Season 4 | Episode 4

The Stakes

The number of things at stake in the climate crisis do not fit inside one episode. It's hard to even fit them inside your mind. Part of what makes the potential losses so hard to grasp is that they're happening at lots of different scales, all at the same time. And as we move back and forth between what's happening out our own backdoors with what we know is happening all around the globe, one thing becomes very clear: there's no separating what we're doing to nature from what we're doing to ourselves. 

In this episode, we look at what climate chaos could do to our ability to meet our basic needs and live together in relative harmony, and explore what we all stand to lose if we don’t act fast enough.

Guests

Read More

• The net-zero transition: What it would cost, what it could bring — Report published in McKinsey Sustainability

• Global Warming of 1.5ºC — Special report published by IPCC

• A Degree of Concern: Why Global Temperatures Matter by Alan Buis, NASA’s Global Climate Change website

• Yale Climate Opinion Maps 2021 — Map and research published by Yale Program on Climate Change Communication

• The Paris Agreement — The Paris Agreement, often referred to as the Paris Accords or the Paris Climate Accords, is an international treaty on climate change, adopted in 2015

• Guest post: Hundreds of planned coal mines ‘incompatible with 1.5C target’ by Dr. Ryan Driskell Tate, Carbon Brief

Listener Submissions

A special thanks to all of our listeners who responded to our call for reflections around climate grief. We had more submissions than we were able to fit into the episode, so enjoy this special collection of listener responses.

Credits

Transcript

[00:00] Introduction

JUDIT HOLLOS: Threshold is made with the support of listeners like you. Join us at thresholdpodcast.org. 

JOE LOVISKA: Hey Threshold. It's Joe Loviska. I'm up Beaver Creek in Montana on a little ski trip with a few friends. This experience is what I'd be really sad to lose because of climate change.

AMY: Welcome to Threshold, I'm Amy Martin, and as we were putting this season together, we asked you, our listeners, to think out loud with us about loss and climate change. What you're worried about losing. What you might already be grieving. We’re going to share some of your responses in this episode. This is what our pal Joe Loviska sent us.

JOE LOVISKA: As we progress through climate change we're just seeing less and less snow falling and it's being replaced by rain. So one day there may be a time when a place like this no longer gets continuously covered in winter snow and I wouldn't be able to ski on top of the creek as we're doing now. And that would make me really sad. So that's just one thing about climate change that I'd be sad to lose.

AMY: This season of Threshold is about the small window of time we have left before we hit one-point-five degrees Celsius of warming over pre-industrial levels. So, our time, right now. What we're doing. And not doing. After spending three episodes getting oriented to this problem—figuring out where the one-point-five number came from and what the atmosphere actually is—I'm eager to start investigating how we can get ourselves out of this mess. What we should we do first, and how to do it. And we're going to get there in future episodes. But before we can move fully into problem-solving mode, I think we have to grapple with a big, obvious, and really difficult question: what happens if we fail?

MUSIC

AMY: What will the consequences be if we hit one-point-five and keep on warming the world to two degrees or more? We have to ask this, because that's what we're on track for now: two-point-seven degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels by the end of this century. That amount of warming, in that amount of time, would be a catastrophe.

But what kind of catastrophe exactly? What kind of future are we heading into if we don't act decisively on climate in the next few years? These are not fun questions, I know. They make me anxious and angry and sad. So many people, all around the world, are feeling deep worry and grief about what we're doing to the climate. But as hard as it is to face these feelings, I think there's power in bringing them out into the open, where they can be seen and shared and possibly transformed into useful action.

And as we make space to process some feelings, we're also going to arm ourselves with some facts with the help of three different experts. It's not enough to say that the climate crisis is bad, that our carbon emissions are harmful. We need to get much clearer about the specifics. Who and what is at risk here? What are the real stakes of failing to meet the one-point-five goal?

We have to examine that possible future, because it might be the one we're choosing. And I think we owe it to ourselves, and future generations, and every other living thing on this planet to confront what that means.

MUSIC: THRESHOLD THEME

“I don’t want to live in a society in which the climate crisis is solved, but injustices are permanent.”

“Most people are really affected by climate change don’t have the resources to migrate. 

“To keep kicking the ball further and further down the road, it’s going to get harder and harder to deal with.”

“What we’ve called these tipping points and extremes are not that far away. In fact, the future is closer than we think and we are unprepared.”

