How climate change will reshape geopolitics over the next 20 years

A near miss with a falling boulder while climbing in the Swiss Alps prompted Arthur Snell to link his love of mountains with the bigger forces remaking the world. In his book Elemental he argues that a warming planet is unsettling landscapes and, in turn, the ways states exercise power — from drought-stricken Africa to a defrosting Arctic.

As ice and permafrost retreat, formerly inaccessible resources and habitable land are suddenly in demand, and that brings both opportunity and risk. Greenland’s minerals illustrate the dilemma; newly navigable Arctic waters could open lucrative summer shipping routes and intensify competition for oil, gas and fish in a region where Russia and the US meet, and where strategic naval passages run past Greenland.

climate change, geopolitics, arctic, greenland minerals, permafrost, shipping routes, oil, gas, fish, droughts