Afghanistan – The Climate Crisis

 

 

Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale

 

Last month we wrote about the end of the American occupation of Afghanistan and the Taliban victory.[1] This piece is about climate change in Afghanistan. The topic is urgent. Afghanistan is one of countries in the world most vulnerable to climate change.

This year a long-running drought caused by climate change has reduced the harvest by almost half. Hunger and famine threaten unless Afghans receive a great deal of aid, quickly. But there is the looming danger that US financial sanctions will make aid work impossible and combine with hunger to create economic collapse.

This article begins with the effects of climate change in Afghanistan over the last 50 years. Then we talk about the situation now. We argue that instead of making war for twenty years, the Americans could have worked to create climate jobs and prevent the climate crisis. We end with ideas of what people in other countries can do politically to help Afghans facing climate disaster.

In many parts of the world people see climate change as a terrible threat in the future. In Afghanistan that threat has been eating away at the fabric of the economy and society for half a century.

Since 1750 climate change has already warmed the world by an average of 1.1 degrees centigrade. Afghanistan is warming at more than double the global average. Scientists and the UN now urge us to keep the total increase below 1.5 degrees if possible, and absolutely to avoid the dangers of passing 2.0. Afghanistan warmed by 2.0 degrees between 1951 and 2020. By 2050, thirty years from now, temperatures in Afghanistan are likely to rise by another 2 degrees.

This is happening in what is already one of the poorest and most arid countries on earth. On the plains, and in the summers, it is already very hot. Only 5% of the land can produce crops, and most of that only with irrigation. Most people live on 2 dollars a day or less. Now that the crops have failed, the price of food will rise rapidly.

The most important effect of rising temperatures is drought. Andrej Přívara and Magdalena Přívarova write that, “Striking droughts in Afghanstan have become a solid feature of its climate. Several severe droughts have been recorded with a tendency to increase the frequency of the drought cycle, for instance, 1963–64, 1966–67, 1970–72 and 1998–2006. The period 1998–2006 appeared to be the longest and most extreme drought in the climate history of Afghanistan.”[2]

Notice that the drought from 1998 to 2006 lasted eight years. Since then, there has been the drought of 2013-14, and the drought that started in 2018 continues today.

Two accounts of the early days of climate change in Afghanistan can help us understand what that could mean. One account is from the north of the country, and one from the south.

Nancy writes: In 1971 and 1972 Richard Tapper and I lived with Afghan villagers, the Piruzai, for nearly a year. Hajji Tuman was our host throughout our stay with the Piruzai. This is a picture of Tuman and his daughter, Maygol. They were crazy about each other.

Hajji Tuman and the other Piruzai we knew were warm, clear thinking and tough. They lived hard lives in an unforgiving setting and had few illusions about what was possible.

People didn’t complain, but coped with an alert intelligence they described as ‘keeping your thoughts in place’. They were good a laughing at themselves, and curious and wise about others. Their care and love of their children was a model Richard and I strove to follow when we had children of our own.

And we were fortunate in another way. Haji Toman understood we were doing research – anthropology – insanshenasi – and wanted to help us ‘write a book’.

The Piruzai were Pashtu-speakers, semi-nomadic pastoralists and peasant farmers. They were poor people trying to survive in a vicious, unequal political system.

The Piruzai villages were in the Sar-e-pol River valley. Many Piruzai stayed in the villages all year round.  Farming in the valley was arduous, but it was reckoned easier than travelling more than the 150 miles to and from the central mountains of the country in the summer.

1971 was the second year of the drought in northern Afghanistan. That winter was severe, and sudden late snows inflicted catastrophic losses of flocks throughout the country. The Piruzai suffered greatly, while elsewhere, especially in Ghor and the far north-west, there was famine and people starved.

In the winter at least one family from the owners of a joint flock stayed out with the animals on the steppes east of Sar-e-Pul, assisted by one or two young men hired as shepherds.

In the summer of 1972 Baya Khan, one of Hajji Toman’s grown sons, wept as he remembered the winter:

In the autumn, it became clear that it was going to be a bad winter. There was no grass left in the steppe where the sheep were grazing, it was all dust, just like the tracks. Then for two nights there was a foul dust storm. The first night, a whirlwind came from downriver. You couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. In the morning when we went out to the steppe to look for the animals, they were all over the place – and so were the wolves.

