Rabat – “Is Climate Change the New Economic Warfare?” asked the attention-getting question announcing the theme of a recent panel on current and emerging ecological disasters.

The question set the terms of the debate in the self-important kind of verbal acuity commonplace in intellectual circles. Its dramatic rhetoric and serious connotations seemed enough to predict what the ensuing discussions would be like. The question also implied the type of panel that could best tackle it.

And so there was apprehension when, as visibly excited participants began filling the airy conference room at the irrepressibly elegant View Hotel in upstate Rabat, the moderator, Moroccan journalist Rachid Hallaouy, said, “I’m sure tonight’s panel will be enlightening, informative. But I mostly hope it’ll be entertaining, fun for you guys who have made it.”

Enlightening is what a conference of this kind is supposed to be. But both entertaining and enlightening is a lot to ask of an academic-styled conference meant to discuss weighty, complex issues that require technical, sometimes esoteric language that no normal person would use in their day-to-day conversations. The event took place on Wednesday, September 18, and started an hour away from the much-anticipated PSG vs. Real Madrid game in the European Champions League.

It was clear the conference would take more than an hour. So the moderator’s point about hoping the event to be fun was self-explanatory: With many participants having potentially ditched that kind of match for this kind of exercise in intellectual pronouncements and painstaking policy discussions, they deserved something beyond the usual tedium that most academic conferences turn out to be.

No ordinary conference

But this was no usual academic conference.

Human-induced ecological degradation makes for exciting, urgency-filled discussions. Inviting geopolitics in the debate elevates the feat even further, far beyond the typically anticipated stakes.