Welcome to Locally Sourced, a biweekly Covering Climate Now newsletter for journalists working to localize the climate story. Share this newsletter with colleagues and journalism students interested in localizing the climate story.
Story Spark: Violence
Extensive research has shown climate change is not only making the world hotter, but more violent as well. Extreme heat makes it more difficult to process new information, manage emotions, and control impulses, priming people to act more aggressively when temperatures rise.
Climate change fuels gender-based violence, with recent research suggesting that one in 10 cases of intimate partner violence (IPV) will be linked to climate change by the end of the century. The same study estimated that by 2090 an additional 40 million women and girls are likely to experience IPV each year in a 2-degree-Celsius warming scenario. Extreme heat also increases the risk of gun violence. A study of 100 US cities found that that nearly 7% of shootings nationally, between 2015 and 2020, could be attributed to above-average daily temperatures. These incidents of climate-driven violence hit hardest in vulnerable communities, where climate change exacerbates economic instability, food and water insecurity, displacement, and other risk factors for violent behavior.
Digging into how heat exacerbates existing disparities, like racial health equity, will deepen your reporting. Solutions to reduce urban heat islands, including building and maintaining green spaces, address several issues at once by reducing urban temperatures and providing shade on hot days. But larger efforts are needed to address this social climate impact, including expanding access to vital support networks for survivors, addressing other climate impacts driving conflict like drought, and, critically, ending the use of fossil fuels.
Expert Tips
Andreas Miles-Novelo, PhD, is a core faculty member at Fielding Graduate University. He is the author of Climate Change and Human Behavior in the Applied Social Psychology series from Cambridge University Press, as well as a regular publisher of scientific studies on violence, climate change, and emerging technology.
Helina Selemon is an award-winning science investigative journalist and researcher based in New York. She most recently worked for The Blacklight, the award-winning investigative unit for the New York Amsterdam News, where she reported on COVID-19, climate change and gun violence.
ANDREAS: Heat is just one way climate change is increasing violence. No one thing causes violence to take place; rather, it is the combination of a lot of risk factors that, when combined, increase the likelihood of violence. Rapid global warming is increasing many of the known risk factors associated with both individual-level violence and group-level conflict. That includes increased heat, as well as other issues like resource scarcity, increased displacement, perceived and lived material insecurity, and subsequent increases in hostile rhetoric towards outgroups. All of these effects are coming together to create a situation that is increasingly likely to erupt into violence. Scientists are already seeing this unfold.
HELINA: Center voices that aren’t in the news a lot. To make sure you’re not telling the same story everyone else is, seek out and elevate voices who aren’t often interviewed by the media. Black and brown people and people from marginalized backgrounds shouldn’t be marginalized voices in your stories.
HELINA: If data intimidates you, seek help (and be collaborative with researchers)! Find researchers who are maintaining datasets and who can help make sense of them and ensure your takeaways are accurate. The Trace has a data hub to help journalists and others. Find data that’s wide-reaching but granular for a sense of scope for how your communities compare to others across the region or country.
ANDREAS: Solutions must be holistic. Because the relationship between violence and climate change is complex and intersectional with other social issues, we have to remember that to address the climate crisis, we need holistic policies that address all levels of exploitation, oppression, and inequality across the globe. Research demonstrates that the best prevention of violence is perceived material equality and social stability, so any policy directed at violence prevention must take that into account to be truly effective.
HELINA: Get to know local community violence prevention groups. Ask them about what they see in their communities and about annual trends, and how they respond. It’s important to highlight who’s most impacted and most in need. Science stories and science reporters can tell stories with feeling. Aside from finding groups on social media or at community events, talk to your local government agencies or look for organizations that have gotten local government funding to help with community violence prevention.
Stories We Like
- New York’s Amsterdam News explores how rising temperatures and gun violence are intertwined, and examines how heat exacerbates existing social and environmental disparities in urban areas.
- From tensions over a water-sharing treaty between India and Pakistan to Israel targeting Gaza’s water systems, The Guardian highlights how incidents of water-related violence have nearly doubled since 2022.
- In Sri Lanka, one of the world’s most climate-impacted countries, increasingly frequent heatwaves, droughts, and storms exacerbate existing economic hardship; men then turn their rage on women.
- NPR digs into a scientific experiment that placed thousands of people in baking hot rooms to find out if high temperatures may make us more violent.
- The Xylom highlights how locals in the increasingly resource-starved East African region of the Ilemi Triangle are taking steps to embrace climate-smart agriculture to limit pastoral conflicts.
Resources
- The research into this topic is robust — check out recent studies examining the link between rising temperatures and violent crime — including in the US, South Korea, Spain, and Kenya.
- Explore how the climate crisis fuels gender-based violence in the latest brief from the UN’s Spotlight Initiative.
- Find more information on the psychology of violent behavior and climate change in a new literary review from the American Psychological Association.
Experts
- Seulkee Heo, associate research scientist, Yale University
- Craig Anderson, professor, Iowa State University
- Jenevieve Mannel, professor, University College London
Before We Go…
The next Locally Sourced will highlight El Niño. Have you reported on the wide-ranging impacts from previous ENSO events or highlighted the likelihood of a “super El Niño” emerging soon? Send them to us at local[at]coveringclimatenow[dot]org. We’d love to consider them for the next edition of Locally Sourced and our media trainings and social platforms.
CCNow Office Hours. Are you a journalist who needs help finding the local angle to a climate story? Sign up for office hours with CCNow’s David Dickson for editorial and climate support.
Want more story ideas? Check out the Locally Sourced archive for more topics to explore, including AI data centers, coastal flooding, air transportation, and more.
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