[I updated this post, especially in the Comments sections at the end, in August 2022, to reflect several recent reports about the impacts of military activity on carbon emissions, and relocation of places because of climate change.]
On Monday, March 4th 2022, the fifth day of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the greatest act of inter-state, territorial military aggression since the1940s, the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) published its Sixth Assessment Report. The coincidence that they occurred so close together has led me to think about the very different roles that place plays in war and peace from the perspective of global warming. More specifically, modern warfare involves the deliberate destruction of places, displaces their populations and contributes significantly to greenhouse gas emissions. But the Sixth Assessment Report assumes a geopolitical background of peace will be needed for the mitigation and adaptations needed to keep climate change, which destroys places and displaces populations through fires, floods, droughts and rising sea levels, within reasonable limits
In its effects, global warming is a self-inflicted, slowing intensifying world war that will impact most of humanity. But this is not a war that can be fought with weapons or violence. It has to be fought with peaceful cooperation at every geographical scale from nations to regions, cities and towns.
Nation States and Sense of Place
I’ll begin with some general comments in order to clarify how I understand relationships between place, war, and peace and place.
”Sense of place’, as it is used in everyday language, can refer to the attachment we have with the home we live in to a feeling of responsibility for the entire Earth as the home of humankind. Within this wide range of places the country where we live is likely to stand out as especially significant, not least because our connections with it are constantly reinforced by elections, passports, national sports teams, anthems, flags and patriotic feelings. However, for all its emotional connotations the word ‘country’ has little political or legal status. What we usually call ‘countries’ are more formally ‘nation states’ (usually referred to simply as nations), which are defined by political borders established in treaties, shown in maps and usually demarcated on the ground. The idea behind them, which seems to have originated in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries from some strange combination of political theory, capitalism, and improvements in cartography, is that they somehow fuse a ‘state’, or an area under a single government (it could be a monarchy, a republic or a dictatorship), with a ‘nation’, which involves some combination of ethnicity, culture, language, and shared history.
The United Nations, and various parallel and subsidiary organizations such as the International Olympics Committee, the World Trade Organization and the IPCC, currently recognizes 195 nation states. This formal recognition gives them an aura of permanence. But the fact is that many nation states in their current forms are relatively new, created in the 19th century (e.g. Italy, Germany), or in treaties after the world wars of the 20th century (e.g. Poland, Austria, Hungary, Israel), or as an outcome of decolonization (e.g. India, Nigeria). Their borders and identities are not carved in stone, but are the consequence of negotiated settlements.
Different interpretations about the geographical extent of nations and where state borders should be drawn have led to separatist movements, and more significantly to the violent military confrontations of two world wars, and now the Russian invasion of Ukraine. These territorial wars are, in effect, conflicts between two opposing political or ideological senses of place. On the one hand the aggressors wish to expand the place that constitutes their sense of what their nation should be. On the other hand, countries that are threatened fight to defend their nation as a place with a distinctive culture that is shared by all its communities and citizens. For those caught in the war zone, if they survive, one consequence of these ideological disagreements is that many of the actual places where they live will be destroyed.
War and the Annihilation of Place
Strategies of warfare have often included the deliberate destruction of places where people live and conduct their everyday lives because this is regarded as a way to undermine popular resistance and ensure subjugation. In 146 B.C. the Romans reduced the city of Carthage to such complete ruin it could not be rebuilt. In the 14th century the English Black Prince conducted a chevauchée in France, a campaign to instil terror and to weaken the supply lines of the French by burning and pillaging villages and towns. In 1565 Vijayanagar, a city at the heart of an empire that ruled southern India, was captured and destroyed by Muslim armies, and then completely abandoned; the remnants of the ruins are now a World Heritage Site.
In the Second World War these strategies were brought to a terrifying new level with technologies of area bombing. Ken Hewitt has described the result with brutal simplicity as “the annihilation of place” (Hewitt, 1983, 1994). The bombing, he indicates, was systematically directed at city centres, where population densities were highest, and a deliberate attack on the inhabitants of cities and the infrastructure and amenities of civic life. It was an explicit manifestation of the idea of ‘total war’ in which everyone, soldier or citizen, is considered to be somehow involved in the conflict and therefore a potential target. The aim of place annihilation was, and still is, to undermine civilian morale, generate terror, displace populations, put leverage on political leaders, and perhaps to reduce casualties among one’s own troops by bringing an early end to war.
