Professor Philippe Le Billon’s lecture critically examined how climate-related conflicts emerge from three sources: the impacts of climate change itself, contestation over climate inaction, and backlash against climate action. He argued that climate change operates as a “threat multiplier,” intensifying pre-existing inequalities and vulnerabilities rather than acting as an isolated trigger of violence. He explored how climate activism—while driven by moral urgency—can be framed as elitist and provoke populist opposition, and how the implementation of climate policy can generate new conflicts when perceived as unjust or technocratic. Professor Le Billon warned that “green capitalism” risks reproducing extractive logics, creating new “green sacrifice zones,” and underscored that climate justice requires confronting colonial legacies, class inequality, and structural power relations.
Reported by ECPS Staff
The seventh lecture of the ECPS Academy Summer School 2025—titled “Populism and Climate Change: Understanding What Is at Stake and Crafting Policy Suggestions for Stakeholders”—took place online on July 10, 2025. The day’s featured lecturer was Professor Philippe Le Billon, an esteemed scholar of political geography and political ecology at the University of British Columbia (UBC). Prior to joining UBC, Professor Le Billon worked with prominent institutions including the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) and the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), as well as with environmental and human rights organizations. His research has long focused on the political economy of natural resources, extractivism, and the connections between environment, development, and security—especially in conflict settings. His current work engages closely with environmental defenders, small-scale fisheries, and the socio-political dimensions of the so-called "green transition."
Though Professor Le Billon modestly framed himself as “not a major expert on climate change,” his extensive scholarship on the political economy of resource sectors, conflict, and environmental governance provided a compelling framework for analyzing climate-related conflicts in relation to populism. His lecture, titled “Climate Change, Natural Resources and Conflicts,” examined how climate-related conflicts increasingly shape and are shaped by populist mobilizations globally.
Professor Le Billon invited participants to think critically about climate conflict through a tripartite analytical lens: conflicts driven by the impacts of climate change; conflicts driven by perceived climate inaction; and conflicts triggered by the implementation of climate action itself. Framing his talk within what he described as the current era of “polycrisis”—marked by intertwined crises of climate, inequality, and governance—Professor Le Billon emphasized that climate change must be understood as a political issue embedded in structures of power, inequality, and historical injustice.
By drawing on case studies from around the world, his lecture challenged participants to reflect on the multifaceted relationship between populism and climate politics, showing how climate change is at once a driver of conflict and a contested arena where competing visions of justice, sovereignty, and socio-ecological futures play out.
Conflicts over Climate Impacts: From Environmental Stress to Political Violence
Professor Le Billon reflected on the prevailing focus in academic and policy circles on conflicts attributed to the material impacts of climate change itself. He framed this discussion within the literature that examines how climate-induced environmental stress—particularly droughts, altered rainfall, and extreme weather—affects resource availability and contributes to tensions over land, water, and livelihoods.
As he explained, “generally, the drivers have been portrayed and naturalized as fitted with things like higher temperature, altered rainfall patterns, more frequent and intense disasters, sea level rise, etc. So droughts in particular have been a major focus.” To this list, he added lesser-discussed ecological dynamics such as “shifts in resources—so grassland seasonality, but also fish migrations. Every fish species has a temperature range that they like, and so they’ll migrate as temperatures warm up or cool down, and that can lead to fishing conflicts.”
Professor Le Billon was careful to emphasize that while climate change is an important contextual factor, it is rarely the sole or primary driver of violent conflict. He invoked the now widely accepted notion that climate change acts as a “threat multiplier,” noting that it “amplifies existing vulnerabilities” where poverty, inequality, livelihood insecurity, and political exclusion already prevail. He stressed that scholars and policymakers must avoid simplistic causality and instead attend to these intersections as the crucial sites of analysis.
To illustrate this argument, he cited several case studies, including the recurrent droughts in Syria, which “had a nasty effect on communities in Syria, and would have been part of the lead-up to the Syrian civil war. Of course, this is by far not the only factor, but it would have been an aggravating one.” He similarly highlighted the Sahel, where tensions between farmers and herders reflect a long history of land disputes now exacerbated by environmental pressures.
Professor Le Billon also drew attention to lesser-known cases of ecological disruption, such as fisheries conflicts prompted by species migration as ocean temperatures change. These examples underscore that climate change is interwoven with complex social and economic dynamics rather than being an external or autonomous driver of violence.
Critically, Professor Le Billon challenged dominant frameworks for analyzing these conflicts, identifying two key forms of reductionism: the naturalization of climate change itself and the culturalization of conflict. He argued that “what it has done also is generally depoliticized the inequalities that are at play in those countries, the kind of colonial legacies that have led to the type of property rights or absence of property rights,” and the “type of extractivist legislation that is in place.” Such framings, he cautioned, obscure the historical and structural conditions that have made many communities in the Global South so vulnerable to environmental shocks in the first place.
