Our new podcast features Peter Schwartzstein, journalist and scholar, exploring how the climate crisis is reshaping the relationship between environmental stress, conflict, crime, migration and inequality. We discuss his book Heat and Fury: On the Frontiers of Climate Violence, examining how water scarcity, competition over land, food insecurity and failures of governance can intensify existing social and political tensions.
Drawing on examples from Iraq, Syria, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Sudan, Nepal and the Sahel, the discussion also challenges the Eurocentric framing of climate migration, foregrounding its often overlooked local and domestic dimensions. Moving beyond the idea of climate change as merely an environmental problem, the conversation asks who bears its costs, who benefits from these vulnerabilities, and how environmental peacebuilding and locally grounded solutions might turn ecological pressures into opportunities for cooperation rather than violence.
Peter Schwartzstein is an environmental journalist who reports on water, food security, and particularly the conflict-climate nexus across some 30 countries in the Middle East, Africa, and occasionally further afield. He mostly writes for National Geographic, but his work has also appeared in the New York Times, BBC, Foreign Affairs, and many other outlets. He is a Global Fellow with the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program, a TED fellow, and a fellow at the Center for Climate and Security. In late 2024, Schwartzstein published my first book, “The Heat and the Fury: On the Frontlines of Climate Violence,” which is the first from-the-ground attempt to explain to the casual reader quite how climate change is contributing to violence across the world, while, simultaneously, trying to flesh out some of the causal pathways between climate and violence to members of my own climate security community. The FT listed the book as one of the best new ones on climate.
The interview was conducted by Anubha Anushree. Alina Young edited the audio file.