Germany used area bombing in the London blitz and in numerous raids on other cities in Britain. The Allies then responded with even more devastating raids on German cities, including Dresden, where a firestorm incinerated almost all the city centre, and on Hamburg, Berlin and about 70 other cities, destroying more than a million houses and making more than seven million people homeless. In Japan the level of destruction was even greater, partly because of the nuclear bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, but also because of the enormous firestorm created in 1945 by American bombing of the Asakusa district of Tokyo which destroyed more than 250,000 houses and probably killed about 130,000 people. In every one of those instances, whether in Britain, Germany or Japan, most of those who died or were forced to evacuate were women, children and the elderly. For those who survived, the physical place where they had lived, its buildings, streets, parks, trees, had disappeared. Their sense of place was utterly shattered.
Remarkably, in spite of this astounding scale of destruction, powerful elements of topophilia and attachment to place survived. Almost all these annihilated places were rebuilt. Some, such as the centre of Warsaw and the Asakusa Kannon Temple in Tokyo, are faithful reconstructions of what they had been. Most were rebuilt with modern identities, new buildings and street patterns, with only a few monuments to recall their catastrophic destruction. These acts of reconstructive placemaking may have been indirectly encouraged by the formation in 1945 of the United Nations, which had as its primary aim the prevention of future wars and, by implication, their destruction of places.
The decades since then have been relatively peaceful, at least for European and other developed nations that had been drawn into the two world wars. Major conflicts in Korea, Vietnam, and most recently Iraq and Afghanistan were relatively localized (and also seemed remote from more developed nations). Furthermore, the Cold War threat of mutually assured destruction through an exchange of nuclear missiles effectively discouraged conventional wars that might have escalated into global place annihilation.
In this period of enduring peace the widespread assumption (much as it had been before the First World War, see MacMillan, 2013) seems to have been that peace, at least between developed nations, had become a geopolitical condition that would persist indefinitely into the future. This assumption was upended by the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the systematic destruction of places in Ukrainian cities, apparently on the pretext of annexing somewhere Russia considers part of its ethnic national place.
Place in Peace at a Time of Climate Change
The Sixth Assessment Report of the IPCC, released just a few days after the attack on Ukraine, begins with the blunt statement that the effect of human activity on the Earth’s climate has become unequivocal, increasingly apparent and widespread (IPCC, 2022). Impacts of climate change and extreme weather events have already caused the loss of ecosystems, reduced food security, contributed to migration and displacement, damaged livelihoods, adversely effected the health and security of people, and led to increased inequality. The world is rapidly moving towards temperature, climatic and weather conditions that have not happened in the last 12,000 years (and possibly a much longer period) and will pose enormous challenges. To mitigate and adapt to these challenges require “transformative actions” in political and socio-economic systems need to be taken internationally and immediately. It is very clear from numerous but scattered comments in the Report that these transformative actions will require both peace and the extensive participation of local places, which is to say places at the scale or nations, regions, cities, towns and villages.A context of peace is implicitly assumed in almost everything written about place because it has been written in the peacetime that has generally prevailed for seventy years since the Second World War. Of course, there have been civil wars in Syria, Colombia, Rwanda, and elsewhere, and major regional conflicts in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, but until Russia invaded Ukraine there had been no inter-state wars in seventy years.
I think it is no exaggeration to suggest that, in the absence of transformative changes, the destructive, place annihilating consequences of climate change could equal or even exceed those of the two world wars. Rather than missiles and bombs, the damage will be done by wildfires, floods, rising sea levels, droughts, rising wet bulb temperatures and all forms of extreme weather. With global warming the entire world has, in effect, acquired a common enemy with the power to contribute to widespread deaths and destruction of places, and forced mass migrations of tens of millions. But unlike inter-state conflicts, the war against warming cannot be fought and won with weapons or violence. It has to be fought from a foundation of peace and cooperation in order to implement universal measures needed to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, and to coordinate strategies for adaptation.
