On Wednesday, February 26, the Strauss Center for International Security and Law and LBJ School of Public Affairs will host a discussion with environmental journalist and researcher Peter Schwartzstein about his new book, “The Heat and the Fury: On the Front Lines of Climate Violence.” This talk will be moderated by Strauss Distinguished Scholar and LBJ Professor Joshua Busby.
In this conversation, Schwartzstein and Busby will discuss how climate change can often exacerbate existing tensions, leading to conflict of varying levels at the interpersonal, community, national, and global levels. They will discuss what can be done to cool this simmering challenge and how cooperation on climate may help mitigate other pressing issues in our world.
This talk will be held from 5:15 to 6:30 pm at the LBJ School of Public Affairs in first floor classroom SRH 3.124. Parking is available for a fee at the Manor Garage and the San Jacinto Garage. Parking will not be validated.
For any questions about this event, contact Brittany Horton at brittany.horton@austin.utexas.edu.
About the Speaker
Peter Schwartzstein is an environmental journalist, researcher, and author based in Greece, but often also working elsewhere in the Eastern Mediterranean, Middle East, or North and East Africa. He writes about the connections between the environment and politics and security, with a particular focus on the climate-violence nexus. For about a decade, Schwartzstein wrote for National Geographic, contributing dozens of features, but also regularly published articles in Foreign Policy, Bloomberg Businessweek, the New York Times, Foreign Affairs, and the BBC, among many others. Over the past ~12 years, he has reported from more than 30 countries while contributing history and science articles to Smithsonian Magazine.
Since 2017, Schwartzstein has consulted for a range of UN agencies and iNGOs, including UNEP, UNDP, Amnesty International, HRW, UNICEF, and the International Water Management Institute (IWMI). In 2018, he joined the Center for Climate & Security, a non-partisan DC-based think tank, as a non-resident research fellow, and, in 2022, became a Global Fellow with the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change & Security Program. He is a TED fellow, and has given talks or spoken on panels at dozens of conferences and colleges, ranging from the UN Environment Assembly and the State Department, to Yale and Georgetown Universities.
Most recently, in late 2024, Schwartzstein published his first book, “The Heat and the Fury: On the Frontlines of Climate Violence,” which 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, simultaneously, trying to flesh out some of the causal pathways between climate and violence to members of his 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, fighters, and regular families in the middle of this mess. Among many reasons for writing the book, he is trying to hammer home the severity of climate change to constituencies who might be more inclined to embrace its national security ramifications than its justice/health/ecological consequences. The FT listed the book as one of the best new ones on climate.