[04:58] Segment A

SHAMIM: Sandhill cranes, I’d really miss sandhill cranes. There isn’t a fall or spring that goes by that I don’t stop what I’m doing when they come over. And this year’s migration was really late and it makes me wonder what’s to come. 

MUSIC

JULIA: The first thing that pops into my head, I think, are seasons, like distinct seasons, and specifically spring, which really seems to be vanishing, and if spring disappeared entirely, obviously, that would have huge ramifications for what that would mean for plants and animals and us and our Earth. But I also would just miss the experience of spring, the temperatures, the feeling of the air, the type of sun, the breeze. Yeah, spring. 

AMY: The number of things at stake in climate do not fit inside one episode. It's hard to even fit them inside my mind. The list of plants and animals at risk of extinction is long enough to break the hardest of hearts. Polar bears of course. But also corals, koalas, Adélie penguins, leatherback sea turtles, Bengal tigers, mountain gorillas, monarch butterflies and so much more.

CLAUDE: Tadpoles, they used to be so many, and now are very few. So I grieve the loss of tadpoles and of nature, but in the grieving, which is a form of love, there's also energy and connection with other living beings, in order for us to be aware of what we don't want to lose.

DENEEN WEISKE: It would hurt to lose a lot to a changing climate, but the thing I immediately think of is the rich and beautiful boreal forest that surrounds my home. There's nothing quite like the clean smell of conifers throughout the different seasons. Softness of the trails covered by fallen pine needles. It's the forest of fairy tales. I spend hours in it year round. It's already suffering massive impacts from the changing climate, and this far south, it simply will not be able to survive, and it will be heartbreaking to bear witness to its loss.

AMY: Part of what's hard about grasping the potential losses here is that they're happening at lots of different scales, all at the same time. There are these huge planetary changes. Forests converting into savannas. Oceans turning acidic. The ancient dance between pollinators and the pollinated falling out of rhythm. But we experience them in small, personal ways, right outside our own backdoors.

ALEXIS: I would be really sad to lose the Eastern hemlock. It's my favorite species of tree, and is one of the pillars of our Northeastern forests. They're just such powerful trees, and I really can't imagine a forest without them.

MUSIC

AMY: Each of us is holding a small shard of the mirror that shows us what we're losing. And what see in that mirror is very different depending on who we are and where we live. But no matter what our individual contexts are, human all over the plant share basic needs for water, food and security. And the more we knock the climate out of kilter, the more we undermine our capacity to meet those needs and live together in relative harmony. That's what we're going to focus on here: what climate chaos could do to our human societies.

SHERRI: You don't have to have 100 percent certainty that X is going to happen at Y time to kno w that it's a threat.

AMY: Sherri Goodman works in the growing field of climate security: the many ways the climate crisis makes the world world more dangerous for people. She's based in the U.S., and she's been working at the intersection of environment and security for decades. In the 1990s, she became the first person at the U.S. Department of Defense to be named Chief Environment, Safety and Health officer. She's currently the secretary general of the International Military Council on Climate and Security.

SHERRI: Which is a group of generals, admirals and national security professionals in 35 countries around the world, dedicated to elevating attention to climate change and its security impacts.

AMY: So let's ground this conversation with two key data points. First, as I said a few minutes ago, we are currently on track to hit two-point-seven degrees Celsius of warming by the end of this century. Almost double the one-point-five goal. That number comes from the Climate Action Tracker, an international consortium of climate research organizations. Using current real-world emissions and policies—not what countries are saying they hope to achieve but what they are actually doing. That means that number could change—a lot—if we take different actions. So it's not set in stone, but it is bad news. Data point number two is a reminder of something I said in our first episode this season: global warming is like turning the knob on a stove, not flipping a light switch. So if we hit one-point-six degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels, it's not like we suddenly wake up inside Dante's Inferno. But we do take one more step toward it. And as we pass each notch on the climate dial, we make our world less safe.

MUSIC

SHERRI: As General Sullivan, former Army Chief of Staff said, You know, we can't wait for 100 percent certainty. If we do, we know something bad is going to happen on the battlefield. So military leaders are accustomed to operating and making decisions based on incomplete information.

AMY: And she says understanding the climate crisis as a security threat can help leaders make smarter choices.