The invasion of Ukraine challenges some fundamental, mostly implicit assumptions both about both place and about strategies for mitigation and adaptation to global warming. First, almost everything written about place, sense of place and placemaking has been published since 1970, and has assumed a peaceful political context. To my knowledge there have been no discussions of the place consequences of civil wars in Syria, Colombia, Rwanda, the Balkans, and elsewhere, or of major regional conflicts in Afghanistan,Vietnam and Iraq. Secondly, the IPCC is an agency of the United Nations, which was created to promote international peace, and all the conferences and reports about climate change that it has created have been in the context of the peace that has prevailed globally since it was created in 1988.
As a first step to try to grasp the implications of substantially changed circumstances created by the war in Ukraine, I studied the Sixth Assessment Report to determine what it suggests about war, peace and the importance of place.
[ A brief note on method: The Sixth Assessment Report is thorough, comprehensive and backed by a huge amount of scientific research. But it is also very long, dense and difficult to read. Because my interest here is in place, peace and war, I employed the Find function to identify uses of these terms (and related terms such as violent conflict, cooperation, and local) and then paid attention to those instances where they are discussed rather than just cited in book titles or used as figures of speech. The numbers given below (14-72 etc) are page references – each chapter has its own pagination (i.e .Chapter 14 page 72); SPM is Summary for Policymakers, the first section of the Report.]
War and Violent Conflict are mentioned only about twenty times each in the 3700 pages of the Report, and most of those suggest that climate change probably contributed to civil wars in Syria and Sudan. More generally it is noted that: “major armed conflict” is much less likely to happen because of climate change than “low-intensity organized violence” and perhaps civil wars (16-3, 16-22, 16.72), and these will most likely happen where extreme weather exacerbates poverty and food shortages (see 7-80, 7-118). In other words, conflicts will probably be localized, perhaps in ragged wars. The solutions to these cannot be military, but have to be linked “to development and people’s vulnerabilities in complex social and politically fragile settings” (18-22). In other words, the solutions lie mostly in development to reduce poverty and food insecurity.
Peace. The IPCC, as a branch of the UN, implicitly assumes a mostly peaceful future for its prognoses and proposals. In the Sixth Assessment Report there are over 500 mentions of peace (perhaps half of those are in titles of articles and books). An important theme in these is that “climate resilient peace” and “peace building” can be promoted through adaptation and inclusive development that reduces exposure to extreme weather (7-8, 7-107). This reflects ideas promoted in the Paris Agreement and in the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals, especially the goal for peace and justice (9-12).
A major risk to peace-building comes with involuntary displacements and migrations across state borders that could result from drought, crop failure, sea level rise and flooding (16-72). This risk, it is suggested, might be reduced by pursuing “climate resilient pathways.” These are shown in a diagram in the final chapter of the Report (18-11) which indicates the five pillars of development used in the Sustainable Development Goals (People, Prosperity, Partnership, Peace, Planet) and a “narrow and closing window of opportunity” to make the transformational changes needed for development futures that are “climate resilient and sustainable.” In other words, mitigation and adaptation have to involve policies for social justice and equity that will facilitate peace.
Place and Local Knowledge. It is clear from numerous references in the Assessment Report that climate resilient pathways have to run through places and involve local knowledge. Although ‘sense of place’ is mentioned a mere 20 times, ‘place’ and ‘places’ are used over 1000 times and the word ‘local’ almost 3000 times, often in association with ‘knowledge’. It is clear that these are fundamental ideas in climate resilience. Exactly how important can be pieced together from these numerous mentions.
First, the Report emphasizes the importance of Indigenous and local knowledge, as well as scientific knowledge, for understanding and evaluating climate adaptations (SPM-5). ‘Indigenous and local’ are frequently combined (see for instance Cross-Chapter Box INDIG 18-74 ) because they both hold relevant knowledge about specific environments and environmental changes, and the impact of those on ecosystems and livelihoods. Indigenous/local knowledge is defined as the “understandings and skills developed by people specific to the places where they live” (1-44). The scale of what is meant by ‘local’ is not explained, but my reading suggests that they mostly refer to somewhere below the national level, roughly at the spatial scale of municipalities, metropolitan areas, or distinctive topographical/ecological areas, where lower levels of government and other agencies can engage directly with communities impacted by extreme and changing weather, and use building codes, urban planning, and land-use management policies that are appropriate for the specific or unique circumstances in their areas (see, for example, section 17.14.2 on Governance; also comments on 6-120, 10-95, 14-17, 18-21, 18-80). This is, I think, consistent with the Report’s recommendation that adaptation and mitigation options should be aligned to local contexts in order to take advantage of bottom-up initiatives, engage with individuals and communities, protect local resources and ensure that existing inequities in particular communities are not worsened (18-21,18-6).