This depoliticization, he warned, enables securitized responses, particularly in the Global North, where governments increasingly treat climate-affected populations as threats—especially potential climate migrants—rather than as subjects of justice and solidarity. As Professor Le Billon put it, “many of these conflicts take place in, and affect, populations in the Global South which are the least responsible for what has happened.” Yet Northern discourse tends to focus on fears of migration, feeding into anti-immigration agendas and populist narratives of external threat.
Professor Le Billon’s intervention here was also a normative one: he argued that these conflicts should not be framed as technical problems requiring security solutions, but rather as calls for climate justice. He proposed that “rather than seeing [them] as a conflict,” these phenomena “should be seen as a call for justice rather than a call for militarized protection from Northern societies against those climate and conflict migrants.”
Moreover, he drew attention to the way populist actors at the domestic level have manipulated identity politics to escalate these conflicts. In many contexts, governments have “legitimated violence against those groups,” by framing nomadic herders or marginalized populations as scapegoats for broader socio-economic grievances. He noted that this dynamic is mirrored at the international level, where right-wing populists in the Global North leverage the specter of mass climate migration to bolster anti-immigration policies.
Conflicts over Climate Inaction: The Rise of Climate Activism and Eco-Populism
The second broad category explored by Professor Le Billon concerned conflicts motivated by perceived inaction on climate change. These conflicts, while often nonviolent and institutional in form, represent an important and increasingly contentious terrain of political struggle. Professor Le Billon traced the rise of protests, demonstrations, and civil disobedience aimed at governments and corporations failing to address climate change. These movements, such as Fridays for Future and Extinction Rebellion, have emerged as potent social forces, demanding rapid action to avert climate catastrophe and often invoking the urgency of saving humanity and the planet. As Professor Le Billon put it, these movements are driven by “concerns for current and future impacts of climate change… it’s often a call for saving humanity and the planet in general, and in itself it can be sometimes quite problematic.” This universalist framing, he noted, is both rhetorically powerful and politically vulnerable.
While recognizing the moral force and legitimacy of these movements, Professor Le Billon offered a critical reflection on their social composition and political rhetoric. “Very often the people participating in the protests also have a relatively privileged background, and so it’s relatively easy to frame them as essentially privileged elites not being too preoccupied with the immediate concerns of some of the other population,” he observed. This tension, he argued, can be—and often is—instrumentalized by populist actors who portray climate activists as out-of-touch elites imposing burdens on ordinary people.
At the same time, Professor Le Billon highlighted the distinctive populist inflection of much climate activism itself, particularly in its critique of fossil fuel lobbies, global corporations, and corrupt elites. In this framing, “the climate inaction is framed as a result of decisions made by corrupt elites, greedy corporations, elitist global institutions that are done at the expense of local communities and the planet.” Thus, progressive eco-populism casts “the people” as aligned with the planet against an oligarchy of corporate and political actors who block meaningful climate action. This framing frequently intersects with indigenous and peasant movements, as seen in opposition to pipelines and extractive projects in North America and beyond.
However, as Professor Le Billon noted, these movements are not without internal tensions and external challenges. He pointed out that their demands often shift toward more radical critiques of the underlying political economy: “Essentially when people start not only to claim that there is climate inaction on the part of governments, but that the current system means that the government is incapable of acting… thus there is a need for a system change—that’s when we see a lot of violence taking place in different ways.”
This dynamic helps explain why such movements are subject to escalating repression and criminalization, particularly when they adopt disruptive tactics such as blockades and sabotage. Professor Le Billon discussed how governments in liberal democracies such as Australia, the UK, and Norway have responded with “very high arrest rates… while police violence has tended to be relatively low,” in contrast to countries like France, South Africa, or Peru, where “the rate of arrest is very low but the rate of police violence is very high.”
He emphasized that repression tends to correlate with movements that shift their critique beyond specific policies to systemic structures of capitalism and fossil fuel dependence: “It’s essentially when they start to challenge the system itself that we see an intensification of violence and repression.” Thus, his lecture illuminated the complex relationship between climate activism, eco-populism, and state repression. Professor Le Billon’s analysis underscored both the promise and the perils of contemporary climate movements, situating them as key arenas where conflicts over climate inaction are contested not only between activists and the state but also within broader struggles over privilege, legitimacy, and systemic change.
Conflicts over Climate Action: Green Transitions and Class Struggles
The third type of conflict examined by Professor Le Billon concerned resistance to climate action itself. Paradoxically, he noted that even as climate movements demand urgent measures, the implementation of climate policies can generate backlash and new sites of conflict—especially when these policies are perceived as unjust, unequal, or technocratic. As he remarked, “it’s common sense to intervene and change our system so that we’ve got more climate action—but the common sense also is that this transition cannot happen overnight,” capturing the contested terrain of climate policy.
