The Land & Climate Podcast

Content advisory: this episode describes events that listeners may find distressing.
Five years ago, in the small coastal town of Palma, Mozambique, 500 fighters from the ISIS-affiliated al-Shabab group stormed a community living and working beside a multi-billion-dollar natural gas field part-owned by France's biggest company, TotalEnergies. As insurgents swept through Palma, they beheaded and shot men, women and children indiscriminately, among them construction workers contracted to build Total's gas plant.  
British journalist Alex Perry spent almost two years investigating the massacre, and established the death toll among Palma's population was over 1,000 people. Perry’s reporting has since won a Polk Award and a True Story Award, and has been shortlisted for the Orwell Prize.  
Alasdair chats to Perry about his new book, Blood Will Flow: The Murderous Business of Oil and Gas - now longlisted for the Financial Times Business Book of the Year - which provides a full account of events in Palma and their aftermath.
TotalEnergies did not respond to a request for comment from The Land and Climate Podcast. The Land and Climate Podcast has not independently verified Alex Perry's account of events, and guests' views do not necessarily represent the editorial views of The Land and Climate Podcast. In November 2025, TotalEnergies rejected accusations of complicity in war crimes, torture, and enforced disappearances in Mozambique. Legal investigations are ongoing. See TotalEnergies' past statements on this issue at the links below: 
'Mozambique LNG: TotalEnergies welcomes the launch of official investigations in Mozambique', March 2025
'Mozambique LNG: Clarification by TotalEnergies', November 2025
'Chronology of exchanges between TotalEnergies and media about Mozambique LNG' 
Further reading: 
Blood Will Flow: The Murderous Business of Oil and Gas, by Alex Perry, 2026
The Elements of Power: A Story of War, Technology, and the Dirtiest Supply Chain on Earth by Nicholas Niarchos, 2026 
'Climate diplomacy must shift focus from markets to land rights', Land and Climate Review, 2025
'Cobalt mining kills. Who is sorting it out?', Land and Climate Review, 2023
'To stop fossil fuel finance, The Equator Principles must change', Land and Climate Review, 2021
My Traitor’s Heart: A South African Exile Returns to Face His Country, His Tribe, and His Conscience by Rian Malan, 1990
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Colombia is one of the most unequal countries in the world regarding agriculture and land ownership. Violence in the Colombian countryside has often allowed corporate agriculture to displace land once held by small farmers, known as “campesinos”, and transform it into new frontiers for capital.
Jaskiran Kaur Chohan tells Alasdair that “armed conflict undermines the productive systems of campesinos, which reinforces the corporate food regime and the modernisation of agriculture”. They discuss how corporate food regimes take root in the aftermath, and how the country's smallholders can survive. 
Dr Kaur Chohan is a political ecologist at the University of Bristol, whose work focuses on rural communities in Colombia and the intersection of violence, conflict, and agriculture.
Further reading: 
'Violent conflict, capitalism and insurgent food sovereignty', The Journal of Peasant Studies, 2026
'Have monopolies broken agricultural markets?', The Land and Climate Podcast, 2025
'The corporate food regime in conflict zones: Armed violence and agriculture in the Zona de Reserva Campesina-Valle del Río Cimitarra, Colombia', Geoforum, 2024
'Sugar cane is eroding Colombian biodiversity', Land and Climate Review, 2024
'Tough Tradeoffs: Coca crops and agrarian alternatives in Colombia' , International Journal of Drug Policy, 2021
'Slow violence and corporate greening in the war on drugs in Colombia', International Affairs, 2021 
'Zonas de Reserva Campesina: ¿Estrategia de Desarrollo Regional y contra el Desplazamiento?', Mama Coca, 2020
'Grassroots masquerades: development, paramilitaries, and land laundering in Colombia', Geoforum, 2013
Broken Republic: Three Essays, Arundhati Roy, 2011
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With five and a half years of content, The Land and Climate Podcast has an overwhelmingly large back catalogue. We have always aimed to produce evergreen episodes, however, and many of our older interviews still have insights and relevance in 2026. 
This is why we are launching a new offering, alongside our usual programming, called 'In Review'. Alasdair and Bertie pick one topic per episode, playing highlights from our favourite interviews and discussing recent developments. 
First up: plastics. 
Following reports that the current draft of the much-delayed UN Plastics Treaty is even less ambitious than the one rejected by many nations last year, Bertie and Alasdair listen to interview excerpts about microplastics, false solutions to plastic waste, and industry lobbying around the Treaty negotiations. 
