Climate change in the Fertile Crescent and glimpses of a less stable, more selfish world

Alissa Rubin, in a conversation with Sabrina Tavernise for the New York Times, on how climate change-induced water stress is changing lives in the Fertile Crescent, where settled farming first emerged:

Alissa Rubin

Well, as the wars wound down, there was something still deeply unsettling. And it wasn’t just the aftermath of war. There were cities where people weren’t leaving their homes during the day. Villages that were half empty or even villages where I saw people leaving, animals abandoned by their owners and just left to die, and really overcrowded hospital emergency rooms in some places.

These are things I expect to see during a war. But this was about something else. It was actually about hotter temperatures and, ultimately, an increasing lack of water. It was making it impossible to have a kind of civilized, normal life. And yet, it seemed almost no one was talking about it.

It is a little ironic, and incredibly sad to see Iraq, whose modern fortunes have been inextricably linked to fossil fuels, suffering from some of the worst impacts of climate change. It has both started and suffered devastating wars because of oil. Amongst violence, sanctions, and political turmoils, Iraq does not have the stable institutions to amass huge sums of oil cash to adapt to climate impacts, or rebrand itself as a shiny clean tech leader like some other Gulf states.

Now climate impacts are fuelling the cycle of violence and despair:

Alissa Rubin

Upstream villages in places that are water-stressed will build a little dam or put in a gate that stops the water from flowing downstream. And then they take the water until they’ve taken as much as they need. And then there’s not so much to go to the next downstream village, and even less for the village after that. And after this happens several times over, people get angry. And they’re willing to attack people in the neighboring village who are doing that.

Another piece that feeds into conflict is that because people are poor and it’s hard to find jobs, and especially young people — they’re at the beginning of their lives, but they don’t have much to hope for — it’s very fertile ground for recruitment by different kinds of armed groups and extremists. These are groups that will pay to have you work as a soldier, essentially. And that’s at least something people can bring home. And if you don’t have other options, you’re willing to consider that.

What’s happening in Iraq should be alarming, concerning and motivating for all of us:

Alissa Rubin

This is more than the canary in the coal mine. It’s just a little ahead of where a whole raft of places in the world are going to be.

[…]

Countries that are poor, countries that have weak government or very nearly failed states, or if you look at the Middle East, countries that keep having conflict, Syria, Lebanon, they can’t do long-term planning. It’s just not part of what’s possible when you have conflict. So they are going to become harder and harder and more and more awful to live in.

And people will get poorer. The places become more unstable. And that spills over into neighboring countries, into various kinds of climate migration. It leads to a, rather, not just a poorer future, but one with an awful lot of suffering. Living in heat with too little water is a recipe for instability, but also disease and a complete lack of hope for large areas.

Sabrina Tavernise

Fundamentally, the common thread is a less stable world.

Alissa Rubin

A less stable world and a more selfish world, Sabrina. That’s the way I would think of it.

What we are fighting against, perhaps more than emissions or even fossil fuel interests, is “a more selfish world”, as Rubin puts it.