Drawing one of the strongest links yet between global warming and human conflict, researchers on Monday said that a recent extreme drought in Syria between 2006 and 2009 was most likely due to climate change, and that the drought was a factor in the violent uprising that began there in 2011.
The drought was the worst in the country in modern times, and in a study published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the scientists laid the blame for it on a century-long trend toward warmer and drier conditions in the Eastern Mediterranean, rather than on natural climate variability.
The researchers said this trend matched computer simulations of how the region responds to increases in greenhouse-gas emissions, and appeared to be due to two factors: a weakening of winds that bring moisture-laden air from the Mediterranean and hotter temperatures that cause more evaporation.
Photo: Reuters
Study lead author Colin Kelley said he and his colleagues found that while Syria and the rest of the region known as the Fertile Crescent were normally subject to periodic dry periods, “a drought this severe was two to three times more likely” because of the increasing aridity in the region.
Kelley, who did the research while at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and is now at the University of California at Santa Barbara, said there was no apparent natural cause for the warming and drying trend, which developed over the past 100 years, when humans’ effect on climate has been greatest.
US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration meteorologist Martin Hoerling, whose earlier work showed a link between climate change and aridity in the Eastern Mediterranean, said the researchers’ study was “quite compelling.”
“The paper makes a strong case for the first link in their causal chain, namely the human interference with the climate so as to increase drought likelihood in Syria,” Hoerling said in an e-mail.
Some social scientists, policymakers and others have previously suggested that the drought played a role in the Syrian unrest, and the researchers addressed this as well, saying the drought “had a catalytic effect.”
They cited studies that showed that the extreme dryness, combined with other factors, including misguided agricultural and water-use policies of the Syrian government, caused crop failures that led to the migration of as many as 1.5 million people from rural to urban areas.
This in turn added to social stresses that eventually resulted in the 2011 uprising against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
What began as civil war has since escalated into a multifaceted conflict, with at least 200,000 deaths. The UN estimates that half of the country’s 22 million people have been affected, with more than 6 million having been internally displaced.
The researchers said that there were many factors that contributed to the chaos, including the influx of 1.5 million refugees from Iraq, and that it was impossible to quantify the effect of any one event like a drought.
Francesco Femia, founder of the Center for Climate and Security, a research group in Washington that has long said that the Syrian drought had a climate-change component, said the new study “builds on previous work looking at the impact of drought on agricultural and pastoral livelihoods.”
However, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology political science professor Thomas Bernauer said he was skeptical: “The evidence for the claim that this drought contributed to the outbreak of civil war in Syria is very speculative and not backed up by robust scientific evidence.”
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