SHERRI: You know, in the Cold War, we spent billions of dollars of American GDP to deter a Soviet nuclear attack, a bolt out of the blue nuclear attack that we didn't know that it was going to happen, and thankfully it didn't. But, you know, we were willing to invest much of America's treasure, both in money and people to defend and deter against that threat because we conceived it as a low probability, but very high consequence threat, low probability, but high consequence in the climate era. Now we have a threat that is arguably high probability and high consequence now. So, you know, when you frame it that way, you realize and that's why you see today our militaries around the world investing heavily in climate resilience and adaptation and also in mitigation.

AMY: That is such a fascinating frame for this. I'm curious as someone who has kind of been there throughout that evolution, was it was it hard work at first to get military leaders to take your work or your concerns seriously on this front? Or did you find that to be a pretty easy conversation to have of like climate change is a national security thing and we need to be looking at it through that lens.

SHERRI: Oh no, it was. It was definitely hard work. I mean, it was definitely hard work. Climate change was not the wolf closest to the sled. That's a commonly used turn of phrase, “well, I have. I have so many problems I have to worry about. The ones I'm going to really focus on, is what's in my inbox today and maybe for the next year or so.” That's the wolf closest to the sled.

AMY: But Sherri was persistent. She was convinced that military leaders needed to start thinking about the implications of climate change. And slowly, they began to agree.

SHERRI: So there was some skepticism that, oh, OK, well, if environmentalists care about it, then people who don't identify as tree huggers can't. And we were very clear. And in fact, many of our generals said, you know, I'm not a tree hugger, and I'm not doing this for that reason. I'm doing it because I believe in evidence and I'm relying on the evidence. And now increasingly, we know that climate change is that wolf closest to the sled. In fact, it's right on the sled right now when we see the devastating effects of extreme weather events around the world occurring virtually every day.

AMY: Extreme weather events are getting a lot of attention for a lot of good reasons. Let's look at the year 2021 alone. There were deadly cyclones in Fiji, Indonesia, and East Timor. Massive dust storms in China. At the end of June, the most extreme heatwave ever recorded hit the northwestern U.S., and western Canada. Temperatures reached 49.6 degrees Celsius, or 121 degrees Fahrenheit, shattering records and killing hundreds of people. That led into the warmest month ever recorded on our planet, and soon, fires were raging in Siberia, the western U.S., Greece, Italy, and Turkey. Flooding in Europe and China killed hundreds of people, and caused billions of dollars of damage. And the year ended with a deadly typhoon in the Philippines, and a posse of tornadoes that ripped across the southern and central United States. This isn't even a comprehensive tally. And we're at one-point-two degrees of warming.

SHERRI: What you realize is that what we've called these tipping points and extremes are not that far away. In fact, the future, I would say the future is closer than we think. It's much closer than we think and we are unprepared.

AMY: Of course, not every weather disaster has a link to climate change, but our tinkering with the climate is making extreme weather events more likely and more severe. These kinds of catastrophes are hard to deal with even if everything else is more or less normal. But it's not. The hurricanes and flash floods increasingly making headlines around the world are playing out against a backdrop of slower, less dramatic changes that might be harder to detect but are no less important. Our carbon emissions are changing longterm rainfall patterns, wind and ocean currents, rates of snow melt, and as one of our listeners said earlier, the length and timing and nature of the seasons in different locations. And all of those things affect one of the core essentials of human life: food. With each additional degree of warming, we make it harder for ourselves to produce enough food. Climate change is already impacting farmers in the United States, south Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and other parts of the world as well.

SHERRI: Parts of Latin America are drying out and the coffee crop is no longer robust. The agricultural regions have become less productive.

AMY: Food shortages have all kinds of effects beyond hungry bellies. Prices go up, economies get disrupted, families are sometimes forced to abandon their lands. Weak spots in the social fabric and government systems begin to fracture and fray. And in the worst climate scenarios, the world would face massive famines.

SHERRI: Some areas might become more agriculturally productive, like northern regions in Canada and Russia. But a lot of areas become much less agriculturally productive over the next several decades because of drought, extreme weather events, changes in the regular precipitation and monsoon cycles, for example, across much of Asia.

AMY: And then there's water. Let's just ignore sea level rise for a minute, and focus on fresh water.

CAYSI: I will really really miss clean, free water. I don't want the reality of the world to end up being a place where water is something we fight and we die over. Pretty heavy. But this is definitely something that keeps me up at night.