The carcasses stacked up. None of our animals died at first, but later they went hungry. Once a sheep “falls from its stomach”, it’ll drop dead.

At first you could find fodder here, at a price. But in late February it ran out completely. My job was to find straw and take it to the sheep.

My trousers were frozen stiff. It was so cold, you couldn’t raise your arms from your sides. When we went by night to places in the main valley, we could hear wolves howling out in the snow. Once, on our way back, we were with some Omarzai, and one of them fell behind; we saw some wolves on top of a ridge and we said, “Watch out that fellow doesn’t get eaten!”

We watched, but he didn’t make it.^[3]

Baya Khan’s older brother Padshah and his wife Pakhal were with the flocks during the black months of icy cold.

Pakhal held Spin, her baby daughter, when she talked about the winter [see photo below].

The night this girl was born, four of our sheep died, but the dying hadn’t really begun. Two days later, the snow really started. We slaughtered 50 sheep, and put the carcasses into Pakiza’s hut, filling it to the door.

This was just two days after I’d given birth, and when Baya-khan arrived with more hay, I cried, ‘I’m unwell. The sheep are dying and we’ll die here too!’

I was feverish.  At night we took the sheep into our tiny hut. I went to sleep with sheep on my bed. The snow fell for three days and nights, and from then on each night at least twenty sheep died, sometimes forty or fifty.

Everyone in Hajji Tuman’s household was involved in the struggle to keep Padshah and Pahal and the flocks alive. Every couple of days someone came out to the steppe with water and flour, while Baya-khan, and Hajji Tuman himself, begged friends and relatives in Konjek and the neighbouring villages for hay and straw for the sheep. Later, Baya-khantook a train of camels to the bazaars in Sar-e-pol, Sheberghan and eventually Mazar-e Sharif, searching for fodder at ever rising prices.

Jonathan Remembers

And Jonathan writes: It is November of 1972. I am twenty-three, a young anthropologist beginning my first fieldwork, in the town of Lashkargah in southwestern Afghanistan. King Zahir Shah still ruled  the country.

Walking back to the only hotel in town for my supper, I pass a teenage boy standing on the side of the road. He says something quietly. I am well past him by the time I understand what he said. I am so proud of myself. It is the first Pushtu sentence I have understood outside of a lesson. But I am too embarrassed or shy to go back to him.

He said: “I am hungry”.

To the north of Lashkargah a terrible famine was beginning. I understood within weeks that boy was a refugee from that starvation. That famine, I know now, was caused by drought caused by climate change. Like every famine it was also caused by inequality and cruelty.

In the north of the country the government delivered foreign aid grain. The district officers put armed soldiers around the piles of grain in the middle of the towns to prevent the hungry getting the food. The poor sold their land at knockdown prices to the rich to buy wheat from the district officers at five and ten times the usual prices. Those with no land to sell died.

My friend Michael Barry asked some starving people why they did not storm the grain piles. One of them said: “The King has planes. They will come and shoot us down.”

Those were Russian planes, flown by pilots trained in America. US Aid knew what was happening to their grain aid. I know that because the wife and daughter of the man who ran US Aid told me so as I drank scotch in their nice house in Kabul. They were upset because they could not get their husband and father to do anything.

I have told that story many times since, in many ways. I will go on telling it, boringly, until the day I die. I tell it to make an important point about what serious climate change will feel like – and what it already feels like for many millions.

No one dared to storm those piles of grain. But when the ‘leftist strongman’ Daoud, the King’s cousin, staged a coup two years later, no one would die for the King. The famine had left him with the mark of Cain. And when the communists staged a coup against Daoud four years after that, no one fought for Daoud, the King’s cousin, either.

The story of Afghan politics after that is endlessly complex. But the direction is clear: war after war, betrayal after betrayal, endless grief. Always in the background, the failure of the rains, across all of Central Asia, for decades.

What Droughts Do in Poor Countries?

And now Nancy and Jonathan write: It is important to understand what droughts do. Australia and the western United States have been hit as hard physically by climate change as anywhere in the world. But these are rich countries, where only a small minority of people live by farming. The larger economy and society can absorb the disaster of drought.

