Interview | Peter Frankopan talks climate education in Central Asia

In August, CAPS Unlock hosted a conference in Almaty on Climate Change Education in Central Asia. The event brought together experts, researchers, government representatives, and NGOs to address climate challenges through education.

A highlight of the conference was the presentation of Kazakh- and Russian-language translations of the recently published The Earth Transformed, by renowned historian Peter Frankopan. The book explores how human societies have interacted with evolutions in the climate over the centuries.

After addressing the event, Frankopan took time to sit down with CAPS Unlock for an interview in which he shared his thoughts on climate education and research in the Central Asian context. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

CAPS Unlock: Given the limited availability of region-specific materials on climate change, how can Central Asian governments improve public education and engage policymakers in meaningful climate action?

Peter Frankopan: The starting point is what materials they have available to inform themselves. One of the things I put out in this morning’s talk was the dearth of materials that focus on climate change in Central Asia as a whole.

I know that there are non-academic publications that do focus on climate change in Central Asia, but the overemphasis on the region’s role in geopolitics and security means there is not that much available.

If you’re an educator or a public official, where do you get your starting point information? Both about what the reality is, and then, second, in terms of policy: What do you do next?

Some of that has to do with journalism and with more public debate. Because what can happen with policy discussions and with academic conferences is that you get these high-level papers and ideas being pumped out, but these do not translate into outcomes, into policies. If you’re trying to influence policy, how do you get policymakers to come and listen? How do you boil things down into something digestible, rather than producing 300-page reports that do not get read.

The next phase is getting city authorities, mayors, local government, as well as government ministers, to sit around and discuss what are the best small steps that can be made.

And that is starting to happen here in Kazakhstan.

Getting policymakers involved, giving them the opportunity to talk and to share their views and their problems is the next piece that might be missing.

CAPS Unlock: How can policymakers and educators craft compelling narratives to engage the public on climate change?

Peter Frankopan: I don’t think there’s any magic. It’s about finding what the story is, what’s interesting and why it’s important. It’s just explaining, putting things in black and white and trying to remember what it is that the reader is going to take away from it.

For what it’s worth, something that is changing very fast is the way in which young people actually gather information, what kind of sources they consult to be informed.

The way in which the under-30s gather information in small doses from vast numbers of sources is a real opportunity, But it’s a challenge too because you don’t have that narrative of 1,000-2,000 words, or a big book that people are going to read. You’re dealing with people coping in 45 seconds on social media platforms and that can mean that you can reach millions of people very quickly.

Some of the reasons that climate and environmental activism in Europe and the United States have been so dynamic is that these platforms allow you to share ideas, and those narratives have to be bite-sized.

CAPS Unlock: And, of course, a recurring difficulty with getting people to engage with the challenges of climate change is that crises can often feel remote. Or people feel helpless in the face of the problem.

Peter Frankopan: Yes, when the narrative is about big storms and floods in northern Kazakhstan and all the displacement that causes. How does that matter if you live in Almaty, or even Turkmenistan? They may be dust storms or water shortages somewhere, but you can’t see how it affects you. That just needs someone to point out the fact that prices have gone up in food baskets by 30% in the last 18 months, and that we are all affected.

Everybody on earth realizes that the world is warming. We all feel a bit powerless. If we cannot choose to modify our own behavior because we’re not incentivized, then what other tools do governments have to encourage better performance? Water preservation, optimization, clean energy, all those kinds of things. There is plenty that could go around that doesn’t need to have civic activism of people demanding change.

Lots of those benign interventions could be done effectively and quite cheaply.

CAPS Unlock: This may be a heretical idea, but could Central Asia’s authoritarian systems, where the absence of properly free and fair elections relieves leaders from periodic electoral pressures, actually incentivize long-term environmental policies?

Peter Frankopan: If the primary concern of these five states is political stability or regime stability, then the incentive to get things right is presumably much greater. Because you’re concerned about shocks, which can undermine your primary goal of keeping the political system intact.

But you do see shocks, like in Karakalpakstan, in Uzbekistan [in 2023], where the government played it wrong, and suddenly you saw people taking to the streets.

Last summer in Aktau [in west Kazakhstan], and in fact in Astana too, people were taking to the streets shouting: “We want water.” If you are in the presidential palace or one of his advisers, you probably want to minimize the risks of those kinds of uncomfortable exclamations, because those can be extremely damaging.

Autocratic regimes, or more monolithic political structures, have the ability to make decisions, but they can make bad ones too. More so than in democracies, where you can course-correct. That is one of the classic defense of democracy; when you make a mistake, you can correct it.

CAPS Unlock: We are now seeing a lot more high-level dialogue between states in the region on addressing environmental challenges. But can this sometimes be counterproductive? Do you think empowering local communities could sometimes be more effective than regional cooperation?

Peter Frankopan: Local communities tend to have fewer restrictions. Because if you’re in a small community, then you’re off everybody’s radar, and you’re not threatening when you make decisions.

Sometimes big cities and political structures are part of the problem, because they want to centralize. They want to bring everybody in, they want to have big, sweeping discussions and produce big policy documents, but actually empowering local communities — and we know about this from experiences in all parts of the world — can be much more effective, because people make decisions that are going to directly impact them.

The expectation of paternalism, where someone at the top decides something and tells you what kind of car you can drive or what kind of fuel you’re going to use is always going to meet resistance. Bottom-up tends to be much more effective. Lots of people doing small things can magnify in ways that top-down doesn’t always achieve.

CAPS Unlock: Has rapid urbanization in Central Asia disrupted the traditional symbiosis between urban and rural communities, and how should governments address this?

Cities are great places to live. They allow for intensive exchanges. They’re good for all educational outcomes. They’re good for marital outcomes because they allow you to have a greater choice of potential partners than if you’re living in the countryside.

So cities are great, but they also draw in resources. That disconnection with the countryside happens quite quickly. So when you start saying education means learning about history, linguistics and other non-practical skills, then people’s interpretation and engagement with the countryside changes. If no one learns how to grow food, how to look for water, how to preserve water supplies, then suddenly you produce lots of priests, all living in cities with strong opinions about things, but limited practical experiences.

That change in Central Asia around urbanization, particularly with young people wanting to come off the land to come and look for opportunities, is something states have to think about quite carefully.

My big worry here in Kazakhstan is around soil chemistry change and food supplies. Kazakhstan relative to the other four countries of Central Asia does well in terms of water and its metrics on nourishment levels, but we are five degrees warmer here than we were in 1979, or the 20 years before that. If we’re even close to the projections that Central Asia is warming twice as fast as any other part of Asia, those changes do have consequences. Figuring out how one anticipates for that should have started a long time ago.