In December 2015, news about the airstrikes in Syria was in danger of overshadowing the important developments at the UN climate conference in Paris. While some environmentalists may have viewed this as highly regrettable, the upside is that the coincidence should highlight that the two are actually linked. Between 2006 and 2009, Syria experienced its worst recorded drought. It left up to 1.5 million people refugees in their own country. This placed severe demands on urban centres to employ, house and feed rising populations that were largely ignored by the Assad government. Protests and the subsequent uprising in 2011 led to the current civil war and the rise of Daesh. A study by Kelley et al published this year in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (doi: 10.1073/pnas.1421533112) makes a convincing case for the initial drought to be associated with human-modified climate change.
Kelley et al (2015) show some of the social trends in Syria. But the World Bank give many more - and together they are enough to describe the anatomy of the growing pressurised Syrian system. As the 2000s progressed, the urban population was rising, partly as a result of Iraqi refugees, but GDP was rising and food production was rising. But it was also getting hotter with the groundwater reserves in decline, and inflation rising steeply. The region is used to coping with fluctuating seasonal rainfall. Indeed, the drought in 2006-2010 had been preceded by similar droughts in the 1950s, 1980s and 1990s when food production had suffered but social stability had remained largely intact. The real difference with the last drought was the growing inability of the whole social-political-economic-agricultural system to absorb the problem and to cope. It had lost resilience through the gradual changes portrayed by the social and environmental trends - and the widely reported rise of mobile phones had acted as the catalyst for coordinating protest.
Climate change didn't 'cause' the Syrian war - it just played a big hand in starting it. It seems that we can expect more conflict, mass migration and geopolitical instability as an indirect impact of unmitigated climate change.
Parts of this entry were published online in The Guardian 6-12-15 http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/dec/06/nuclear-is-not-the-answer-to-the-climate-crisis
Kelley et al (2015) show some of the social trends in Syria. But the World Bank give many more - and together they are enough to describe the anatomy of the growing pressurised Syrian system. As the 2000s progressed, the urban population was rising, partly as a result of Iraqi refugees, but GDP was rising and food production was rising. But it was also getting hotter with the groundwater reserves in decline, and inflation rising steeply. The region is used to coping with fluctuating seasonal rainfall. Indeed, the drought in 2006-2010 had been preceded by similar droughts in the 1950s, 1980s and 1990s when food production had suffered but social stability had remained largely intact. The real difference with the last drought was the growing inability of the whole social-political-economic-agricultural system to absorb the problem and to cope. It had lost resilience through the gradual changes portrayed by the social and environmental trends - and the widely reported rise of mobile phones had acted as the catalyst for coordinating protest.
Climate change didn't 'cause' the Syrian war - it just played a big hand in starting it. It seems that we can expect more conflict, mass migration and geopolitical instability as an indirect impact of unmitigated climate change.
Parts of this entry were published online in The Guardian 6-12-15 http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/dec/06/nuclear-is-not-the-answer-to-the-climate-crisis