MUSIC

AMY: One region of huge concern is central Asia, where the Himalayas and other mountain ranges hold massive amounts of snow and ice, which helps to provide fresh water for one-and-a-half billion people downstream, in Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, China, and a handful of other countries. Even if we manage to keep global temperature rise to one-point-five degrees, one-third of this ice could be lost by the end of this century. If we warm the world beyond one-point-five, half or even two-thirds of Asia's glacier ice could be gone in 80 years. There's a similar scenario playing out in the Andes Mountains in South America. And these are far from the only regions where lack of fresh water is a growing issue.

SHERRI: Across much of northern Africa, in the Sahel, the drought is becoming even more extreme. And again across many parts of the world now floods, fires, drought all exacerbated by climate change beyond the natural cycles.

AMY: Anyone living in the western U.S. or western Canada knows that wealthier countries are not exempt from devasting drought and fires. Several of our listeners spoke to this…

EVA: Something that I've already been sad to lose with climate change is summer is without wildfire smoke and. And being able to feel like I can spend time outside and be able to walk my dog without worrying about health impacts for him, and being worried that there's particulate pollution leaking into my house through the windows. And just generally, being able to feel like the air isn't this toxic thing that is turning my lungs into a time bomb for cancer.

GRETCHEN: I'm worried and sad about losing the experience of hiking a big mountain and getting to the peak for a view where you feel like you can just see forever. Last summer, I had that experience of going for a hike and kind of being ready to take in a great view and just feeling kind of sad because you could just see all this brown crap in the air blocking the view.

EMERY: Something I'll be sad to lose with climate change are the mountain forests here in New Mexico. These are places where wildflowers bloom in mountain meadows in the summer and where the peaks are covered in snow in the winter. And they're the closest I feel to being at home in nature. But they're really fragile, and if wildfire season continues to grow out of control, or if the climate warms so much that these forests can't survive, I'll lose this feeling of being at home in the wild world.

AMY: On the other side of the continent, in cities like Boston, New York, and Miami, the problem is more likely to be too much water. And many parts of Europe, are already dealing with increased flooding. But although it is important to understand how climate will impact each of our individual communities, I think maybe it's more important to recognize that the climate crisis is a global problem in a very globalized world. It brings an increased risk of pandemics, possible disruptions to supply chains. Things that happen in one place quickly ricochet out and affect us all.

SHERRI: It's abundantly clear now that the climate considerations and climate commitments are mainstream in the foreign policy decision-making of virtually every country now, whether you like it or not. And so it's become part of global geopolitics. And so it's going to be a continuing factor in relations between major powers—the US, China, Russia, Iran. Also between developed and developing countries. Every week now almost brings a new chapter in the permutations of the relationships and affects both how we address and combat climate change, but also relations between countries, from trade to finance, to all the elements of security.

MUSIC

AMY: So let's do some sorting of the potential threats here. Sometimes I hear people say climate change is going to destroy all life on Earth or wipe out humanity as a species. Both of those things are highly unlikely. Many beautiful, complex, and utterly unique species will be lost forever, but life on this planet will persist, and our remarkably adaptable species is a long, long ways from self-extinction. But there is an existential struggle going on here for human civilizations. We need some amount of predictability around core resources of food, water, and habitable territory in order to build every other element of human society: health care, education, government, laws. Art and culture. Technology and trade. These are the things that are really at stake here. Without some basic level of stability and balance in the climate, all of these things could start to crumble, and we may be reduced to a level of social chaos that's hard for us to actually imagine. Possibly a state of constant war. That's why Sherri convened the first group of U.S. generals and admirals to address the national security implications of climate change back in 2006.

SHERRI: We did that because we could see that there were mounting threats to our security from climate change, which we characterized as a threat multiplier, a threat multiplier for instability in fragile regions of the world.

AMY: Everything we've already talked about could help fuel conflict: extreme weather events, long term ecosystem changes, disruptions to our food and water systems. But that's not all. We're literally changing the map of the world—reducing the amount of habitable land in coastal zones, where hundreds of millions of people live, and possibly wiping out some island nations, as Adelle Thomas described in our first episode. As farm lands become deserts and tundras become bogs, we will radically change the number of people who can live in any given region. It's a scale and type and pace of change that our current national and international institutions are not designed for and are not prepared to handle. As we look at all these scary possibilities, it's important to keep in mind that conflicts are created by people, not carbon molecules. There's nothing that says we have to respond to the climate crisis with war, and some past claims of causal links between climate and conflict have later been shown to be overblown or just plain incorrect. We have agency here. People can and often do choose to cooperate, even in very hard times. But making the choice to collaborate might get more difficult as resources become more scarce. An overheated climate adds a lot of new stresses to our societies, and stress tends to bring out the worst in us.