Featuring clips of science journalist Matt Simon, Punyathorn Jeungsmarn (Arm) from Environmental Justice Foundation, and Dr Rob Ralston from The University of Edinburgh. 
Listen to the original episodes: 
'Has the plastics industry co-opted the circular economy?' with Rob Ralston, 2026
'What if climate politics is about power, not carbon?' with Jessica Green, 2025
'Can the world regulate plastics?' with Punyathorn Jeungsmarn, 2025
'How badly have microplastics harmed ecosystems, climate, and human health?' with Matt Simon, 2022
Further reading: 
'Leaked memo shows how U.S. aims to weaken global limits on plastic pollution', Washington Post, August 2026
'UN plastic treaty is going backwards, experts say', The Guardian, August 2026
'The Global Plastics Treaty must include production reduction', Land and Climate Review, 2025
'There is so much to say about plastic pollution. Why are we not talking about it?', Land and Climate Review, 2023
A Poison Like No Other: How Microplastics Corrupted Our Planet and Our Bodies by Matt Simon, 2022
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Solar and wind power is growing worldwide, but so is electricity consumption: as a result, renewables are often only added to the energy mix, rather than replacing fossil fuels. 
Reducing energy demand would make net zero more achievable, but it recieves far less attention than decarbonisation efforts. This may be due to a perception that managing energy demand would be politically unpopular, requiring governments to make radical interventions into people's lifestyles and spending. 
Oliver Broad, Senior Research Fellow at University College London, tells Alasdair that such fears are unfounded. His team's research found that the UK could reduce energy demand by 52% without new tech or overly disruptive societal change, and has worked with policymakers and public focus groups to demonstrate political acceptability. 
Further reading: 
'Policymakers and academics envision energy demand reductions beyond typical policies in the United Kingdom', Nature Energy, 2025
'Policymaker-led scenarios and public dialogue facilitate energy demand analysis for net-zero futures', Nature Energy, 2025
'Energy demand reduction options for meeting national zero-emission targets in the United Kingdom', Nature Energy, 2022
'Real people or "economic processing units"? The limited understanding of people's roles in energy and climate governance', Energy Research & Social Science, 2022
'A low energy demand scenario for meeting the 1.5 °C target and sustainable development goals without negative emission technologies', Nature Energy, 2018
'Invisible energy policies: A new agenda for energy demand reduction', Energy Policy, 2018
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Geoengineering research is growing, as scientists look for increasingly radical means to protect humanity from the disastrous impacts of global heating.
Less publicly, concerns are also building about the use of these techniques for geopolitical disruption or control. 
Technologies such as solar radiation management (SRM) and stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI) are controversial amongst climate scientists: they could buy us time through a temporary cooling effect, but they would not actually stop global heating, and could cause other negative impacts.
Danielle Young tells Alasdair that scientific research on these technologies often lacks alignment with political realities. While scientists plan for multilateral governance regimes to protect global populations from heat, government and military officials are more likely to think about SRM or SAI in terms of weaponisation and international power struggles. 
Dr Danielle Young is an Assistant Professor in Politics and International Studies at The University of Leeds. Her research focuses on the geopolitical and security implications of emerging solar geoengineering technologies. 
Further reading: 
'Why we need to explore conflict and competition around solar geoengineering', PLOS Climate, 2026
'Who could deploy stratospheric aerosol injection? The United States, China, and large‐scale, rapid planetary cooling', Global Policy, 2025 
'How will capitalism react to climate collapse?', Land and Climate Review, 2025
'Who Can Govern from a House on Fire? International Order, State
Responsibility, and the Problem of Solar Radiation Modification', Ethics & International Affairs, 2024
'Scientific models versus power politics: How security expertise reframes solar geoengineering', Review of International Studies, 2024
'Considering stratospheric aerosol injections beyond an environmental frame: The intelligible ‘emergency’ techno-fix and preemptive security', European Journal of International Security, 2023
'Do-or-Die: Should we be talking about geoengineering?', Land and Climate Review, 2022
'The Geopolitical ecology of solar geoengineering: From a ‘logic of multilateralism’ to logics of militarization', Journal of Political Ecology, 2020
Geoengineering, the Anthropocene and the End of Nature, Jeremy Baskin, 2019
‘The entwined Cold War roots of missile defense and climate geoengineering’, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 2019
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Find all our latest investigations, features and interviews at www.landclimate.org