Mass movements of people expected as climate change progresses are often depicted as catastrophes-in-waiting. We visit Niger, where that shift has begun, finding there is good news amid the bad. We examine the spate of video games depicting Ukraine’s live theatre of war (11:32). And the end of Indiana Jones’s run prompts a reflection on what made his adventures so compelling (17:12).
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Runtime: 24 min


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Hello and welcome to the intelligence from The Economist.

Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

Just yesterday we were talking about the famed franchise Call of Duty.

We dig into something novel, the spate of games depicting a live theater of war in Ukraine, complete with washing machines stolen by Russians.

And it would seem it's the end of the road for Indiana Jones.

What is it that made this series so compelling?

Was it the edge of your seat action scenes?

Our culture editor reckons it was something simpler.

As climate change raises temperatures, shifts water levels and wreaks unpredictable havoc around the world, a lot of people are going to have to move.

Much of that movement will be from climate-stressed areas to perceived safer spots within countries.

By 2050, the World Bank reckons, between 50 million and 216 million people will have to make these kinds of moves.

A lot of policies are focused on keeping people in place, adapting to the future climate impacts where they are.

What you're hearing, the slightly chaotic sounds, is from a visit to the home of a man named Ganso Seni Ali.

He's the chief of a group of herders from rural Niger.

Kinley Salmon is our West Africa correspondent.

He's speaking in pula and you can hear a man translating this into French for me and my colleague Robert Guest.

Mr Ali is a leader of a group of herders, a much older man he took to us squatting just outside a tent wearing a kind of traditional pula hat with a very friendly gap-toothed demeanor.

And he was explaining how the seasons are just not as good as they used to be where he's from.

He says, to start with, it's hotter, but in particular that the rains often fail.

And that's why he and some sort of half of his home village of over 150 families have moved from that rural setting where they long live to the edge of the capital city of Niger, Niamey.

They used to live up in the Tilaberi region, hundreds of kilometers away.

And around him are all the things you'd expect herders to have.

Cows eating their morning feed, you know, goats tethered under trees, the busy milking of the cows, the sort of family running around doing all the chores that 1 would do, but all in a surprisingly urban setting.

And so he was surrounded there by the people who had moved from that village with him?

Yeah, we were on the outskirts of really the sort of very edge of the capital And it looked in a lot of ways that the countryside had moved to the city.

You know, there are kind of clusters of these dome-like wooden huts that have popped up.

And there've been quite some numbers of these rural folk that have arrived, you know, often because of climate change.

And 1 of the things that has driven this group of people to the city is conflict.

The drought where they're originally from has increased conflict between herders and sedentary farmers who are sort of fighting over similar resources of land and water where they want to graze, in the herders' case, grow crops for the farmers.

He told me that in some cases this has led to deadly battles, you know, fought with guns, arrows and machetes.

But he sort of pointed out happily that in the city that kind of strife is much less common, and not least of which because the fight for resources is considerably less desperate.

But still the business of running herds must be difficult if you've moved to the edge of an urban setting.

Well, yes, but it turns out that they fear quite a bit better than you might expect.

Ali described how they take their cows out in the mornings, and in fact they did this as we were visiting, to graze on the edge of the city where there is a bit of grazing space on the outskirts.

And they find extra food for their animals by knocking on doors in town and taking the vegetable scraps that people might otherwise throw out for their cattle and goats.

And he points out that in the village, things weren't always so easy either.

There were problems of animal nutrition that were particularly difficult there and veterinary assistance was hard to come by.

They also say they find it easier to sell the milk in the city with of course so many customers close by.

He generously offered me a steaming bowlful fresh from the other while we were there.

They also point out that In some ways it's better in the city because there's more work, other kinds of work.

Someone in his group he mentioned is now working also as a brickmaker on the side, and that kind of gives the families a little bit more money, and so they're often able to eat more than they perhaps did before.

I mean, there may be advantages, but this whole village has had to move from a place they knew and presumably loved.

This is at least partly a sad story, isn't it?

Climate change is clearly not a good thing.