Secondly, the word place mostly seems to be used interchangeably with local, for example, knowledge may be place-based and rooted in local cultures, (1-44), and locally-driven, place-based approaches can help build adaptive capacity to climate change impacts (5-143). The distinctive importance of place is recognized in terms of place attachment and place-based adaptations, (CCP5-18, CCP5-34).
Thirdly, place-based adaptation is frequently referred to in the Report, perhaps because there is substantial evidence from case studies that place-based approaches can build capacity for transformative action (e.g. 6-89, 5-143). This responsibility for effecting change is, of course, shared with national governments and international agencies because climate change is a “multi-scale phenomenon from the local to the global” and all levels need to work together to advance climate resilience and adaptation (1-46, 1-4).
Fourthly, a conclusion of the Report, explicitly stated with very high confidence, is that Indigenous and place-based local knowledge shapes how climate change risk is understood and experienced, and offers the possibility of significant solutions for the challenges of climate change, though these do need to be integrated with broader national and international policies and practices. (18-7)
Comments
First let me summarize the role of place in both war and in the peaceful conditions needed to address global warming. In territorial, inter-state wars, such as the one in Ukraine, some perverse national sense of place is often a driving cause for starting the war, and then in the fog of what follows actual, everyday places on both sides become objects to be destroyed in the hope this will give some strategic advantage. In the context of the mostly peaceful circumstances that have to prevail if almost 200 nation states are to co-operate to moderate the processes and impacts of climate change, place matters because local places are an essential foundation for establishing constructive practices for mitigation and adaptation. The optimistic hope expressed by the IPCC is that while the extreme weather that follows from global warming will cause some places, such as coastal settlements, to be destroyed or abandoned, and will lead to migrations and other social upheavals, any associated conflicts will be localized and mitigated through international cooperation and appropriate forms of sustainable development. The possibility of inter-state warfare, such as that in Ukraine, was simply not considered in the Sixth Assessment Report, which was consistent with most prevailing expectations until the Ukraine invasion.
However, the U.S. National Intelligence Agency in its March 2021 projection for the next two decades, Global Trends 2040: A More Contested World, seems to have sensed a possible shift in geopolitics. It argues cogently and succinctly that a mixture of demographic, economic, technological, and environmental forces, including climate change, will probably generate significant social and political divisions at both national and international levels in the near future. It notes first that the Covid-19 pandemic has shaken assumptions about resilience and adaptation, and rather demonstrating the capacity of international cooperation to address a common problem it has reinforced nationalism because individual countries have followed their own strategies prioritizing their own needs. More specifically it suggests that climate change could generate social cleavages within countries because the costs of damage from extreme weather, mitigation and adaptation will require difficult trade-offs with other priorities, and internationally it could lead to increasing competition for food, minerals and energy. Climate change alone might not be the cause of inter-state conflicts, but it is certainly a very significant multiplying factor as deterrence becomes more difficult as treaties weaken, geopolitical relations are destabilized by new technologies such as artificial intelligence, and more major political actors emerge (e.g. additional states with nuclear weapons). There is, in fact, a significant possibility that localized struggles and civil wars could escalate into inter-state ones.
Should this happen, what are the implications for places and climate change? First, war will detract attention and resources from transformative actions urgently needed for mitigation and adaptation. Even before the Ukraine war many climate scientists were sceptical that actions would be insufficient to keep global warming to less than 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, the target of the Paris Accord; indeed, many expect the average global temperature rise by the end of the century will be at least 3.0C. This will have catastrophic consequences for places almost everywhere.”If we fail in meeting the 1.5C target [of the Paris Accord], Michaelova (2022, p.16) has written in a recent report on Military and Conflict-Related Emissions, “the repercussions will be more deadly than all the the conflicts we have witnessed in the in the last decades.”
