Seeds of violence in climate change
This is the second in a series of stories about Harvard’s engagement in Latin America. When Nathan Black considers the potential global consequences of climate change, one thing he sees is war. Black, the French Environmental Fellow at the Harvard University Center for the Environment, is spending two years investigating the connection between changing agricultural conditions — specifically the supply of agricultural land — and civil war. He is examining the cases of two nations, Haiti and Mexico, where shifts in the supply of agricultural land sparked violent conflict. He is also looking at Uruguay, which avoided conflict despite similar conditions in the late 1980s and early 1990s, to understand how violence was averted. “What I’m looking at is, ‘What did Uruguay do that Haiti and Mexico failed to do?’” Black said. “What is the playbook?” Black, who earned a bachelor’s degree from Rice University and a doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, became...