Global Dispatch
Tuesday August 8, 2017
Kenya, refugee camps, July 2011-- credit IHH via flickr/cc license
Somalia is ground zero for an emerging trend in global affairs– the nexus between climate change and conflict.
Journalist Laura Heaton with The GroundTruth Project spent years reporting on how climate change and conflict feed off each other in profoundly destabilizing ways in horn of Africa.
She’s the author of a feature story in Foreign Policy magazine that uses the work and life story of a British Scientist named Murray Watson to explain how climate change in Somalia has exacerbated conflict — both local and international .Watson went missing on 2008 after being kidnapped in Somalia, and it was assumed that his trove of ecological research went missing with him — until Heaton uncovered its existence in an attic in the British countryside.
If you have 25 minutes and want to learn the symbiotic relationship between climate change and conflict in Somalia–and what that means for the world at large, have a listen.