SHERRI: None of these issues exist, you know, in their own silos. That's there's a convergence now of climate and national security. And that's what I often talk about. The climate effects converge on the other security risks we face around the world.

AMY: The elephant in the room here is inequality. Although climate change poses big risks to people everywhere, wealth buys some degree of protection. And one of the cruel ironies here is that nations like the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany have more wealth and protection in large part because of the activities that cause climate change. They industrialized early, and became wealthy through the burning of fossil fuels at a mass scale. Meanwhile, hundreds of millions of people in less developed countries, who did almost nothing to create this problem, live in extreme poverty, with no safety net, no parachute cord to pull when climate disaster strikes. This is an increasing source of tension on the international stage; I saw it first hand at the UN climate talks in Glasgow, Scotland. I wanted to get Sherri's take on this.

AMY: I heard person after person, not just protesters, but people inside the blue zone in Glasgow talking about inequality as a huge driving factor of what this problem is based on and why we're having a hard time solving it. How do you think about that in a security context?

SHERRI: Well, in a security context, the goal is always peace and stability. So if you think the objective is peace and stability, then persistent, prolonged and massive inequality is disruptive to peace and stability.

PROTESTORS: Global warming is a war / of the rich against the poor!

AMY: I'm out on the streets in Glasgow, on the second day of massive protests held during the UN climate conference. Every group that walks by seems to have a different slogan. This group is shouting over and over, “global warming is a war of the rich against the poor.”

PROTESTORS: chant continues

AMY: I stand off to the side, watching them for a while. Some of them looked a little surprised to be there, maybe a little unsure of themselves. Some look really angry. And all of them look very young.

PROTESTORS: chant continues

AMY: I wonder what the world will look like for them, 20 or 30 years from now. Will they be telling their kids stories about how they helped to avery the worst? Will they still be passionately protesting this war? Or if they might be fighting in it.

TALIAH: I don't know what our planet is going to be like in a few decades, and I don't know if I feel good about choosing to bring another human being into the world when I cannot say with any kind of certainty that they won't be born into a world that's full of supply issues or food shortages or inhospitable conditions. I'm sure some people out there would say, oh my gosh, you're being so dramatic. There's no reason to doubt that your future exists, you'll be fine, we'll be fine, and maybe I will be fine with all of the privilege that I have backing me up. But not everybody will be. And maybe I won't be, maybe you won't be. It's weird to think, and it's weird to press on as if nothing is massively wrong, when we don't know how wrong it can go.

AMY: We'll have more after this short break.

Break

[31:18] Segment B

BRUNO: I believe that an ecological and climate transition will be completely inevitable. I believe that it will happen. But the main question that we need to ask ourselves is: how and in which terms this transition will develop.

AMY: Welcome back to Threshold, I'm Amy Martin, and this is Bruno Rodriguez, one of the founders and leaders of an organization called Youth for Climate Argentina, a branch of the global Fridays for Future movement.

BRUNO: I'm 21 years old, and I study political science at the University of Bueños Aires, my home city.

AMY: I heard Bruno speak at an event hosted by the New York Times in conjunction with the UN climate conference in Glasgow. And I knew right away that I wanted to talk to him further about this intersection between the climate crisis and global inequality. We met online after the conference, and Bruno told me his pathway into these issues started when he was just 14 years old. That's when he started working with people in some of the poorest neighborhoods of Bueños Aires. Later, when he participated in his school's model UN team, he started to make connections between major international issues and what he was seeing on the ground in his city.

BRUNO: I started to understand the interlink between the violation of human rights and vulnerable economic and social conditions and the effects of the climate crisis.

MUSIC

AMY: In previous episodes, we've talked about how the climate crisis isn't being caused equally and how its impacts aren't landing equally earlier. That’s already happening. But in a future where we fail to limit temperature rise to one-point-five degrees, it's almost certain that the gap between the haves and have-nots will grow exponentially. And there's another layer here: even the actions we take to solve climate change could make inequality worse if we're not careful.

BRUNO: For example, let's change or the fleets of cars which are sustained by fossil fuels to electric cars. OK, but how are you going to do that? Are you going to exploit the territories, which have the most important natural resource to develop that poses, which is the lithium triangle, Bolivia and Chile and Argentina?

