COP26, Global Conflicts, and Climate Refugees

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Brian Lehrer: It's Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. As the COP26 Climate Summit is now in a second and final week. We'll get a very informed view of how it's going now but also take a step back. Think about this. What is the relationship between global warming and the atmosphere and the effect on human beings? Well, one very basic answer to that question is that it changes where on earth is habitable or uninhabitable. If you could live in a place along the ocean before, but sea level rise is making that place uninhabitable now, people have to move.

If a country in the global South was hot and dry, but it was cool enough and had enough moisture for agriculture, and now it's not, people have to move. Climate change causes migration, more migration than there would have been without it. It also can cause armed conflict, war, where large enough groups of desperate enough people have to compete or move for food. When any of these developments affect large populations of poor people, the result is many refugees, climate refugees. It's already happening to a tragic degree and it will only get worse if meetings like COP26 fail to prevent it.

With me now is David Miliband, President, and CEO of the International Rescue Committee, which helps to resettle and advocate for the world's refugees. As some of you know, he was previously the Foreign Minister of the UK. He knows many of these government leaders at COP26 and knows how these things work, and don't. David, it's always great and important when you come on the show. Welcome back to WNYC.

David Miliband: Thank you so much, Brian, for having me on. You've basically said it all. You said, in 45 seconds, what we're going to cover in a half an hour. It's great to be talking to you. I look forward to restoring the issues.

Brian Lehrer: You agree with the premise of my intro that climate change is already causing an increase in the number of the world's refugees. It may not be the first thing that many people who listen to radio shows like this in the United States think of. Let's look at a few of the specific places and populations to which this is happening. Your website mentions one, for example, much in the news in the United States, but for other reasons, migration to here from the Central American countries of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. Can you explain what that has to do with climate change?

David Miliband: Yes. The critical thing for people to understand is that there are direct and indirect effects of the climate crisis on the forced movement of people. The direct impact is precisely, as you suggested, that if someplace has become too hot, if some place has become water-stressed, they can lead to people to move. Critical to understanding is to remember that the climate crisis isn't just about the average rise in the global temperature that can have an impact on sea levels or other things, it's also a change in the climate that causes more extreme weather events.

In respect to Central America, we're seeing a lot of extreme weather events that are contributing to the movement of people. Often those people stay within their own country. They're climate refugees within their own country, but they also cross borders and move further. The indirect effect is also worth recognizing, and we'll come back to this in the course of the conversation. You mentioned rightly that because the climate crisis puts more stress on resources, when there's stress on resources, there's more conflict, when there's conflict people move.

Just to put an interesting statistic in your head, of the 20 countries in the world most vulnerable to climate change, 14 of them are already suffering from armed conflict. We can see the indirect effect as well as the direct effect. In the so-called Northern Triangle of Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. You're seeing some of the direct effects. They've got other problems as well, which we can get into. Whether you look at North and Central America where there's extreme weather events, whether you look at the origins of the Syria crisis, which had a climate dimension in the drought in the Northwest of the country in 2008, 2010.

Whether you think about the trauma of Afghans at the moment, who are suffering from a meltdown in their economy after the withdrawal of American troops, there's a climate effect there because 90% of the rural areas have been suffering from drought, and so they've missed the planting season. Or whether you think about the Sahel region of Sub-Saharan Africa. I was on a call this morning with some colleagues in Mali, there are complicated factors at work there. In answer to your question, climate change, the climate crisis is here now, it's leading to the forced displacement of people.

It's imperative, therefore, that these climate conferences, the UN climate conference in Glasgow, all the nations of the world get serious about mitigating future climate change, preventing it, by changing the way in which we power our economy. They also get serious about helping communities adapt to climate change because if there isn't better adaptation then people will be on the move and in ever-greater numbers.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, help us report this story. Are you an immigrant from, or do you have ties to places in the world where refugees and other large-scale migration or armed conflict are being driven by global warming and its effects? 212-433-WNYC. 212-433-9692. If you have any story like that to tell from any country that you're connected to or any questions you have for David Miliband, President of the International Rescue Committee, which works with and on behalf of refugees, and he's a former UK foreign minister. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, or tweet @BrianLehrer.

Let's take another example. Another place much in the news in this country, but for different reasons, Afghanistan, which your IRC website says is in a worsening humanitarian crisis, exacerbated by drought. Can you give us some of the details of that and how it connects to climate change?