By contrast, about 80% of Afghans live in rural areas, directly or indirectly dependent on farming and herding to survive. Droughts kill the livestock, because there is no grass. Droughts also kill half of the crop, and in some places all the crops. Farmers with land borrow money, and long recurrent droughts trap them in a cycle of debt until they have lost all their land.

With falling harvests, the price of food rises. The majority of Afghans, rural and urban, already live on the edge of hunger. For the majority families, flour is the major expense. When the price of flour rises, adults and children eat less.

In bad years, many small landowners sell land to buy grain. But at least half the people on the land are sharecroppers. Depending on the region, their share is a fifth to a third of the crop. In a good year, that share is just enough for a family of four to eat. In a bad year, the amount of food is cut by half or more.

Over decades, as drought follows drought, many herders and small landowners have been driven down into the ranks of the landless poor. And millions of the landless poor have been driven into the cities, or into refugee camps abroad, in order to survive.^[4]

The Drought in 2019

Andrej Přívara and Magdalena Přívarova described the situation in 2019:

Over the last 3 years, most regions in Afghanistan have experienced between 4 and 6 successive rainfall seasons that were far below the average rainfall previously. As a result, there have been recorded substantial decreases in water tables, river flows, snow depths, water levels in dams and soil damp.

These climate change events have already negatively and irrevocably affected agricultural production in Afghanistan. Repeated cycles of drought caused a loss of crops, livestock and livelihoods and weakened purchasing power. According to Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), as of September 2018, 9.8 million people (43.6% of the rural population) were recorded to be in Food Crisis and Emergency, indicating that Afghanistan is experiencing a major food and livelihood crisis, which has been mainly caused by the severe drought restricting food production and diminishing the livelihoods and assets of farmers and other livestock keepers.

As of 8 July 2019, the sudden inflow of over a quarter million people into the borders of Herat, a provincial capital city, during just a few months, has caused the appearance of 19 massive and expansive informal settlements. According to estimations, 13.5 million people are severely food insecure and need emergency assistance. In these conditions, displaced households residing in impermanent and poorly protected shelters are facing the risk of severe winters and the high risk of flooding, especially those living on dry-river beds.[5]

The Situation Now

This brings us to now, to mid-September of 2021. There was serious drought in 2019. In 2020 there was enough rain. But 2021 has seen the return of drought, particularly in the North, the West and the central mountains. The best estimate is that 40% of this year’s crop of wheat has been lost. This is a rough guess, no one can know for sure, but it indicates the scale of the problem. And that is an average across the country. In some places much more than half the crop will have been lost.

The majority of Afghan households spend at least half of their income on food, and for most of them the majority of that is spent on the staples: wheat bread and corn bread. When climate change drought hits the crop on this scale, several consequences follow.

First, the families of small farmers and sharecroppers do not have enough to eat. They are the majority of people making a living from the land. They must borrow money to live, offering their land as collateral. Or they must sell land. But for many the long previous droughts have worn down their collateral. And sharecroppers have nothing to mortgage. They are hungry, and many will die.

Second, because there is not enough grain, the price of bread rises. That price has risen by about a third in the last few months. But if shortage persists it will rise by much more. These price rises make rural hunger much worse. But they also hit the urban working poor, the majority of people in the cities.

Third, there has never been a famine anywhere on Earth in which everyone dies. The poorest and weakest die, and the richest and most powerful not only survive but prosper. The question of government policy becomes crucial. If the government can control grain, or get food aid from other countries, and the government can distribute food fairly, famine can be averted.

The current political situation will make that hard. The Taliban victory was a humiliation for American power, as we argued two weeks ago [here]. The United States has a long record of financial sanctions designed to break the economies of countries who have defied or defeated them, like Cuba, Vietnam, Iran and Saddam’s Iraq. All of these examples took place in much richer countries than Afghanistan, with a much stronger state apparatus, where people were less hungry to begin with.

There is every sign that the Biden administration is pursuing the same policies now. When the Taliban walked into the Central Bank, they discovered that the previous government had put all their reserves in the Federal Reserve Bank in Washington. The Fed refused to release that money, which belonged to Afghanistan, because they no longer approved of that government.

Just as important, both the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have cut off any dollars for Afghanistan. These monies are not necessarily important in themselves. But the large international banks usually take this as a signal that they too should not loan to a government.

Unless something is done soon, this will mean that the Afghan government cannot borrow money. Just as important, they will not be able to move money to pay for imported food.

