Climate Change and the Syrian Civil War

Scientific American has published an article by John Wendle on how climate change has spurred the conflict in Syria. Wendle writes:

Climatologists say Syria is a grim preview of what could be in store for the larger Middle East, the Mediterranean and other parts of the world. The drought, they maintain, was exacerbated by climate change. The Fertile Crescent—the birthplace of agriculture some 12,000 years ago—is drying out. Syria’s drought has destroyed crops, killed livestock and displaced as many as 1.5 million Syrian farmers. In the process, it touched off the social turmoil that burst into civil war, according to a study published in March in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA. A dozen farmers and former business owners like Ali with whom I recently spoke at camps for Syrian refugees say that’s exactly what happened.

He tells a story of environmental degradation, ill-conceived agricultural and water-management policies, and their effects:

“The war and the drought, they are the same thing,” says Mustafa Abdul Hamid, a 30-year-old farmer from Azaz, near Aleppo… “The start of the revolution was water and land,” Hamid says.

But the story Wendle writes is about more than Syria:

The refugee crisis will eventually subside, [Richard Seager,a professor at Columbia University’s Lamont–Doherty Earth Observatory] assumes, and the war in Syria will run its course. Nevertheless, he says, the region’s droughts will be more frequent and more severe for the foreseeable future. After closely studying dozens of climate models he and Kelley and their colleagues are convinced that continued greenhouse gas emissions will widen the Hadley cell, the band of air that envelops Earth’s tropics in a way that could further desiccate the lands of the eastern Mediterranean.

These past months many people have written about the Syrian civil war. Many have written about climate change. Wendle’s article considers both the perspectives of farmers who have become refugees and of scientists studying climate change. It is not only describes where we are, but how we got here, and what may be yet to come.

Highly recommended.