David Miliband: Yes. We said in August, when American military forces left, that it would be a disaster if the military withdrawal was followed by a humanitarian and economic withdrawal, but unfortunately, that's what's happened. I'm going to give you some absolutely staggering statistics, and they are exacerbated by the climate crisis, Brian. The World Food Program is forecasting that 55%, more than half of the Afghan population, the population that remains is about 38 million people. Seventy thousand Afghans came out and have come to the United States in the midst of the crisis of August, but 38 million are left.

More than half of that population are placed in the highest levels of food insecurity, that means they don't know where their next meal is coming from. Part of that reason is that the salaries of teachers and nurses are not being paid because there's a freeze on international support for the country because of the Taliban regime that's come in, so those people can't buy food. Large parts of Afghanistan are rural where they run what's called a subsistence economy, that means people grow their own food and survive on the basis of it. Drought is affecting, as I said earlier, about 80 to 90% of the Afghan population.

The food production system in rural areas has broken down as well. It's a further example of the way in which the climate crisis doesn't just impact livelihoods, it drives people to move. Part of the Afghanistan story in the last 20 years has been urbanization in part driven by the climate crisis. I think there's been a real failure over the last 30 or 40 years. We talk about the climate crisis as if it affects the "planet", but it affects the people on the planet as well as the planet itself.

Brian Lehrer: Exactly.

David Miliband: Living as if there are three planets, not one. I'm 56, God help me through to admit that, but we've lived as if there were three planets, not one. If you do that, it affects the people on the planet. This is a manmade displacement crisis, and I'm afraid it's also a poverty crisis and a health crisis in various ways as well. There is still time to make a difference, but we've got to deal with the fact that the greenhouse gases that have been put into the atmosphere are going to be there, in many cases, for 80 to 100 years.

It's true that methane, about which there was an agreement led by President Biden last week to cut by 30% of methane emissions, methane only stays in the atmosphere for 20 years. That's bad enough because it's eight times as potent as carbon dioxide For the other greenhouse gases, like carbon dioxide, that come out of our travel systems, out of the burning of coal, that's in the atmosphere for a hundred years. We've baked into the planetary system impact on humans, and it's deeply short-sighted, to put it mildly, not to recognize that. We've got catch up to do, and we've got adaptation to do.

Brian Lehrer: David, I see, we have some callers coming in who will take, in a couple of minutes, connected to various countries around the world to tell this human. I love the way you put that, this is discussed much too much as save the planet and not enough in terms of people when we talk about the impacts of climate change, global warming. Turning to COP 26, and I'll remind everyone that COP stands for Conference of the Parties to the Paris Climate Accord, and it's COP26 because this is their 26th meeting, the countries that signed the Paris Climate Accords.

How's it going in your view to make the commitments necessary to accomplish their goal of preventing warming greater than one and a half Celsius degrees or a 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit after which it's believed that the even more drastic and extreme effects of global warming would take effect?

David Miliband: This is the 26th meeting since the UN started summoning these climate conferences of all countries in 1994-1995, there missed last year. These are the conference of the parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, it was said that this is a global problem that needs to be addressed by every country according to its wealth and to its historic contribution.

Brian Lehrer: I just want to make that clear because I think I misstated it last week then too. This is not Conference of the Parties to the Paris Climate Accord, it's the parties to something much bigger and older.

David Miliband: Yes. The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which was the first time in the mid-1990s that all the countries in the United Nations recognized that climate change was an issue. That led in 1997 to the Kyoto Protocol, which bound rich countries to reduce their emissions. The US government at the time signed it but then the Senate didn't pass it. Then, subsequently, there'd been further conferences. The Paris Conference in 2014 was a landmark conference because it had tougher targets than before.

It bound every country to submit a plan for how it would help the world live within a substantially less than two degrees rise in average warming, that's been interpreted as a 1.5 degrees rise. It's a UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, UNFCCC. The Paris Agreement was within that framework. Now the Glasgow meeting is important because, although the Conference of the Parties happens every year, it is led at ministerial or prime minister or presidential level every five years, six years because of COVID, it was lost last year, but effectively every five years.

It needs to be a landmark moment because we're off track to live within the limits established by Paris. I would say that after a week of this Glasgow conference, we can only say that the glass is a quarter full. We do not yet have a global plan that will allow us all, and I say us, not just the planet, us all to live within the 1.5 degrees limit that itself will be damaging but won't be catastrophic. There was progress last week on methane, which is a very dangerous greenhouse gas. There was progress on forestry because deforestation is so dangerous.

Brazil, for the first time, because of the Amazon rainforest, was part of the agreement, although there are many people having doubts about the extent to which they will implement it. There was progress last week also about the pledges that were made by a range of countries that hadn't previously made pledges. For example, India made a pledge to get half of its energy from renewable energy by 2030. India has the largest population in the world, 1.4 billion people. However, it only committed to reach net-zero emissions.