Even more important, international aid agencies will not be able to move money in and out of Afghanistan. That will mean they cannot pay for food and medicines. That matters much more than it would in most countries because Afghanistan is so poor. That poverty means that no Afghan state since 1838 has been able to raise enough taxes to pay for even the minimal actions of a state. All Afghan states, of all political complexions, have relied on aid from a foreign power or powers.

When the Taliban were in power before, from 1995 to 2001, they relied on foreign development agencies, NGOs and the UN for food aid, and money to run hospitals and schools. The governments under the US occupation since have done the same.

All the conditions are in place for climate drought to become famine. The UN and NGOs estimate that about 12 million people, almost a third of the population, are in danger of hunger. Snow lies heavy in the higher mountain valleys in winter, and many will be cut off from any food or traffic for six months by late October.

We have seen one report that there is almost no work available for day labourers in Kabul, a large part of the working class. We do not know how general this is, or how long it will remain the case. But Kabul is a city of about four and a half million people, with little underlying industry or economy except for the American occupation and the government.

Three things are happening at once. There is the reality of drought and hunger. There is the threat of economic collapse in the cities because the stimulation from the occupation has been cut off. And there are concerted moves led by the Biden administration to cut off any possibility of aid, food or money from outside.

We should be clear about the US government policy. The instruments are financial. The intent is to create widespread famine. Among other things, that will kill large numbers of women and children. The hope in Washington is that famine will produce chaos, civil war, mass movements of refugees, neighbour turning upon neighbour, and eventually the fall of the Taliban.

They are weaponizing climate change to kill and kill to avenge their defeat by the Taliban.

Maybe you don’t like the Taliban. Fair enough. Maybe you hate them. But if you are supporting sanctions against Afghanistan, be very clear that your chosen weapon is starving children to death. Not starving Taliban leaders but starving the children of poor Afghans who have chosen to support the Taliban, and the children of Afghans who despise the Taliban.

There is now an endless barrage of news stories in the United States and Britain, and elsewhere that are designed to do two things.

The first thing is to mobilize support for sanctions. These stories say that the Taliban will not let women be athletes, that they have closed some girls’ schools, that many teachers are frightened, that the corrupt women judges of the old regime are in hiding. These stories are a mixture of truth, exaggeration and lies. You would be a fool to believe most of the stories without careful checking, but you would also be fool not to know that some of them are true. But it is important to remember than that most of the Afghan voices we hear reported in the media are from well to do people, people of the Afghan elite. They are people who benefitted from the occupation and have lost place with the Taliban victory.

These voices, of course, also reflect complex realities. Take the case of the women judges in hiding. The male judges of the old regime are also in hiding. The great majority of those judges, men and women, were corrupt, and fear punishment.

But you should also understand the implicit message behind most of these stories – something must be done to punish the Taliban. The only tool available to the Americans seems to be financial sanctions to starve the children. It is remarkable how easily mainstream media in the US and Britain assume that is not only morally acceptable, but also what is bound to happen.

The second set of stories in the US and Britain are aimed at criticising Biden and Johnson for a chaotic and incompetent withdrawal. The purpose of these arguments, we have argued elsewhere, is to conceal an important truth.

That truth is that the American and British armies have been defeated. Biden and Johnson had no options. If the American military stood and fought, they would be taken prisoner, killed or evacuated from the battlefield by helicopters. And most likely many American and British diplomats and other citizens would also have been killed. The global humiliation would have been complete.

Instead, the Biden administration did the best they could and negotiated a truce with the Taliban which allowed them to evacuate all their soldiers and some of their citizens. And far more important, there would be no fighting in Kabul, and little fighting in the other cities. Power passed with very little loss of life.

This was not only because the Taliban took the decent option. It was also because there is a very long tradition in Afghan politics of avoiding battles between Afghans whenever possible. And it is because the Taliban knew that the people whose support they needed desperately wanted a peaceful transfer of power.

This was a signal achievement for the Taliban, for their Afghan enemies, for ordinary Afghans, and for Biden. All the crabbing about Biden is to conceal the fact that, given the defeat of the American military, he had no choice.

This also means that the Biden administration, and the other NATO powers, are strongly tempted to humiliate the Taliban through the economic collapse.

