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From Climate to Climatism
How an Ideology is Made

The land of Afghanistan has had its fair share of conflicts and miseries over the past 200 years. In the nineteenth century it was subject to an imperial tussle between Britain and Russia - 'the Great Game' as it was called - and in the past half century it has been invaded by both the Soviet Union and the United States and its western allies. More recently, it has faced internal conflict with the rising to power of the Taliban - a militant Islamist and jihadist political movement - who ruled the country between 1996 and 2001 and then again since August 2021. Throughout these imperial invasions, geopolitical manoeuvres and jihadist uprisings, the climate of Afghanistan has remained resolutely 'dry continental', to use the jargon of climatologists. It possesses an arid to semi-arid climate, very hot in summer and very cold in winter. Drought is endemic, rainfall rarely reliable but always welcome, and farming precarious. Afghanistan's climate enables and sustains a particular way of life and a distinctive set of agricultural practices.

And yet since the Taliban reclaimed power in 2021 from the American-backed democratic government of Mohammad Ahmadzai, the climate of Afghanistan seems to have gained new political agency. In the eyes of some western commentators, recent 'changes' in Afghanistan's climate have 'strengthened' the Taliban and even 'helped' it regain power. As one journalist argued, 'One of the decisive factors behind the Taliban's sudden takeover of Afghanistan this summer [2021] has been hidden in plain sight - climate change.'1 The argument is made that new agricultural precarity, induced by 'drought or flood-ravaged soil', has been used by the Taliban to sow resentment against the former US-backed government and to recruit supporters to its cause. Being paid up to $10 per day to fight for the Taliban appears a more attractive deal for some young men, it is argued, than continuing to extract a livelihood from the land in the face of climate's vicissitudes.

We see in this one example how (easy it seems to be) to move from climate to climatism; from recognizing a nation's distinctive physical climate to offering 'a change in the climate' as a decisive explanation for political change. It is an example that we find repeated in many other spheres of contemporary life.

From climate to climate change

Climate may be defined in purely physical terms, as for example by the scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). For them, climate results from 'the evolving interactions between the five major components of the Earth's system: the atmosphere, the hydrosphere, the cryosphere, the lithosphere and the biosphere'. Alternatively, climate may be understood phenomenologically as weather routinely experienced in a place, or understood culturally through the kind of oral traditions that survive among many Indigenous peoples. However one might define it, climate is real. Either way, the seasonal rhythms of atmospheric phenomena which characterize a place's climate are a precondition for life. Put differently, one cannot imagine life in a climate-less world. A world that offered no order or pattern to the physical conditions emanating from the atmosphere - phenomena we call 'weather' - would be one in which it would be difficult, if not almost impossible, to live securely.

And yet it is now indisputable that the world's physical climates are changing in ways heavily influenced by the collective weight of historical and ongoing human activities. Around the world the seasonal rhythms of weather are changing. Establishing this fact has been a significant accomplishment of cooperative international science over the past century and more.2 It has also been recognized by some more intuitively, through vernacular knowledge and first-hand experience. These changes afoot present a new and challenging dynamic for both human and non-human life. Their implications confront all social, ecological and political systems in today's world.

But this book is concerned neither with climate nor with climate change, both of which I have written about at length elsewhere.3 Rather, it is about naming, explaining and challenging a very specific pattern of thinking about the world which is becoming increasingly dominant, and about the nature of consequent human action in the world. This pattern of thinking I call climatism. I label climatism an ideology, a structured set of beliefs that interprets social and political worlds and that is used to guide human action in those worlds.

Simple belief in the physical realities of a changing climate does not in itself constitute climatism, however these beliefs in climate may be scientifically expressed or culturally mediated. Neither is the mere recognition of the processes of climatization at work in today's world - how matters of concern become linked to a changing climate - constitutive of climatism. No. The ideology of climatism reaches out further than this. Climatism is the settled belief that the dominant explanation of social, economic and ecological phenomena is 'a human-caused change in the climate'. It frames the complex political and ethical challenges confronting the world today first and foremost in terms of a changing climate.

Yet climatism is a pattern of thought which I believe carries significant dangers for social justice, political freedom and future prosperity. This chapter lays out how one gets from recognizing the importance of climate and believing in human-caused climate change to the ideology of climatism. It explains how it is possible to claim that 'climate change helped the Taliban to win'; in other words, how it is possible to move from recognizing the distinctive physical characteristics of Afghanistan's climate and its changes, to becoming convinced that the rise of the Taliban is a result of climate change.

From climate to climatization

Climatization is the process whereby issues that were formerly deemed largely or totally unrelated to climate start being analysed and understood predominantly through a climatic lens. Thus diet becomes climatized when food choices are made on the basis of their possible impact on climate; sport becomes climatized when decisions on when, where and how to play become conditioned on climatic considerations; or high energy particle physics becomes climatized when the location of a future power-hungry hadron collider is determined by its carbon footprint. The list is long and growing of environmental and cultural phenomena, matters of human choice and behaviour, or public policy issues that have become or are becoming climatized. Over the last few decades, questions about human mobility and conflict, about urban design and transport planning, about recreation and tourism, about human fertility and fashion - and many more questions besides - have all become climatized. Even whale conservation has become climatized. For example, it is claimed that returning the whale population to the pre-whaling levels of the eighteenth century would shave off about 0.05°C from future global warming. This is because such an increase in the numbers of whales would sequester in the ocean significant amounts of carbon dioxide drawn-down from the atmosphere.4

Some further examples illustrate this trend towards climatization. Take the world of military professionals. In 2019, the International Military Council for Climate and Security (IMCCS) was launched at a conference on planetary security held at The Hague. The IMCCS comprises a worldwide group of senior military leaders, security experts and security institutions dedicated to 'anticipating, analysing and addressing the security risks of a changing climate'. As declared in its mission statement, 'Climate change is driving unprecedented risks to the geostrategic landscape of the 21st century. Militaries have a responsibility to help prevent and prepare for these risks.' Military powers have become climatized by evaluating the impacts of climate change on military assets and installations and through the rhetoric of 'greening defence'. For example, the UK's Parliamentary Defence Committee now holds regular hearings on defence and climate change. Military powers have become climatized by framing climate change as a 'threat multiplier' and by using climate-induced conflicts to justify and mobilize 'humanitarian assistance and disaster relief' by the military. And there are calls for greenhouse gas emissions from military activities to be separately accounted and for the impacts of war on climate to be factored into military strategy.5

Indian international relations expert Dhanasree Jayaram offers a detailed account of how this move towards climatization is playing out within the Indian armed forces. For example, a 'Green Cell' has been established at India's Navy Headquarters to 'coordinate and monitor implementation of the "green initiatives" by all segments of the navy', while India's Territorial Army has raised eight battalions in recent years to form an Ecological Task Force. This Force has been tasked with afforesting severely degraded land on...