You'll have heard this phrase, net-zero a lot, it means that the net impact of the country's emissions is zero because they are compensating for any greenhouse gas emissions they do, it's put that out till 2070. Now, I'll be 105 in 2070, and the world hasn't got that long to wait. Obviously, China and Russia have not turned up at this conference, there are spoilers. The UN process works, every country has a veto, which means that countries like Saudi Arabia that are very dependent on the oil industry can veto any progress. We're up against it now.

The glass is a quarter full because there are major commitments that still have to be made if we're to sustain the chance of limiting the average rise to 1.5 degrees. I just want to emphasize, an average rise of 1.5 degrees shouldn't lull us into a false sense of security because there's nothing average about the rise in extreme weather events that go along with this extraordinarily short term impact, 150-year impact on the global climate that the route to industrialization based on carbon that we've chosen has had.

Brian Lehrer: Jude in Brooklyn with ties to Nigeria. Jude, you're on WNYC. Thank you so much for calling in.

Jude: Good morning, Brian. Can you hear me?

Brian Lehrer: Yes.

Jude: I was just trying to say that the two people from the south-south part of Nigeria, the remote communities where the oil is being explored, they have been facing pollution on their land and water. At some point, they could no longer farm on their land. Then recently, the spill affected their water, so they could no longer do fish farming. Some of them came up with cancer, so they have to relocate some of them from their ancestral lands. The government awarded a contract for cleanup, but it seems the clean-up project is not achieving the desired result though.

Brian Lehrer: There's yet another connection to global warming. Even if what you were just describing isn't from the warming of the temperature of the atmosphere directly, it's from the drilling for the oil that, of course, contributes to global warming and the effects of that. I think that's what I hear you saying, Jude, correct?

Jude: Yes sir. Then they always have-- Nigeria has been having incessant flooding these days, it has not been happening before. You see people having to move from their place. Once they forecast that the flood is going be immense, and it happens yearly now. We never used to have that kind of situation before.

Brian Lehrer: Jude, thank you very much. That would be more of a direct consequence of global warming. Is Nigeria one of the countries you're focused on at the International Rescue Committee, David?

David Miliband: Yes. Thanks to Jude for his important point. Nigeria raises a really important point. It's going to be the largest population in Africa, 206 million people at the moment, probably going to grow significantly in the next 30 years. It needs to industrialize to serve its own people. Its wealth comes significantly from oil and gas, but its oil production is part of a global system that is condemning large numbers of people in the north of the country to a really, really difficult existence. Now I don't want to oversimplify this because the north-south split in Nigeria is religious, it's ethnic, it's not just about climate.

I think it's really important that we recognize that there is a climate reality, and there's also a development or energy reality that needs to be addressed. The International Rescue Committee does work in northeast Nigeria. I've been myself to Maiduguri in the northeast of the country on two occasions. You've mentioned a couple of times, Brian, the International Rescue committee's website, I hope you don't mind me pointing people towards it. It's rescue.org where people can learn about the work that we're doing in northeast Nigeria, and the way in which the climate crisis is contributing to the humanitarian crisis.

My point always is, number one, this planetary crisis is a human crisis, as I said earlier. Secondly, untended humanitarian crisis ends up causing political instability. To go back to the countries that you mentioned at the beginning in the Northern Triangle of Central America of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, untended humanitarian crisis in those countries leads to political instability in those countries, and it doesn't stay within those countries because people move. Unless we address these issues as a shared humanity, we're not going to address them at all, and we're all going to suffer as a result.

Brian Lehrer: I read about something called the heat aggression relationship, which according to the website, ReliefWeb, suggests there's a 10 to 20% increase in the risk of armed conflict associated with each half a degree Celsius or a little less than one Fahrenheit increase in local temperatures.

David Miliband: Well, that's very striking. If you, at some level, it stands to real. If you think about parts of the world that are water-stressed, that is what drives people to conflict. The conflict of resources is not just a theoretical one. When the Lake Chad Basin, that's the lake in between Nigeria, Cameroon, Niger, right in the corner there, between all those countries. If any of your listeners click onto the picture of Lake Chad 30 years ago and a picture of Lake Chad today, it's decimated. It's one-third the size.

The idea that that doesn't have an impact on the fishermen who were fishing in Lake Chad and now cannot do so, and on the wider movement of people, they're kidding themselves. There is a major armed conflict in that part of the world. It's led by an armed opposition group that you have heard of, Boko Haram, and climate is part of the equation, not least in respect to the impoverishment that people feel there.