We Can Stop Famine

The danger of financial sanctions is real. But a climate catastrophe and famine on a horrific scale are not inevitable. There are forces that can stop it, on both a great power and a grassroots level.

For the moment, the US looks likely to take revenge. But Afghanistan’s neighbours have strong reasons for making peace and helping the Taliban.

China has made peace with the Taliban, and Afghanistan has now joined the Chinese Belt and Road project, signalling that they are prepared to be in China’s sphere of influence.

Both Pakistan and Iran already have millions of Afghan refugees. They do not want more. China, Russia, Uzbekistan and Pakistan all fear the impact of political Islam in their own domains and fear what would happen if the Taliban aided their dissidents.

In consequence, all these powers may come together to provide enough aid to avoid collapse and civil war. If they do, their motives will not be noble, but they will save a lot of lives.

But at the grassroots level there are also real forces in the United States, the UK and the European Union who want to act. The most important of these are the humanitarian agencies. At the top, right now, the main agencies are torn. Their senior managers know only too well what is likely to happen. It is central to their life’s work that they should do something to help. But at the same time, they are afraid of the anger of Western governments, who provide so much of their funding. Given the barrage of stories about evil Taliban, they also have to worry about angering the reasonably affluent people who usually donate to them.

Still, the pressure for action is building. On Monday, for example, the Guardian reported that the UN had just convened a meeting of donor countries who promised a billion dollars in aid for Afghanistan. The same article also reported that in Ghor province, in the central mountains, hospitals and doctors were effectively out of medicines. This is all in the middle of a raging Covid epidemic in Afghanistan.

This is a situation where the Washington consensus on punishment is not all powerful.  In this situation, ordinary humanitarian workers can make a difference. If their voices are raised, even just a little, and petitions launched asking people who are, or have been, humanitarian workers and others to sign. If only a thousand of those people signed, it would make an impact. And many more would sign.

No one who signed the petition would have to support the Taliban. That is not what this is about. The petition would be about making sure that food can get to people so they don’t starve.

Climate Change and the Occupation

We want to end by coming back to where we started. This is a climate emergency. The climate droughts we talked about earlier started half a century ago. The rains may come next year, or they may not. There is an element of chance there. What is not left to chance is that the general direction of travel is downwards, to worse droughts, worse harvests, worse heat and more suffering.

Some recent reports have suggested that the Taliban were able to win, in part, because of the long droughts under the American occupation. This may be the case, but we would urge caution.

Two years ago, we published a chapter of a book on oil, war and climate change in the Middle East. [You can download it here.]

There we compared the wars in Darfur, Syria and Afghanistan, all places badly affected by climate change. We argued there that there were many foreign powers stirring up proxy war in Darfur, but that the central dynamic was poor farmers and herders fighting for disappearing water and pasture. In the Syrian case, drought and the migration of poor farmers to the cities was important. But more important was the hatred most ordinary Syrians had for the forty years of brutal dictatorship.[6]

Similarly, we argued that climate change mattered in Afghanistan, but the more important dynamic was that the American occupation repelled many Afghans. One way to understand this is to read Anand Gopal’s recent reporting in the New Yorker. He decided to interview grandmothers in southern Afghanistan. They explained to him why they, like so many other Afghan women, had chosen to support the Taliban against the Americans. It was pretty simple really. The Americans had killed large numbers of their relatives and neighbours, including people dear to them, including adults and children who had not supported the Taliban. The Taliban had not done that. [7]

So sometimes climate change is just one part of the story of war and resistance. Sometimes, as in Darfur, it is a central part. As the impact of climate change grows worse, that balance will shift, and we will see many more conflicts and tragedies where climate change is the central driver. But we will never see a pure and simple climate disaster. Always climate tragedies happen in actually existing societies. Climate disasters are magnified by the inequalities of class and race, by the meddling of great powers and proxy wars, by poverty and capitalism.

Critically, climate politics and normal politics are not separate these days. Afghanistan is a climate issue. We spoke earlier of the humanitarian workers in shifting opinion outside Afghanistan. But that is also part of the duty of climate campaigns and climate activists. This is what climate change looks like now.

But people don’t just need help as they confront a downward spiral. They need solutions and alternatives. They need jobs. In Afghanistan the resources of wind are immense. And across most of the country the sun shines brightly most of the time all year.