AMY: These three countries possess more than half of the lithium in the world. And demand for the metal is going through the roof—for electric cars, cell phones, and everything else that uses a lithium battery. But the process of extracting lithium has a lot of environmental impacts. One common method requires a ton of energy, which adds to the climate problem. Another method requires huge amounts of water—around half a million gallons per one ton of lithium—and the use of toxic chemicals that can contaminate local waterways. That's the method that's primarily being used in Latin America. And even if the environmental impacts could be minimized, there's the question of who benefits from mining and selling the lithium. Because right now, foreign companies are doing the bulk of it in Bolivia and Argentina, and local communities are dealing with water shortages and other problems, while receiving few if any benefits.

BRUNO: And you're going to leave absolutely nothing to those communities in order to finance your energy transition process in the U.S. and the European Union? Or is it going to be fair for all of us? Is it going to be a just transition in geopolitical terms.

AMY: Bruno is by no means saying we shouldn't do everything we can to transform our economy away from fossil fuels. But what he and thousands of other activists, especially young people, are demanding, is that this energy transformation has to include a transformation of the underlying power dynamics too.

BRUNO: It's a circular fight which interacts with social issues, economic issues, human rights issues, environmental issues as well.

AMY: Simply put, he's saying fairness matters in the climate crisis. And I'd like to think that fairness matters because fairness matters. Full stop. Countries and companies should put human rights front and center in their responses to the climate crisis because it's the right thing to do. But if that's not enough to convince everyone, there's also a very pragmatic reason: if this transition isn't fair, it won't work. People will rebel against it. For instance, a lithium mine in Tibet caused so much damage to local streams that people threw piles of dead fish into the streets of their village in protest. A so-called “green revolution” that evokes that kind of response isn't green, and isn't a revolution. It's business as usual. It's the same old-fashioned definition of progress that we've been using since the Industrial Revolution. Like we talked about in our last episode, that definition celebrates successes while ignoring the costs. And Bruno says if we don't disrupt that way of thinking, then we are headed into a very dark time.

BRUNO: Well, I think that the world which failed to deliver good climate action it is a world of a dystopia. It is indeed a world in which the present social injustices and the present economic gaps are deepened in a way that we cannot imagine.

AMY: The latest reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change confirm this. All the impacts we've already touched on—sea level rise, heat waves, the location and amount of land in which it's possible to produce food, fresh water availability—all of these things could make the lives of the poorest people on the planet much worse, and drive hundreds of millions of additional people into poverty.

BRUNO: And it will be also a crisis in which we are going to have, for example, new mass levels of refugees, which it will create like a sub-crisis in the climate crisis. It will be the crisis of the climate refugees. And imagine what that would be in a world in which water is extremely compromised by the consequences of the climate crisis.

MUSIC

BRUNO: So personally, and I think of this very deeply, I think that if we do not engage with solutions which are based on this international diagnosis of extreme geopolitical asymmetries between the global north and the south, even though we have a transition waging on from from north to the future, it will be impossible for us to live in a fair society. And I don't want to live in a society in which the climate crisis is solved but the injustices are prominent. So I think that is the main and the key problem that we need to look at.

MUSIC

AMY: So, I just have to take a minute in all of this heaviness to notice something pretty remarkable about the youth climate movements happening all around the world. They refuse to leave anyone out. They're just done with the whole mentality of sacrifice zones, and expendable, erasable people. Sure, it's a lot easier to speak those ideals than it is to put them into practice. But I don't think there's ever been a time when this many young people, in countries all over the world, were as conscious of the connections between their individual lives, the global human community, and the health of the planet.

MUSIC

AMY: Bruno and I actually spent most of our conversation talking about how to build this positive vision for the future, not contemplating dystopias. So you'll be hearing more from him this season. But I want to turn now to a topic that he mentioned a moment ago: how the climate crisis could force people to leave their homes, or even their home countries. Climate migration is on a lot of people's minds right now. Both the fact of it, and the fear of it.

CHRISTIANE: I think the very, very first step is an acute awareness when talking about climate change and its its consequences, an acute awareness of how we how we talk about it and the impact of how we talk about it.

AMY: Christiane Fröhlich is a research fellow with the German Institute for Global and Area Studies.

CHRISTIANE: I'm based in Hamburg and I'm a peace and conflict researcher by training.

AMY: And she says we have to start any discussion of climate migration with an understanding that there can be a big gap between our assumptions about migration, and what the research actually shows. For instance, she says, the stereotypical picture of a war refugee is of a person in dire straits, destitute and homeless. But that's often not the case.