But some of these groups are adapting to it and really say they're doing better now.

Of course, some of the older men I spoke with are sad about the shift and complain about immodest dress or individualism among the women, but kind of villages can be pretty stiflingly controlled by those older men, often at the expense of women and younger people.

And that's considerably less so in a big city.

But even the older men would acknowledge that what they've lost in culture, they might've gained in other ways.

Urban wages are less dependent on the weather.

And in fact, it's very much the case that throughout the developing world, poverty is less common in cities and wages are higher.

Healthcare, they also point out, is nearer and more accessible in the city than it was for them back in the village.

And even kids, there are benefits there too.

Many more of them are likely to go to the school in the city simply because there are more schools and they're easier to get to.

Ayi told me that back home in the village, very few children at all attended

He reckons that in Nyamey now, school attendance has got up to about 30% or so among his group.

That's still low, but it's a lot better than none.

And now pretty much every country in the Sahel, the arid strip below the Sahara where you also find Niger, is wracked by multiple insurgencies.

Ali and his group is avoiding a lot of that strife and benefiting in other ways from doing so.

And so you'll see that same dynamic playing out throughout the Sahel and in other regions that

I think much will depend in terms of how positive and how much benefit can come from shifting into town and whether governments help set up their cities to allow migrants to come and settle, help them to sort of find employment, integrate.

If on the other hand what happens is that towns end up looking more like rural areas in terms of some of the types of work that people do, or the tendency for them to not attend school and so on, those benefits might not be as strong.

And I think we shouldn't obviously underestimate how traumatic moving and upping sticks can be for people, especially when they're forced to do so by a changing climate.

That said, right across other places in Africa and beyond, when rural migrants move to urban areas, their lives do tend to get better.

And people often don't realise how true this is, even migrants themselves.

A study in Kenya in 2020 found that rural people were less likely to move because they underestimated the benefits of being in an urban centre.

Well and presumably governments could benefit too.

I mean is there a sort of policy angle on this touting the benefits of moving perhaps?

Well that's 1 of the really striking things about this.

In fact many governments actually discourage domestic migration.

The UN finds that roughly half of countries have policies to reduce rural urban migration.

For instance a huge rural job guarantee scheme in India in effect pays the poor to remain in their home states.

And there are pretty similar schemes to reduce mobility in Indonesia, Vietnam, and across the continent from Niger in Ethiopia.

I mean, discouraging free movement tends to make societies less dynamic under pretty much any circumstances.

And even in a kind of climate context, a lot of the policies aimed at the world's estimated 475 million smallholder farms tend to focus quite heavily on helping them stay where they are by adopting more climate resilient farming techniques.

Of course that can be useful in plenty of cases, but in many others, these small farms will eventually become unsustainable.

That's the tragic truth of climate change.

And so many will be forced to move and find other jobs or rely on bigger farms for food.

And so governments standing in the way of this doesn't make much sense.

In fact, there's a good case that they should think about helping with some of this movement to reduce the barriers that might keep people in places where otherwise they'd like to leave, rather than kind of battling to stave off what, in some cases at least will ultimately be inevitable shifts.

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So you might have seen these videos online.

They begin usually with an aerial view of a Russian tank or armored vehicle.

There's often heavy metal music banging away in the background as the camera view hovers over this tank and then somewhere on the edge of the frame, a mechanism flicks and a grenade falls, sometimes right into an open hatch of the tank and the whole thing explodes.

Hal Hudson writes about technology for The Economist.

This kind of footage has racked up tens of millions of views on YouTube and TikTok, and the videos have now become the basis for a new game called Death From Above.

It's 1 of many games aiming to stir up pro-Ukrainian sentiments.

Death From Above is a fairly simple stealth game where you play as a Ukrainian drone operator stuck behind Russian lines.

The goal of the game is to sneak up to Russian army bases and basically destroy as much of the infrastructure around them as you can by pounding them with grenades.

You can also do slightly tongue-in-cheek things like grab washing machines that the Russian troops have stolen and thieve them back to your side to deprive the Russian army of the chips in those washing machines.

