The Correlation Between Humanitarian Crises and The Climate Crisis

“You can’t separate human trauma and planet trauma; they are one and the same.” – Sheila Watt-Cloutier, climate activist, human rights advocate, and Nobel Prize nominee.

When news first broke of the Taliban taking control of Kabul in Afghanistan in early August, our team decided to take the necessary time to educate ourselves and engage in some offline conversations (with people a lot more knowledgeable than us) before we added our voice to the dialogue that was dominating your timelines and newsfeeds.

In those offline conversations, and through our individual research, what we found to be true was something team MM has always believed: Everything in this world is connected.
But as climate activist Sheila Watt-Cloutier said, “The global connections we need to make in order to consider the world and its people as a whole are sometimes lacking.” As a brand with a platform, this is where we think MM can be most impactful.

While academics still debate over whether the climate crisis directly causes conflicts and wars like what we’re seeing in Afghanistan (the factors behind any conflict are usually a mix of political, economic, social and environmental), what we know for certain is that nothing exists in a vacuum. To that end, humanitarian crises are almost always exacerbated by, or in some cases ignited by, the climate crisis. Human-induced climate change was a contributing factor to the extreme drought experienced in Syria prior to its civil war. This drought led to large-scale migration, and this migration worsened the socio-economic stresses that underpinned Syria’s descent into war in 2011. In Haiti, the last few years have been plagued by political turmoil which have limited the country’s ability to react to and aide their citizens in the most recent earthquake disaster – an earthquake which measured stronger than the 7.0 magnitude event that devastated the nation in 2010 and claimed the lives of more than 200,000 civilians. And in Afghanistan, where 80% of the population is dependent on rain-fed agriculture and cattle-grazing for income, farmers in places like Badghis Province have experienced such drastic temperature increases and a lack of rainfall that their crops have withered and their cattle have died of thirst which has led to hunger, which has led to poverty, which has led to migration to cities like Kabul. A city now under siege by the Taliban.

Even the wealthiest nations in the world are not immune to the effects of climate change. In the last year alone we’ve seen watched burst through banks and submerge entire towns in Germany and Belgium, and wildfires ravage national parks, homes and entire communities in the US, Canada, and Australia. But what separates places like the US from countries like Haiti or Afghanistan is their ability to recover; wealthy nations simply don’t feel an economic or social impact that is proportionate to their contribution to the problem. Put another way: We’re all weathering the same storm, but we’re not all in the same kind of life raft.

The World Bank Group estimates that climate change could result in more than 100 million additional people living in poverty by 2030; in large part because marginalized communities have the least sophisticated means to adjust and adapt to the changes that are already happening. The US military is the largest institutional emitter of greenhouse gases in the world, and between 2001 and 2019 they emitted 1.2 billion tons of GHG into Afghanistan; a country already plagued by extreme weather, mass displacement and conflict. What will those greenhouse gas emissions look like under the Taliban’s control? What will those who rely on farming and cattle for income do if their crops suffer further? Where will those communities migrate to if major cities like Kabul are no longer safe?

Maggie Marilyn doesn’t know the answer to these questions, but we must stop discussing humanitarian crises and the climate crisis as separate emergencies. We believe that sharing stories of the human connection to - and reliance on – nature and helping each other understand that planet trauma and human trauma are intrinsically linked, is the gateway to real, lasting change.