A tangled knot of overlapping causes led to the bloody chaos that grips Syria today. But some of them have received more attention than others.
The match that set the country aflame—the Syrian government’s brutal suppression of Arab Spring protests in early 2011—has gotten plenty of coverage. But beginning in 2006, years before the first demonstration got underway in Daraa or the first shot was fired in Damascus, there was drought. But it wasn’t a typical drought. It was an extended dry spell that one expert characterized as “the worst long-term drought and most severe set of crop failures since agricultural civilizations began in the Fertile Crescent many millennia ago.”
According to Francesco Femia, director of the Center for Climate and Security, herders in the Northeast of the country saw 85 percent of their livestock get wiped out. In many of the Syrian communities that were most dependent on agriculture, 75 percent of farmers experienced total crop loss.
The drought, which had been aggravated by years of resource mismanagement by the regime of Bashar al-Assad, was a major shock for a society that already had a lot of social friction—ethnic, political and economic tensions that had long been percolating beneath the surface.
Food prices skyrocketed. People went hungry. And roughly two million Syrians who were reliant on agriculture–around 10 percent of the population–saw their livelihoods destroyed, and had to get up and move. Most of them ended up in urban areas like Homs and Damascus, cities with poor infrastructure that was already straining under the pressure of refugees flowing in from Iraq and elsewhere.
Privation and hopelessness brought a huge number of Syrians out into the streets, and ultimately led to the devastating civil war that continues today. That conflict then opened the door to ISIS’s encroachment and rapidly expanded into a regional proxy war.
Femia cautions that it’s hard to say exactly how much Syria’s epic drought contributed to the outbreak of fighting, largely because it’s almost impossible to study the issue while the bloodshed continues. But he points out that before the revolution, Syria “was widely perceived as being stable and not susceptible to the same kind of pressures we saw in Tunisia and Egypt. And one of the reasons [the conflict took people by surprise] is that these environmental stresses were largely ignored by traditional security analysts.”
But we do have an idea of the role human-caused climate change played in Syria’s environmental disaster. A 2011 study by the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) found that, in large part due to human activity, 10 of the 12 driest winters on record in the Mediterranean region (which gets most of its precipitation during the winter months) occurred in the past 20 years. And earlier this year, UCSB climatologist Colin Kelley and his colleagues found that greenhouse gas emissions had “increased the probability of severe and persistent droughts in this region, and made the occurrence of a 3-year drought as severe as that of 2007−2010 two to three times more likely than [would be predicted] by natural variability alone.”