Climate Change and Politics: the Syrian War


The link between climate change and extreme environmental hazards is still a debated topic. Models have increasingly improved in the last few years and they were able to confirm a connection between the intensity and frequency of such weather events, however there is still no strong enough scientific proof of the independent causality link between the two. This to say, that what science has been able to prove so far is that extreme weather events are naturally occurring on Earth, however climate change is exacerbating their effects, which result in social, economical and ecological implications. With such models based on real life data, it is now possible at least to create a pattern in their occurrence which helps to predict when and where they will manifest as well as their destructive intensity. This research has turned into recent years as well into a science: extreme event attribution.

Environmental hazards have also been seen to be implicated into regional politics, such as in the example of the Syrian Civil War, which was shortly anticipated by a severe drought in the Fertile Crescent region. In this example, the riskiness of the events is a direct product of the vulnerability and hazard severity of the region. This has been further intensified by the agricultural policies enacted by the Syrian President Hafez al-Assad (1971−2000), whose unsustainable political strategy aimed at further exploiting the land use of a region already scarce in water supply. This consisted in an inefficient utilization of the available rainfall, which occurs during the sole 6 winter months, and on top of that an over exploitation of the remaining groundwater. Important to notice as well that before the begin of the drought period in 2003, agriculture accounted for 25% of Syrian gross domestic product. With the increasingly exacerbated climate change and thus droughts, the agricultural system of several regions began to collapse, which consequently brought as well to to the causation of mass migrations. 

In conclusion, what the analysis is able to correlate is that anthropogenic climate change along with inefficient governmental policies as well as the State's incapability of correctly enacting and adapting to it represents one of the many variables which eventually erupted in the Syrian Civil War.

The global public opinion leveraged on this linkage between climate change and the civil war, to wedge on the idea that a futuristic exponentially warmer world will lead to increasingly more frequent popular insurrections, as quoted by Obama, Bernie Sanders, Jean-Claude Juncker and other Democratic leaders. By drawing such strong conclusion, the public has been compelled to use the argument to justify for example the immigration waves in Europe, calling them climate immigrants. For this reason, the academic community has thus since then tried to explore all possible approaches to the matter trying to find to what extent the above mentioned thesis is applicable. Even though lots of papers confirm the interlinkage between the two events, we find, for example, that the publication by Selby 2017 disagrees with it. The authors claim that "this existing assertions to this effect do not stand up to close scrutiny" as we are not provided with enough evidence to prove that the migration waves have been caused by climate change thus directly impacting the social unrest.


References:

Kelley, C.P., S. Mohtadi, M.A. Cane, R. Seager and Y. Kushnir ‘Climate change in the Fertile Crescent and implications of the recent Syrian drought’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112(11) 2015, pp.3241–3246.  

Selby, J., O.S. Dahi, C. Fröhlich and M. Hulme ‘Climate change and the Syrian civil war revisited’, Political Geography 60 2017, pp.232–244. 

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