​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

Our 2015 study in eastern China showed that there has been a long running trade-off between rising levels of food production and a deteriorating environment. Yields of crops and fish have risen over the past 60 years at several locations studied in Anhui, Jiangsu and Shanghai Provinces.  But these are paralleled by long-term trends in poorer air and water quality, and reduced soil stability.  You may ask if this a bad thing.  After all, increasing agricultural productivity has been one of the factors responsible for lifting millions of rural Chinese out of poverty.  Does it really matter that the natural environment has taken a bit of a hit?  
 
Well yes.  For agriculture and aquaculture to be sustainable from one generation to the next, the natural processes that stabilise soils, purify water or store carbon have to be maintained in stable states.  These natural processes represent benefits for society, known as ecosystem services.  We show that, since 1950, losses of ecosystem services have occurred relatively slowly through the cumulative, everyday actions of individual farmers.  Indeed, when asked, farmers tend to underestimate the length of time since the degradation started. The problems started in the 1980s when farmers began to use more intensive methods, especially artificial fertilizers.  But the losses of ecosystem services have quickened after 2000 when intensification of production methods was spurred on by new national policies. Worryingly, in some localities, the slow deterioration has turned into a rapid downward spiral.  Some aquatic ecosystems have dropped over tipping points into new, undesirable states where clear lakes suddenly become dominated by green algae with losses of high value fish. These new states are not just detrimental to the continued high-level production of crops and fish but are very difficult and expensive to restore. We argue that overall the natural processes are degraded and destabilised to the point that they cannot be depended upon to support intensive agriculture in the near future.  The whole region is losing its resilience to withstand the impact of extreme events – from typhoons to global commodity prices. 


​Long term trends of provisioning services and regulating services in the lower Yangtze river basin, eastern China during the period 1900-2006. A) Map showing study site and locations with names. B-F) Indices of food/timber production (red) and regulating ecosystem services (green) based on aggregated and scaled data from official statistics, monitoring records and lake sediment records for Huangmei County (B), Shucheng County (C), Wujiang County (D), Yangtze tidal zone/Chongming County (E) and the whole region (F) respectively. 

 
What can be done?  Clearly the priority must be to regulate the management of landscapes in rural areas by reforming and implementing national policy that prioritises sustainable agriculture.  Farming practices need to be modified.  Policies need to emphasize correct fertilizer and pesticide applications, appropriate treatment and disposal of cattle slurry and human sewage, reducing soil runoff to streams and rivers, and the controlled use of fish feed.  Unfortunately, this is easier said than done because urbanisation, low farm incomes, low educational attainment, lack of agricultural advice and an ageing demographic all militate against rapid action.  The recent introduction of the Land Circulation reform policy, allows farmers to rent their land to larger combines.  The policy is designed to overcome the inefficiencies of small farm holdings but it may not be taken up widely in the more marginal landscapes where potential profits are low.  All the evidence points to a need for a significantly improved system of information and technology transfer to individual smallholders, probably involving a more efficient coordination between agencies. 
 
But there’s a larger scale context to this problem that may affect us all.  China’s production of grain has risen fivefold since the 1950s, outstripping the pace of population growth.  Despite this, the nation is no longer self-sufficient.  The shift towards more meat production has placed a demand for soybean and cereal animal feed that can no longer be met internally.  In 2012, China imported over 60% of all the world’s soybeans that were available for export, and cereal imports are also on the up.  Reliance on imports to fill a shortfall in home produce is nothing new.  But in China’s case, the additional risk that agriculture is increasingly unsustainable may amplify the demand. The potential scale of demand for imports is bound to have repercussions for global food production and food prices.  Unless reforms are introduced quickly, the rest of the world may well find that they are sharing China’s trade-off with nature - through the weekly shopping bill. 
 
Zhang, K., Dearing, J.A., Dawson, T.P., Dong, X., Yang, X., Zhang, W. 2015. Poverty alleviation strategies in eastern China lead to critical ecological dynamics, Science of the Total Environment 506–507, 164–181.  doi:10.1016/j.scitotenv.2014.10.096
 
Open Access download: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048969714015575
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