CHRISTIANE: Migration is such an expensive activity. People who are well-off, who have the means. That's when migration happens.

AMY: It's not that people fleeing conflict don't have real and urgent needs to migrate. It's just that the people who are able to make that choice are probably not the very poorest people in the society. And Christiane says there's a growing body of research demonstrating that this trend holds when it comes to climate migration, too.

CHRISTIANE: Most people who are really affected by climate change don't have the resources to migrate. They are actually immobile, they have to stay where they are. And they are much more affected by climate change and there's a much stronger necessity actually for them to leave than for the ones who are leaving. So this focus on mobility has really given us a blind spot in a sense because we lose sight of all the people who should actually move because life has become so difficult due to climate change and its effects, but they cannot move.

AMY: Christiane says these misunderstandings about migration and migrants are often borne out of very fear-based narratives that people in developed countries, in the global north, sometimes have toward people from the global south.

CHRISTIANE: It's like they, they only need this one other, this one other thing that will drive them over the edge. And then I mean the “they” alone is so horrible, but that will drive them over the edge and then everything will implode and everybody will be coming here. To be frank. I mean, that's often the picture that this being drawn, isn't it?

AMY: In reality, she says, most forced migrations happen within countries.

CHRISTIANE: It's really the smallest part of people who are being displaced are moving towards the global north. So the data really doesn't give us any basis to feel this fear mongering.

AMY: But of course, that doesn't stop authoritarian leader s around the world from using the picture of hordes of migrants invading the north to whip up anti-immigrant sentiment and further their own agendas. And this may actually be one of the most worrisome aspects of climate migration: how just the thought of it makes people afraid, and how that fear can be manipulated.

CHRISTIANE: I'm not trying to say we don't have to do anything against climate change. On the contrary, what I'm trying to say, I think, is if we work on climate change, especially as academics, but and basically in any capacity, we need to think about how new findings can be instrumentalized for different political goals that have nothing to do with climate change, that have everything to do with winning the next election and wanting to segregate or separate different parts of the society, et cetera.

AMY: But dictators and xenophobes aren't the only people who sometimes get migration stories wrong, Christiane says. As one example, she cites the controversy about the causes of the Syrian civil war, which began in March of 2011. A few years after the conflict started, a study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences—a major U.S. journal—which claimed that the extreme drought in the region in the previous decade was one of the causes of that war. But although the study said that the drought contributed to the conflict, the story soon got reduced down to “the war in Syria was caused by climate change.”

CHRISTIANE: This idea was picking up speed, and it was being picked up by all sorts of really high level politicians in the EU and the United States. And the idea was there was this drought that was internal displacement because of the drought and something that you could call agricultural collapse, and that was what caused the war. However, nobody had actually gone and talked to Syrian farmers to ask them, you know. So there was this drought. What was it like? How were you affected? Did you move because of it? Do you know people who moved because of it? Did you demonstrate because of it? Is this why you took to the streets, etc. All these questions hadn't been asked of my knowledge. And so I thought, that's something that I can add. I can go there and talk to people.

AMY: So she did. She went to Jordan, and spent time in refugee camps and cities.

CHRISTIANE: ... and just, you know, approached people on the street and asked them whether they did, whether they were active in agriculture and Syria before they came and whether they were willing to talk to me about the drought.

AMY: And what did you find when you talked to them?

CHRISTIANE: Well, many things, but mainly what I found was that, yes, there was a drought and it affected mainly the northeast of the country. And yes, there was internal migration, but when the troubles started—troubles is very euphemistic. When the violence started, the demonstrations started, they actually went back home. They left. They weren't the ones who orchestrated these kinds of demonstrations.

AMY: Christiane says getting that story wrong has a lot of consequences. For one thing, it shifts the focus away from the real culprit. In this case, that's the regime of Bashar al-Assad.

CHRISTIANE: The walls had ears. Everybody knew this. This is the single most often cited idiom that I've heard in the interviews that I did. We are talking about highly authoritarian, very repressive state even before the violence broke out.

AMY: Christiane's findings were backed up by the work of other researchers too. We have links to more information about the causes of the war in Syria on our website if you're interested in learning more. But I want to zoom out from the debate about the role of climate in this particular conflict, and think about what it has to teach us more generally.

AMY: Why did that narrative take hold and why has it been so important to you to try to get out the message that that that actually wasn't how it played out?