He discussed the removal of fossil fuel subsidies in countries such as Nigeria, where the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and climate policy imperatives have converged in advocating for subsidy reforms. While the removal of subsidies might advance climate objectives on paper, they also provoke protests from populations who view them as essential to their livelihoods and who see such reforms as anti-poor. “Many people see material well-being and the imperative of social reproduction as being very important,” he observed, underscoring why such reforms often spark resistance.
Similar tensions have emerged around carbon taxes, electric vehicle subsidies, and renewable energy projects. In Canada, for example, carbon taxation became a major electoral issue in 2025, with fierce populist opposition portraying it as an attack on the working class. In France, Marine Le Pen’s far-right party has opposed offshore wind farms, portraying them as an imposition on local fishing communities—a populist strategy that, Professor Le Billon noted, mirrors narratives used in the American context around coal miners and oil workers. He pointed out that such movements tap into a grievance that “green liberalism puts a lot of focus on individual responsibility,” leading to perceptions that environmental policies disproportionately burden working-class populations while privileging elites.
Professor Le Billon introduced a critical perspective on what he termed “green capitalism” and “green extractivism”: the reproduction of extractive logics in the pursuit of green growth. Renewable energy infrastructure and low-carbon technologies, he observed, rely heavily on critical minerals such as lithium, often extracted from indigenous lands or ecologically sensitive regions in the Global South. These new “green sacrifice zones,” as he put it, “frame the climate crisis as resolvable through resource-intensive technological fixes” while perpetuating inequality and ecological harm. He noted that “about 70% of the energy transition mineral projects are near land that can be qualified as sites with indigenous people or traditional peasants,” a statistic that lays bare the colonial patterns embedded in the green transition.
He referenced resistance movements in the Andes, where lithium extraction has threatened fragile ecosystems and indigenous communities, as well as protests in Serbia against a Rio Tinto mining project. These conflicts illustrate how green transitions, if pursued within the existing capitalist framework, may perpetuate old injustices even as they address carbon emissions. As one protester quoted by Le Billon put it, “Green mining doesn’t exist… Politicians need to stop trying to get rid of pollution in cities by polluting our villages instead,” a vivid expression of the local-global tensions animating these struggles.
Professor Le Billon argued that the articulation of populism in these conflicts often turns on competing definitions of “the people.” In some cases, populist rhetoric is mobilized from the right, defending local or national sovereignty against globalist green agendas. In others, it emerges from the left, articulating an anti-elite critique of corporate greenwashing and imperialism. Both forms, he suggested, reflect deeper class struggles over who bears the costs and reaps the benefits of the energy transition: “We see a kind of two main categories… one is a critique of green liberalism… and the second one is against green extractivism, pushing back against the so-called extractivist imperative.”
In sum, Professor Le Billon’s analysis illuminated the complex and often contradictory ways in which climate action itself generates conflict, highlighting how struggles over green transitions are increasingly shaped by narratives of class, sovereignty, and justice. His lecture invited participants to recognize that without attention to these underlying dynamics, climate policy risks reproducing precisely the inequalities and exclusions it seeks to remedy.
Conclusion
In concluding his lecture, Professor Le Billon underscored the importance of understanding climate conflicts in all their complexity—not simply as environmental disputes but as deeply embedded in histories of inequality, structures of capitalism, and struggles over power and justice.
His three-part framework highlighted that conflicts emerge not only from the material impacts of climate change but also from contestation over climate inaction and from the contested implementation of climate policies themselves. Across these domains, populism plays an ambivalent role: sometimes reinforcing reactionary politics and obstruction, sometimes animating progressive alliances around climate justice.
Throughout the lecture, Professor Le Billon emphasized the need to critically examine the political economy of the green transition. He warned against narratives that frame climate mitigation as a purely technocratic project, disconnected from questions of inequality, colonialism, and class power. Without confronting these deeper structures, he argued, climate action risks reproducing the very injustices it seeks to redress.
His analysis also illuminated the paradoxical dynamics at play: climate policy can simultaneously be a site of progressive mobilization and conservative backlash; climate discourse can empower grassroots movements but also invite repression; and the pursuit of sustainability can generate new forms of extractivism and environmental sacrifice.
In sum, Professor Le Billon’s lecture made an invaluable contribution to the ECPS Summer School’s exploration of the nexus between populism and climate change. It provided participants with critical tools for understanding how climate conflicts are not simply about environmental degradation but also about contested visions of justice, sovereignty, and the political future. His call to recognize the uneven and contested terrain of climate politics resonated with the overarching theme of the Summer School: the urgent need to craft policy responses that are attentive not only to ecological imperatives but also to the demands of social and global justice.
