Environmental Disasters Are Here to Stay

Welcome back to World Brief, where we’re looking at climate change impacts from Canada to Bangladesh, Russia’s state of emergency over Ukraine’s breached dam, and jihadi terrorist attacks in Burkina Faso.

I spend most days writing World Brief on my front porch, surrounded by the noise and clatter of Washington, D.C. Today, though, I’ve been forced inside—windows closed—to escape the air pollution seeping south from Canada’s expansive wildfires. It’s just another reminder that nowhere on Earth remains untouched by the destructive forces of climate change.

In Haiti, locals are trying to recover from massive flooding that hit the island over the weekend, killing dozens and displacing thousands in a country that researchers say is at particularly high risk for catastrophic damage due to social and geographical factors. The Bangladeshi government closed primary schools this week to combat a deadly heat wave, which scientists say are happening more often, becoming more severe, and lasting longer due to climate change. South Africans are struggling to implement new potable water measures as severe droughts—which one study found would not have occurred without human-driven climate change—cut across the continent. And in Canada, more than 400 active wildfires have evicted around 26,000 residents from their homes. Although wildfires in Canada—like heavy rainfall in Haiti and drought in Africa—can be a normal feature of the ecosystem, experts say climate change causes more variability and increased extremes.

Farther north, the Arctic may be facing its first summer on record with almost no floating sea ice, according to a new United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report published Tuesday. Scientists warned that within 10 years, high temperatures could melt almost all of the Arctic’s summer ice—a decade sooner than previously predicted. Even worse is the finding that near-total melting could occur “even if nations manage to curb greenhouse gas emissions more decisively than they are currently doing,” the New York Times explained. Regarding the Arctic’s overall health, “I would give it a F,” Jeremy Mathis, the director of the Arctic Research Program at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, told Foreign Policy as early as 2016. “What happens in the Arctic doesn’t stay in the Arctic.”

Science has long established that climate change is a human-driven phenomenon. Nowhere is this clearer than in Europe, where Russia’s war in Ukraine has spiked greenhouse gas outputs to unprecedented levels. In the first 12 months of the war, emissions rose by 120 million metric tons, a new U.N. report due to be released this week found. Almost half of this increase was linked to the reconstruction of buildings and roadways destroyed in the fighting, and nearly 20 percent came from military emissions. To make matters worse, the breaching of a key dam near the Ukrainian city of Nova Kakhovka on Tuesday catalyzed severe flooding, leading Kyiv’s prosecutor general to launch an investigation accusing Russian troops of committing ecocide.

• 6 Swing States Will Decide the Future of Geopolitics by Cliff Kupchan
• What Ukraine’s Dam Collapse Means for the War by Robbie Gramer, Christina Lu, and Brawley Benson
• Russians Are Unraveling Before Our Eyes by Alexey Kovalev

Emergency measures. The Kremlin imposed a state of emergency on Wednesday in Russian-occupied parts of Kherson following the destruction of the Nova Kakhovka dam. Around 1,300 residents have already evacuated the area as mass flooding decimated close to 3,000 homes. In total, around 42,000 Ukrainians and Russians are at risk from flooding.

It is still unclear which side is responsible for the breach. On Wednesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin issued his first public statement on the dam’s collapse, calling it a “barbaric act.” The Kremlin continues to blame Ukrainian “sabotage” groups for the attack. Meanwhile, Kyiv and numerous Western leaders are pointing fingers at Russia, which has a history of threatening to target the dam with explosives. The U.N. Security Council met early Wednesday at the request of both sides to discuss the dam’s demise, where it highlighted the “massive ecological devastation” it caused.

Ongoing insurgency. In Burkina Faso, at least 21 people were killed in two suspected jihadi terrorist attacks on Monday, local security sources confirmed on Wednesday. In one clash, local officials in the southeastern town of Sawenga killed more than 50 suspected terrorists in an airborne counterattack. This followed two attacks late last month by suspected jihadi terrorists that killed around 40 people in western Burkina Faso.

Thousands of Burkinabe residents have fled into neighboring Ivory Coast to escape jihadi violence, which has only worsened following the country’s two military coups in 2022. In April, the government’s military junta declared a general mobilization to combat a series of terrorist attacks earlier in the year. This is a key part of the regime’s goal to reclaim the jihadi-captured territory, which makes up 40 percent of the country’s total land. Since 2015, more than 10,000 Burkinabe individuals have been killed and nearly 2 million more internally displaced due to the violence.

Chinese spy allegations. On Wednesday, the San Francisco County Superior Court accused Chinese tech company ByteDance of spying on Hong Kong rights activists. The court said Chinese Communist Party (CCP) members illegally accessed Hong Kong protesters’ data, specifically targeting those who uploaded “protest-related content” to TikTok, which ByteDance owns. According to former ByteDance executive Yintao Yu, this practice began as early as 2018. Evidence indicates that CCP officials were also able to view U.S. TikTok users’ data.

In June 2020, China imposed a national security law to tamp down dissent in Hong Kong by criminalizing the “subversion of state power,” among other crimes. Once deemed a democratic lighthouse in an autocracy-dominated region, Hong Kong’s prized judicial system has been swept away by China’s secret police, the Cato Institute’s Doug Bandow argued for Foreign Policy shortly after the law was established. Now, Hong Kong’s democratic political culture is facing historical erasure as even the subtlest signs of protest are swept under the rug.

Employees of Australia’s Sovereign Hill, one of Victoria’s most popular tourist attractions, are on strike this week to demand better pay and benefits. Sovereign Hill is a living museum, complete with shops, pubs, a school, cottages, gold diggings, and workshops, all dedicated to bringing to life the region’s 1850s gold rush-era past. Sovereign Hill’s educators are passionate about their historical surroundings; they just want their working conditions to get with the times.