Messy New World: When climate change blurs borders

NEW DELHI: In recent years, Greek soldiers on patrol along the Evros River have found themselves at times unsure of which country they were in. Sometimes extreme rain swells the river, which forms most of the Greece-Turkey land border, enough to obscure telltale markers.

On other occasions, drought reduces it in places to a patchwork of stagnant puddles, with little discernible water separating the two sides. On other occasions, thick smoke from nearby wildfires has covered the river, also known as the Meriç or the Maritsa, in an all-concealing haze.

There is never a good time to stray over a border as politically charged and bristling with weaponry as this one, and lately tensions have been high. In 2022, Greece and Turkey were at each other’s throats over disputed maritime boundaries and other issues. In the river’s pea soup of uncertainty, a conflict is waiting to happen.

Borders are, by their very nature, tense places, where territorial claims, ethnic spats and competition for natural resources frequently play out. To these beefs, we are adding the impact of climate change on the geographic features that demarcate many frontiers.

As rivers, mountain ridges and other physical boundaries shape-shift under the pressure of more extreme weather events, they’re fashioning new or intensifying old bones of contention. Adjoining nations, many wrestling with longstanding challenges and inclined to believe the worst of the other as a consequence, are often poorly equipped to manage the fallouts peacefully.

These climate-induced flashpoints are found on almost every continent and across nearly every type of landscape. For example, thousands of feet up in the Himalayas, melting glaciers are complicating management of the de facto Chinese-Indian border, known as the line of actual control, on which troops have fought and killed one another as recently as 2020.

Thawing ice is destabilising guard posts, while also opening up more terrain for patrols, which can create more chances for clashes.

Well below them, more and fiercer sandstorms are impeding surveillance along the border between Afghanistan and Iran. Drug traffickers take advantage of sandstorms to smuggle drugs from the former into the latter.

But for sheer range of climate-border woes, Greece and its neighbours arguably best exemplify this phenomenon. In the Aegean Sea, changing fish migration patterns risk bringing Greek and Turkish fishermen — and their respective Coast Guards — into more regular and more dangerous contact.

These changes are carrying more high-value tuna into the area around the contested islets that have previously brought the two countries to the brink of war, and which were seldom previously prime fishing grounds. “The fishing patterns are all messed up,” Vasili Lydas, a fisherman from the nearby Greek island of Kalymnos, told me in 2020. “Sometimes they come later. Sometimes they come earlier.” The situation has only worsened since then, islanders say, with smaller catches from overfishing motivating more risk-taking across the Eastern Mediterranean.

In this messy new world, even state responses to climate change can fall afoul of border trouble. Athens has built out considerable new renewable energy facilities, but it won’t be assembling offshore wind farms near its maritime border with Turkey any time soon, defence ministry sources told me.

Despite the Aegean’s blustery, near-perfect year-round conditions for electricity generation, the military has concluded that these facilities constitute a risk to their readiness in the event of an attack by interfering with radar and sonar. “The whole Air Force and naval community just said no,” said one military adviser.

The bad news in a world that is broiling is that we’re likely to see much more of this. Not only will more border features contort themselves in ways and at speeds that inadvertently fuel tension, but more governments may be incentivised to seek out conflict with their neighbours.

But there’s plenty of reason for guarded optimism, too. On its borders with Albania and North Macedonia, Greece has shown that climate action can sometimes reduce tensions. In the Middle East, cooperation over water resources can keep dialogue open in the most challenging of circumstances: Jordanian officials frequently frame climate change as a reason they must engage in water cooperation with Israel, despite its domestic unpopularity.

Most importantly, perhaps, Switzerland and Italy recently provided a stirring example of how countries with strong bonds and established means of negotiating can quickly resolve otherwise touchy topics. When a melting glacier warped a portion of their frontier, the two countries agreed to shift the border. In a world that would very happily live without additional tension, other nations may need to display similar sang-froid.