It's a game that was developed by a company called Rockedile Games, and the publisher, Lesser Evil, joined on the project to help get production going and particularly to give it this kind of propagandistic bent.

I made this game to express my emotions and to kind of fight back on the virtual battlefield.

I'm the founder of Lesser Evil and the game director of Death from Above.

I was always interested in history and politics, so I was very familiar with how different sides in time made propaganda, especially I'm from Germany, I'm half German, a bit Dutch, and a bit Indonesian, so I had grandparents standing on different sides during World War II, and I was always very fascinated by what we in Germany call the Rochenschau, and this idea to support morale of civilians, of the soldiers, I think is very dear to me.

1 big inspiration is Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator, which some people in the press actually compare us to, which is kind of nuts to me, but ultimately the intention is very similar.

It's to boost morale and to really cool the enemy.

1 of the most successful games of all time is the Call of Duty franchise.

But there haven't been that many games which have taken a live theatre of war and tried to convert them into something that is playable at the same time as the war is going on.

And Death From Above isn't the only game that puts players in the theatre of war in Ukraine.

Other games include Ukrainian Farmy, where players play as tractor drivers who are given the task of stealing Russian equipment and dragging it away.

It's inspired by viral footage in exactly the same way as Death From Above.

The tone of these games ranges between silly and tongue-in-cheek.

The canonical example of this is a game called Sunflower Slap, where All you have to do is swipe your phone screen to hit Putin across the face with a sunflower, which is Ukraine's national flower.

In a game called 0 Losses that's coming out soon, you play as a support battalion member for the occupying forces, fulfilling administrative tasks like driving around and collecting bodies of dead Russian soldiers and incinerating them.

What's Up in a Kharkiv Bomb Shelter is a very simple little game that lets players just experience what it was like to be under bombardment for so long.

Death From Above is a far more playable version of a war game than something like Harkiv Bomb Shelter.

But it does attempt to avoid glorifying violence, and all of the proceeds are being donated to Ukrainian charities.

This was obviously a challenge to think about what can you do in the game, which still is in line with our message.

If we put civilians in the game, you can drop grenades on them.

So what we do, do we then penalize the gamer?

So on the 1 hand side is certain challenges, but on the other hand, I think it's the only thing to do now.

We are 2023, Games are the culture technique of the century.

So we have to find a way to tackle these subject matters and also this kind of attention of outside propaganda piece.

So making a game still a game, I don't want to make a boring, interactive, frontal, educational, whatever thing.

It needs to still use the tropes of gaming and it needs to feel a game.

So far, The game has had a pretty warm reception on the online games platform Steam.

Antitila, a Ukrainian rock band, composed a song especially for the game and the accompanying video was watched on YouTube more than a million times in the week after the game came out.

Most of the players have expressed some form of gratitude for the opportunity to play a part in the war effort, even if a virtual 1 that's only in their imagination.

If you watch Raiders of the Lost Ark, the first Indiana Jones movie released in 1981, quite early in the film you hear the triumphant theme tune composed by John Williams.

Andrew Miller is The Economist's culture editor.

He swings like Tarzan onto a moving Seaplane to make his escape.

Indy, as you probably know, is a renegade archaeologist played by Harrison Ford.

And almost from the beginning, this silhouette of a man in his battered Federer and holding a whip in his hand for some reason, became very very distinctive.

And over 40 years we've seen Indiana Jones battle

and hunt for all kinds of mystical artifacts.

And unless you've been living in the sort of catacomb that indie likes to explore, you'd probably know that a fifth and final film is released this week.

So all of this very much harks back all the way to my youth when I first saw the earliest

Well, 1 answer, Jason, is that it comes from the alchemical pairing of Steven Spielberg, who directed the first 4 indie films, and George Lucas, who came up with the idea in the first place.

But also in a way, the character is a kind of walking homage to old movies.

Lots of bits of westerns and war films, and James Bond and Casablanca went into making Indiana Jones.

And at the same time, Harrison Ford makes him this unique and wonderful creation

So it doesn't feel like the the sort of pastiche that it is

I think the genius of the character is that he combined 2 seemingly incompatible things So Indiana Jones is a doctor.