CHRISTIANE: I think the reason why it took hold was that there was a possibility. It's thinkable, right that this happens? And if I'm being mean, I'll say it's a great headline. It's attractive in a sense, It's a story that can help you, and I really get that, that can help you raise awareness for something that we have been ignoring for so long and that we really need to pay attention to. So I understand that you are grateful for any kind of ammunition to throw against that. But I can also see that these kinds of stories, and this is not only for Syria, but also in the Horn of Africa, for instance, where these stories have been, have been told, that this has been used to wall off even further.

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AMY: Some people hear a story about climate driving a wave of migration, and think, “wow, we really need to solve climate change.” And other people hear that same story and think:

CHRISTIANE: We have to build walls to fend off all of these people who will come here because of climate change. And that's why I'm in it, because I can't, I can't sit and watch the EU closing off further and further and further. Yeah, that's why I'm in it.

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AMY: Climate migration will almost certainly be a growing issue in the years to come. But conflict over migration, or any of the impacts of climate change, is not inevitable. It has everything to do with what—and who—gets defined as a threat. And how we define security.

CHRISTIANE: You can think about security as national security, as international security, as human security, and maybe as ecological security. And each time the question, “what is it that we want to secure,” is going to be answered so differently. So if we want national security, we are trying to make safe or secure or, um, you know, safeguard national territory, national population, national boundaries. And if we go to human security, it's going to be we want to safeguard human life regardless of nationality, regardless of place. And if we go even further to ecological security, we want to safeguard life on Earth, not only humans, everybody. So the question is going to be answered differently and the tools that we choose are going to be so different.

AMY: I think this might be one of the central lessons of the climate crisis: there's no such thing as personal security, or national security, without ecological security. No amount of weaponry will make us safe if we just sit back and let the climate fever rise. Although wealth and power might delay the pain for a little while, ultimately, we all suffer if we don't work together to protect our shared home.

AMY: So last question, if there's one thing that you could change about the discourse around climate and migration, like if you could snap your fingers and tomorrow something shifts. What would it be?

CHRISTIANE: If I could switch the power of the global north to the global south, even just for a little while, I think it would change so much. Then we could really start to work against climate change together as the global challenge that it is. If it was possible to switch these positions...yeah. I think it would be awesome.

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AMY: What I hear Sherri, Bruno and Christiane saying is that none of us get to not think about this anymore. Whether you're a hawk or a dove, a Republican or a Democrat, an environmentalist, a capitalist, an anarchist, a religious fundamentalist, or someone who resists -ists and -isms of all kinds: your life is going to be affected by climate change. It already is, even if you're not aware of it. So we have a choice. We can keep trying to avoid reality, and condemn future generations to an endless series of compounding crises. Or, we can take hold of the fact that it is still possible to dramatically reduce future suffering, and decide to get work. That’s what we’re going to do in our next episode.

Credits

SAVRESH: Hi. I'm Savresh from London, reporting for this season of threshold decided by the Park Foundation, the High Stakes Foundation, the Pleiades Foundation, NewsMatch, the Luanne Foundation, Montana Public Radio and listeners. This work depends on people who believe in it and choose to support it. People like you. Join our community at thresholdpodcast.org.

AMY: This episode of Threshold was produced and reported by me, Amy Martin, with help from Nick Mott and Erika Janik. The beautiful music that we're bringing you this season was composed by the one and only Todd Sickafoose. The rest of the Threshold team is Caysi Simpson, Deneen Wiske, Eva Kalea, Sam Moore, Shola Lawal, and Taliah Farnsworth. Our intern is Emery Veilleux. Thanks to Sara Sneath, Sally Deng, Maggy Contreras, Hana Carey, Dan Carreno, Luca Borghese, Julia Barry, Kara Cromwell, Katie deFusco, Caroline Kurtz, and Gabby Piamonte. Special thanks to Judit Hollos. Big additional special thanks to all of the listeners who responded to our call for reflections around climate grief. We actually had more responses than we were able to fit into the episode, so we made a special collection of additional listener voices which is available at our website, thresholdpodcast.org. And, maybe hearing how your fellow listeners are feeling makes you want to share something too. If so, we’d love to hear from you. Please call and leave us a voicemail on our Threshold listener hotline. That number is 321-BISON-20. Or, you can make a voice memo and email it to us at operations at threshold podcast dot org. Again the phone number is 321-B-I-S-O-N-20, or you can make a voice memo and email it to us at operations at threshold podcast dot org. And thanks again to everyone for sharing your thoughts and feelings with us.