Taylor Swift is no match for Pope Francis.

Sometimes, when global disasters or conflicts occur, people create info graphics indicating (sometimes conditional) links to climate change; I tend to cringe when someone tries to attach climate to unrelated issues. But in the case of Israel and Palestine, the land they are fighting for is changing in a clear way.

Understanding how climate and this conflict are connected, for me and for many others, adds another layer of tragedy to an already heart wrenching situation. Israel and Palestine are in one of the most climate-vulnerable regions of the world. Temperatures in the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East are rising almost twice as fast as the global average, and are expected to rise by 0.81 degrees every decade until the end of the century, according to an international team of scientists. At the same time, rainfall in the Middle East and North Africa has declined by more than 8 percent each decade since the 1980s.

Israelis and Palestinians would find it difficult to adapt to these challenges even if there were peace. But this bloody conflict has managed to exacerbate environmental crises. While both Israel and Palestine are affected by sea level rise and loss of coastal territories, the impact is especially great on the Gaza Strip, as it is one of the most densely populated places on earth, and Palestinians are not allowed to expand beyond military borders. Meanwhile, in some parts of the West Bank, Palestinian farmers say settler occupation and violence have prevented them from accessing their usual water sources, forcing them to pay a high price for water when natural resources are diminishing. In the Gaza Strip, where most electricity comes from Israel, blackouts continued over the summer due to an explosion in demand for air conditioners, creating dangerous conditions for people needing ventilators.

Ecosystems cross borders; sometimes regions whose populations suffer from environmental harms created by powerful neighboring governments can have the opposite effect. Israel's control of water resources in the West Bank has contributed to enormous sanitation problems that pose an immediate and deadly threat to Palestinians, but also threaten Israelis because of untreated sewage from Gaza flowing into the Mediterranean Sea. And while some West Bank communities make a living burning imported waste in the form of electronic products from Israel, cancerous smoke is causing health problems on both sides of the border.

In recent years, international environmental groups have begun to emphasize living conditions in Palestine as not only a human rights issue, but also as an environmental issue. "There is a clear divide between how things are managed in Israel and how they are handled in the West Bank and Gaza Strip," Muna Shagrin of the group One Climate in 2021 told Haaretz newspaper. "Israel's attitude toward the West Bank resembles a junkyard. It completely ignores the fact that we all breathe the same air, we sit on the same land. "

In an age of conflict, after the hottest summer in history, it doesn't seem possible to resolve these parallel tragedies of war and climate. The Wizards village, having run unburnable energy, proletarians fought tomorrow, water in hospitals around the world now face imminent Blackouts. The US military sector, which, along with the US is estimated to emit more carbon dioxide than many countries, is mobilizing to provide even more support for Israel. Hamas-backed Iran is the largest fossil fuel producer in the world and is not a signatory to the Paris Agreement.

Last week, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed a bill that requires large companies operating in California to disclose emissions levels at each point in their supply chains. Floods and landslides in Cameroon's capital Yaoundé killed at least 30 people on Sunday. Up to the end of the century, Dammam, Saudi Arabia, could experience conditions, ultra-high humidity, incompatible with human life, even if the world meets the goals of the Paris Agreement, a recent study shows. Al Jazeera reports on scuba divers who are still searching for the bodies of thousands of people believed to have died in last month's devastating dam breach in Libya: Mysteriously calm submariners pile onto boats to jump into the sea when weather and waves allow, trying to rescue bodies still in the waters. The bursting of a storm of two dams over Derna caused floods that swept through the city, obliterating the landscape, washing away buildings and destroying entire neighborhoods. The death toll is estimated in the thousands, with several thousand more missing. "There's a town down there. Especially before, when there were bodies. But it's still a city out there," said one of the submariners. Read the full article by Ahmed Zidan on Al Jazeera's website. This article originally appeared in the Life in a Warming World newsletter, authored by primary editor Molly Taft. You can register here.