Syria: Vision of Mankind’s Future?
February 26, 2014
It is a vision of unimaginable desolation: a crowd of men, women and children stretching as far as the eye can see into the war-devastated landscape of Yarmouk refugee camp in Damascus.
A photograph released on Wednesday by the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, shows the scene when thousands of desperate Palestinians trapped inside the camp on the edge of the Syrian capital emerged to besiege aid workers attempting to distribute food parcels.
More than 18,000 people are existing under blockade inside Yarmouk, enduring acute shortages of food, medicines and other essentials. Much of the camp has been destroyed by shelling, and attempts to deliver aid to those inside have been hampered by continued fighting in Syria’s three-year-old civil war.
SAN FRANCISCO — Drought was a key factor contributing to unrest and civil war in Syria, and the severity of the drought was probably a result of human-caused climate change, new research presented here Monday (Dec. 9) at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union suggests.
The study analysis suggests that the drought was too severe to be simply a result of natural variability in precipitation.
“We don’t have any observed evidence to support a 100-year trend in precipitation that we would prescribe as being natural,” said study co-author Colin Kelley, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California at Santa Barbara. “We can only assume that the trend is anthropogenic.”
Kelley and his colleagues got started on their work because of an op-ed by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman about the Arab Spring uprising in several Middle Eastern countries.
“He was making the case that in each case there was an overlooked environmental stress that was important,” Kelley told LiveScience.
Past reports had suggested that Syria’s breadbasket had experienced a severe three- to five-year drought in the years preceding the Syrian civil war. To assess the drought’s severity, Kelley and his colleagues looked at rainfall patterns for the region going back 100 years. They found that in the years leading up to the civil war, the region had a historically rare three-year drought. From 2002 to 2008, about 1.5 million rural farmers escaping the countryside flooded the cities. [5 Surprising Cultural Facts About Syria]
“There was already considerable water instability even before this drought happened,” Kelley said. “We think of it as the straw that broke the camel’s back.”
Human-caused climate change?
The team also used a statistical analysis to see whether the drought could be explained by natural climate variability. The researchers looked at more than 100 years of changes in rainfall and sea level pressure in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea — high air pressure over the body of water is a measure of potential drought because most of Syria’s rainfall comes from that area, and the higher sea level pressure prevents precipitation from forming over the water.
The team found that it was highly unlikely that natural variations in climate could have caused severe drought for so many years in a row, but that human-caused climate change made it much more likely.
If that’s the case, then the Syrian civil war may have at least been partly precipitated by human- caused climate changes (though many other factors contributed as well). And climate models suggest that drought will worsen in the Middle East in the years to come.
US Department of Defense, Quadrennial Defense Review 2010:
Assessments conducted by the intelligence community indicate that climate change could have significant geopolitical impacts around the world, contributing to poverty, environmental degradation, and the further weakening of fragile governments. Climate change will contribute to food and water scarcity, will increase the spread of disease, and may spur or exacerbate mass migration.
While climate change alone does not cause conflict, it may act as an accelerant of instability or conflict, placing a burden to respond on civilian institutions and militaries around the world. In addition, extreme weather events may lead to increased demands for defense support to civil authorities for humanitarian assistance or disaster response both within the United States and overseas. In some nations, the military is the only institution with the capacity to respond to a large-scale natural disaster.