology and knowledge to move the world forward, and hopefully in a better position to understand the mistakes we've made in the past and build a more sustainable future, not just for those of us fortunate enough to live in advanced economies and live these climate-controlled lives, but indeed for people of the world.
So if you're thinking about a metaphor for the relative kind of causal importance of climate change on armed conflict outcomes, you're not looking for a smoking gun. You're not, you're not looking for a situation in which it's clear and dead obvious that climate change caused some bad outcome to occur. Rather than thinking about a smoking gun, think about climate change as effectively loading the dice and making it more likely on margin that bad things are going to happen. And I think that if you think about us entering a future where the dice are increasingly loaded, it helps us to kind of understand the increasing risk we're facing if we do not take the task of climate mitigation and adaptation seriously.
MONICA: Well, thank you very much, Cullen. This has been a fascinating conversation. I hope you've enjoyed it. I hope our listeners have enjoyed it. It was a great pleasure to have you on the show. So many issues and so many different threads to pull here. A lot to unpack and a lot to think about. So thank you very, very much for your time. Thank you for coming on the show. And hopefully, we'll have you again if you can.
CULLEN: The pleasure is all mine and I'm happy to come on anytime you call.
MONICA: Thank you for joining me on Policy for the Planet. Have a question or a topic to suggest? Email me at [email protected]. I'd love to hear from you.
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