Secondly, given past and current experience it is probable that any inter-state wars will involve the deliberate destruction of everyday places. And if the wars persist, the resource hungry military machines, explosions, destruction, and dependence on fossil fuels, will accelerate greenhouse gas emissions that will rush climate change towards its worst possible trajectory and future environmenal conditions that will make the sort of post-war place reconstruction of the 20th century impossible.
However, it is also the case that the character of modern warfare is changing for a variety of technological and economic reasons (National Intelligence Council, 2021, Future of the Battlefield). Ukraine is a 21st-century conflict in which military, technological and financial elements are intertwined. Place destruction will continue to happen, but will be by long range, perhaps hypersonic weapons, with precise targeting, and may be more more focused than in the past. It will, however, be accompanied by economic sanctions, cyberwarfare, and campaigns of misinformation that will infiltrate everyday life and everyday places that are remote from material destruction. This is currently happening, for instance, both through sanctions imposed on Russia, and in countries in Western Europe where energy costs have risen astronomically as supplies of Russian gas have been reduced.
Even if further inter-state warfare is avoided, the Ukraine war does not escalate, and the sort of peaceful cooperation envisaged by the IPCC is achieved, there will still have to be transformative social and economic changes to keep global warming at reasonable levels. These will involve major adaptations to the physical character and everyday life of many villages, towns and cities, in order to cope with the consequences of extreme weather. Many places will be destroyed, not in the traumatic manner of war, but incrementally through modifications or even slow abandonment. Migrations away from (mostly less developed) regions of the world where drought and other weather conditions have undermined hope for the future have already begun, and the World Bank projects that as many as 261 million people could be forced to move within their own countries by 2050 (World Bank, 2021). In developed nations global warming will mean displacement and the relocation of communities from coastal zones, flood plains and wildfire regions (McAdam and Ferris, 2015).
With the intensification of extreme weather events triggered by global warming, many places will, in effect, be destroyed, attachments to them eroded or broken. Some towns, even cities, along coastlines and in regions affected by drought and insufferable heat, will have to be abandoned, their communities relocated or dispersed. Some will be spontaneous, but when they are planned these relocations have been described as “managed retreats” (O’Donnell, 2022), a military metaphor that reinforces the sense that the world is now engaged in a war against global warming. It is a war that has to be waged from a position of widespread peace. All the indications are that military warfare, especially if it is widespread or protracted, will ensure failure in the battle against climate change and its consequences.
References
Kenneth Hewitt, 1983 “Place Annihilation: Area Bombing and the Fate of Urban Places” Annals, Association of American Geographers, Vol 73(2), pp. 257-284
Kenneth Hewitt, 1994 “Civil and Inner City Disasters: The Urban, Social Spaces of Bomb Destruction”, Erdkunde, 48(4) pp. 259-274.
IPCC 2022, Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability, Working Group II Contribution to the Sixth Assessment Report of the IPCC
McAdam, Jane and Ferris, Elizabeth, 2015, “Planned Relocation in the Context of Climate Change: Unpacking the Legal and Conceptual Issues”, Cambridge Journal of International and Comparative Law, 2015 , Vol 4, No 1, 137-166.
MacMIllan, Margaret (2013) The War the Ended Peace: the Road to 2014. Penguin Books
Michaelova, Alex, et al, 2022, Military and Conflict-Related Emissions: Kyoto to Glasgow and Beyond. Perspectives Climate Group, Freiburg Germany available here
Oliver Morton, 2022, “The Climate Issue” The Economist March 7 2022 available here (a brief discussion of the invasion of Ukraine and the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report)
Adrian Mourby 2015 “Where are the world’s most war-damaged cities?” The Guardian available here
O’Donnell, Tayanah, 2022, “Managed retreat and planned retreat: a systematic literature review” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, available here
Office of the Director National Intelligence, 2021, “Future of the Battlefield” in Global Trends 2040: A More Contested Future, National Intelligence Council, Global Trends, available
Office of the Director National Intelligence, 2021, Global Trends 2040: A More Contested Future, National Intelligence Council, Global Trends available here
Jeff Tollefson 2021 “Top climate scientists are sceptical that nations will reign in global warming,” Nature, November 2021, available here
White House. 2021 Report on the Impact of Climate Change on Migration, The White House, Washington D.C.
World Bank, 2021 “Groundswell Part 2: Acting on Internal Climate Migration”, available here