Imagine if the American occupation had funded Afghans to build wind farms and solar power arrays across the country. Then linked those resources with a long distance grid. And added concentrated solar power, for which the country is ideally suited. And funded Afghans to build factories to make the wind turbines and solar panels and the cables and everything else needed.[8]

In twenty years energy in Afghanistan would have been transformed. Afghans could have had enough small portable solar arrays to heat their homes. That matters, because in so much of the country people are bitterly cold in winter. But they would also have had carbon free energy to use for industry in Afghanistan, and to export to neighbouring countries. Afghanistan, and for that matter America, would have been a beacon to the world. And the cost of all that would have been a tiny fraction of what the US military spent on the occupation.

That is not what happened. But it is what needs to happen, in Afghanistan and across the world. It is perfectly possible to set up an aid program which would help Afghans do that. Because going forward, we all need to learn that the alternative to war is not just peace. The alternative to war is peace and saving the planet as a home for life.

For how to download a free pdf or ebook of Jonathan Neale, Fight the Fire: Green New Deals and Global Climate Jobs, click here.

To read Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale article on ‘Afghanistan: The End of the Occupation,’ click here.

To buy Richard Tapper with Nancy Lindisfarne, Afghan Village Voices, click here,

To read Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale, ‘Oil, heat and climate jobs in the MENA region,’ click here.

[1] Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale, 2021, ‘Afghanistan: The End of the Occupation,’ Anne BonnyPirate.

[2] Andrej Přívara and Magdalena Přívarova, 2o19, ‘Nexus between Climate Change, Displacement and Conflict: Afghanistan Case,’ Sustainability, 11 (20): 1-19. See also V. Aich et al, 2017, ‘Climate Change in Afghanistan Deduced from Reanalysis and Coordinated Regional Climate Downscaling Experiment (CORDEX) – South Asia Simulations,’ Climate, 5 (38).

^[3] These accounts by Baya Khan and Pakhal are from Richard Tapper with Nancy Lindisfarne-Tapper, 2020, Afghan Village Voices: Stories from an Afghan Tribal Community, London: Bloomsbury,164-178.

[4] For more on climate in Afghanistan, see Matthew Savage, Bill Dougherty, Mohammed Hamza, Ruth Butterfield and Sukaina Bharwani, 2013, Socio-Economic Impacts of Climate Change in Afghanistan, Stockholm Environment Institute Project Report; Vincent Thomas, 2016, Climate Change in Afghanistan: Perspectives and Opportunities, Kabul: Heinrich Boll Stiftung Afghanistan;  Abdul Khabir Alim and Syed Sharif Shobair, 2010, ‘Drought and Human Suffering in Afghanistan,’ in SAARC Workshop in Drought Risk Management in South Asia, Kabul: SAARC; UNEP, Climate Change in Afghanistan: What Does It Mean for Rural Livelihoods and Food Security; Christian Parenti, 2011, Tropic of Chaos, New York: Public Affairs, 97-112; John Shroder, 2016, ‘Characteristics and Implications of Climate Change in Afghanistan and Surrounding Regions,’ in Transboundary Water Resources in Afghanistan: Climate Change and Land-Use Implications, ed. John Shroder and Sher Jan Ahmad, Elsevier, 145-160; Matthew Barlow and Andrew Hoell, 2015, ‘Drought in the Middle East and Central-Southwest Asia During Winter 2013/14,’ in Explaining Extreme Weather Events of 2014 from a Climate Perspective, ed. Stephanie C. Herring, Martin P. Hoerling, James P. Kossin, Thomas C. Peterson and Peter A. Scott, Special Supplement to the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 96 (12): 76-83.

[5] Přívara and Přívarova, 2019.

[6] Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale, 2019. ‘Oil, Heat and Climate Jobs in the MENA Region.’ In Environmental Challenges in the MENA Region: The Long Road from Conflict to Cooperation, edited by Hamid Pouran and Hassan Hakimian, 72-94. London: Ginko.

[7] Anand Gopal, 2021, ‘The Other Afghan Women,’ New Yorker, Sept 6.

[8] For the climate jobs approach, see Jonathan Neale, 2021, Fight the Fire: Green New Deals and Global Climate Jobs., London: Resistance. You can also download it from The Ecologist as a free pdf here.

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