He's a learned man, but he's also a fighter.

I mean he's the sort of man who takes his own whiskey to face down the Nazis in a bar in Cairo.

And when he punches you, you hear that special kapow snap every time.

And now he's having his final adventure in the film released this week.

The film is called Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.

And this time, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg are executive producers and the director is James Mangold.

And the story mostly takes place in 1969 and we meet Indy he's on the verge of retirement but he's pulled back in for 1 last caper.

In this case he's hunting for something called the dial of Archimedes which is a kind of ancient calculator, and he's accompanied by his goddaughter Helena, who's played by Phoebe Waller-Bridge.

His enemy this time is a Nazi physicist who's been enlisted in America's moon landing program.

Ford is 80, but still this film's got the usual stunter minute frenzy, with just enough breath taken for them to crack jokes and just enough exposition for the plot to make sense.

All I want to know is that it's better than the last 1?

Jason, be assured, it's definitely better than the fourth Indiana Jones film, The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

This time, cantankerous old Indy is offset by his goddaughter Helena, whom for some reason he calls Wombat, and it's got all kinds of stuff from the previous movies that you've come to expect and love.

There are cryptic clues in musty notebooks.

There are lots of kind of references to the previous films.

The dial that they're searching for gets kicked around a chaotic room just in the way that the vial of antidote was in the Shanghai nightclub in Indiana Jones in the Temple of Doom back in 1984.

The lines on the map that chart Indy's adventures taking from Tangier to the Aegean and beyond because this magical dial can predict fissures in time.

So even given the disappointment of the last 1, we're all going to go to the cinema and watch it.

Well part of the answer, Jason, is that watching these films is like going on a ride in Disney World.

There are umpteen stunts and wisecracks and gags, and who can forget the Zeke Hyling monkey in Raiders of the Lost Ark?

And of course, we get to see Indy do battle with and defeat all kinds of baddies, usually the Nazis, as in some of the other films and in this new 1.

And the plots are very clever, they involve objects like the Holy Grail and the Ark of the Covenant that even the irreligious will have vaguely heard of.

And part of the story's message actually is that you know knowledge can be dangerous I mean Indy is a professor, but at the same time pursuing these Sacred objects can lead to disaster and having you know having your face melt in a sandy whirlwind So I think part of the message of Indy is stay in school kids, but also you know stay in your lane Don't get ideas above your human station But I think in a way the most appealing thing about this character is not his physical prowess or his arcane expertise But that he's surprisingly relatable.

What, because you go fighting Nazis and swigging whiskey in Cairo bars?

Only on weekends, Jason, but actually although, you know, most of us don't, you know, escape from burning Nazi castles or jump out of airplanes like Indy does, There's something in his stories that I do think we can relate to which is that and all of his quests He's always balancing his mission, which is to save the world against his personal feelings and relationships So in the first film as you'll recall it was for his hard-drinking ex-lover then he had a young apprentice who tagged along and another girlfriend Then he had his absentee father who in the third film was played by Sean Connery And in a way James Bond was Indy's dad in a kind of Symbolic way they had a long-lost son finally he's got in this film the godchild And yes the stakes may be higher than they are for you and me Jason, but in these basic dilemma Which is work or family is?

Something that all of us stuck in the office and dream of going home, or perhaps vice versa, can relate to.

So I think the darkest secret of Indiana Jones was that he was always 1 of us.

So with that then, we'll head to the cinema and we'll bid Indy adieu.

♪♪ ♪♪ That's all for this episode of The Intelligence.

The show's editors are Chris Impey and Jat Gill.

Our deputy editor is John Joe Devlin, and our sound engineer is Will Rowe, with help this week from Saul Rivers.

Our senior producers are Sam Westron and Rory Galloway.

Our senior creative producer is William Warren.

Our producers are Alizé Jean-Baptiste, Kevin Kainers, Barkley Bram, and Sarah Larnyuk.

With extra production help this week from Emily Elias, Maggie Khadifa, and Peter Granitz.

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