THE ULTIMATE WEAPON: CLMATE CHANGE

By Isa Wunsch

Across the world, and most specifically in the Middle East (Palestine, Iran, and the Gulf States of UAE, Kuwait, and Qatar) we’re seeing the writing of a new playbook for war: weaponizing the climate itself. 

Many of the nations who are most affected by the war in the Strait of Hormuz are seeing the tit for tat missile exchange of climate warfare. After the US and Israel began targeting desalination plants across Iran, a nation experiencing an unprecedented drought and water scarcity, the Islamic Republic retaliated with its own strikes on desalination plants on Gulf States allied with the US and Israel.

In an era of climate catastrophe, survival adaptations and sustainable alternatives are targeted as means for destruction. When producing water for your country’s populations becomes as intensive and valuable as extracting and selling oil, which target becomes more effective as a means to wage war? 

In Palestine, just the other day, IDF soldiers celebrated the destruction of a water processing plant in Gaza, a repeating pattern of systematically making Palestine unlivable. 

And in Cuba, the double fisted chokehold by the United States on the island has left everyday people struggling to live their most fundamental lives, especially to sleep. Intense heat and humidity, aging infrastructure, and almost daily, 20 hr + blackouts have compromised the ability to live.

It seems like this is the new playbook: destroying the infrastructure necessary to adapt to our increasingly volatile climate. Exposing vulnerable people to the raw effects of drought, intense humidity and heat, and famine. When certain parts of the planet become increasingly hostile to life, and we create technologies to survive in them, do those adaptations become valid targets to those in power?