Claim: ‘How climate change is helping Al Qaeda’: ‘Climate change makes people feel small and helpless, and Islamic fundamentalists have been very good at turning helplessness and despair into anger and action’
'Climate change is making things harder for those who live in a politically unstable and economically challenged region'
Excerpt: What role is climate change playing in conflicts across the Sahel? “Climate change plays two roles,” says Opower's Sloan. “When you and your family have been living off the same land for generations and all of a sudden that becomes impossible, the first impact is relocation. But there’s a limited amount of land in the world so we’re going to see more and more skirmish zones.” “Second, climate change makes people feel small and helpless, and Islamic fundamentalists have been very good at turning helplessness and despair into anger and action. If you give someone who feels small a gun, they stop feeling small,” he adds. Sloan is a former US Army soldier. “If you give them a direction to point that gun they stop feeling helpless.”
