Description:

Peter Schwartzstein is an award-winning British-American journalist and researcher, who has reported on water, food security, and particularly the conflict-climate nexus across more than thirty countries in the Middle East, Africa, and occasionally further afield. He mostly writes for National Geographic, but his work also regularly appears 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. Based in Athens, Greece, he consults for a range of UN agencies and iNGOs. The Heat and the Fury is his first book, which he will discuss in a conversation with Leon McCarron and Roba El Husseini, 2024 Yale World Fellows.

‘The Heat and the Fury: On the Frontlines of Climate Violence’ will be published by Island Press in the US and Canada and by Footnote Press in the UK in late September. The book 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 also trying to flesh out some of the causal pathways between climate and violence to members of Schwartzstein’s own climate security community. Each chapter is centered on a different country in which different climate stresses are fueling different forms of instability, all told largely through the stories of the farmers, soldiers, scientists etc in the middle of this mess. It’s based on more than a decade of reporting from about 30 countries, most of it in his former guise as a correspondent for NatGeo. Copies of the book will be available for purchase at the end of the event.

Cosponsored by the Council on Middle East Studies and the South Asian Studies Council.