Brian Lehrer: One more call, Howard in Manhattan with ties to Haiti, Howard, you're on WNYC. Thank you for calling in.

Howard: Good morning. Thank you for taking my call. I would say when it comes to Haiti, there are many things besides climate change, which makes different things happening there, but the politics, the conversion, and also the insecurity. These things drive everybody out of the country because they are a group of people, they put their-- especially push and left everybody behind.

Brian Lehrer: We have a bad connection, so I'm going to go. I think I take your point that it's all of these things together; corruption, politics, and climate change. David Miliband, one of the other terms that I have seen used to describe the role of climate change in places with multiple issues is a threat multiplier. If you already have conditions that might lead to poverty, if you already have conditions that might lead to refugee flow or to war, climate change, global warming becomes a threat multiplier.

David Miliband: That's certainly what we see around the world. Look, the International Rescue Committee was founded by Albert Einstein before people were talking about climate change in the 1930s. We work in many places where politics is broken and where conflict is the result. That's our calling card, crisis is our calling card. I can tell you that if I look around the 35, 40 countries that we work in, there's no doubt that there's a political failure, there's state failure. There's no doubt that global inequality is part of the syndrome of humanitarian need. We can see that in the respect of the COVID crisis that I think we've just discussed before.

Climate multiplies all of the problems. It multiplies the poverty, it multiplies the ill health, it multiplies the conflict that is the driver of displacement. It's imperative to me that we, as a non-government organization that treats the symptoms of this global problem, speaks to them in a clear way and develops solutions that address some of the need that people face. I'm really pleased that we now have programs that can help populations, agricultural populations, build more resilient livelihoods. We are in the solutions business, but if the politics remain broken, we're going to be running up a downward escalator. The escalator is going to be coming down faster than we can run up.

Brian Lehrer: To close, I want to ask you if this COP26 meeting, which will continue until Friday, or this whole UN Conference of the Parties process, that's been going on for a few decades now, as you were describing, is sufficient to the task? Because while COP26 meetings are taking place inside, there are thousands of mostly young protestors outside. I want to play two clips of the 18-year-old protest leader, Greta Thunberg. In this one, she judges COP26 as already a failure.

Greta Thunberg: It is not a secret that COP26 is a failure. It should be obvious that we cannot solve a crisis with the same methods that got us into it in the first place.

Brian Lehrer: In this one, she explains how people of the world might be snowed into thinking that COP26 participants are doing more than they really are.

Greta Thunberg: The COP has turned into a PR event where leaders are giving beautiful speeches and announcing fancy commitments and targets while, behind the curtains, the governments of the global North countries are still refusing to take any drastic climate action.

Brian Lehrer: Greta Thunberg to the crowd of protestors this weekend. How much do you agree? Ultimately, and this is my last question for you today, is the COP26 process or this whole process as it's set up with her, she says the same people who got us into this mess pretending to get us out of it, up to the task?

David Miliband: Well, the science doesn't lie, so she's right. The pledges that have been made have not yet been followed through. That's why it's so important that countries take their own decisions to set out on a net-zero path, as far as possible. The whole of the European Union, that's 27 countries, now have a decarbonization path that isn't just good for the planet and its people. Here's the point that I want to leave you with, especially to our predominantly American audience.

The countries that make the biggest moves towards decarbonization, living as if there's one planet, not three, will reap the economic dividends as well as the environmental dividends being beneficial to the whole world. The fact that the Chinese are now dominating the solar panel market and have driven, with massive reductions in the cost, they're in the front seat because they moved early. I think it's a really important moment to say that the self-interest, as well as the moral interest points in the direction of rapid movement, and America is an outlier here. In Europe, they're not arguing about whether or not climate change exists.

In China, they're not arguing about whether climate change exists. In China, they need to do more, but they're figuring out how to get with this issue. You have, per capita, the largest economy in the world by GDP. You have a massive opportunity, never mind the responsibility. I'm a Brit, obviously living in America, I live in New York. There are all sorts of things about this country that are amazing, but getting to grips with this climate crisis is not a diversion from America's problems, it's absolutely core to solving the economic challenges that you face. I think that the words of Greta Thunberg are fundamentally right.

Leadership, in the end, is tested by whether or not we are willing to take the decisions that shift the science. Because the science doesn't lie, the science can't spin. The science isn't about headlines, it's about people's lives. It's people's lives close to home, but also people's lives far away. I really hope America's passion and ingenuity can be directed towards making a much bigger difference than has been made so far because we can't afford more lost decades.

Brian Lehrer: David Miliband, President of the International Rescue Committee and former UK Foreign Minister. Thank you so much.

David Miliband: Thank you so much.

 

 

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