Climate abnormalities are increasingly becoming a cause of political unrest and the resulting social chaos that is sending record numbers of the world’s people in forced migrations as refugees. The United Nations estimates that more than 30 million people are presently displaced on the planet because of environmental factors, either directly related or lurking behind in some secondary but pivotal role. For example, the civil war that has wracked Syria for almost 14 years was triggered by a drought.
With a population of about 22.5 million, Syria was a relatively stable country. Any civil unrest was sternly suppressed by its dictator, Bashar al-Assad, the son of its previous dictator Hafez al-Assad. But a severe and unprecedented drought in northeastern Syria between 2006 and 2010 sent an estimated 1.5 million destitute farmers to the margins of the country’s cities where they attempted to survive in wholly inadequate conditions.
Rainfall in the farming areas had decreased by 13% since 1931—studies suggested the cause was altered rainfall patterns throughout the whole Fertile Crescent region due to global climate change. Then poor farming techniques combined with depleted supplies of groundwater made the drought problem even worse.
An analysis of the situation by a US climate scientist, Dr. Colin Kelley from the University of California in Santa Barbara (The Guardian Weekly, Mar. 2/15), was careful not to attribute the cause of the civil war to drought. Other factors were operating: the general turmoil caused by the Arab Spring uprisings, simmering tensions within Syria, inept resource policies, and perhaps too many people trying to sustain themselves on agricultural land now becoming marginal. Although the requests from the displaced farmers to Bashar al-Assad were modest, their complaints were brutally suppressed. This became the spark that ignited a civil war.
“We’re not arguing that the drought, or even human-induced climate change, caused the uprising,” said Kelley. “What we are saying is that the long term trend of less rainfall and warmer temperatures in the region was a contributing factor because it made the drought so much more severe.”
Civil wars are not usually caused by one factor alone, but by the combination of many contributing elements. Had a record drought not occurred, had water been used more efficiently, had the 1.5 million farmers not already been eking out an austere living on marginal land, and had the al-Assad regime not violently suppressed their request for modest reforms, then perhaps the Syrian civil war would not have started.
But it did. And it quickly escalated into a multi-factional disaster with paradoxical complications and deepening implications. On December 8, 2024, after nearly 14 years of bloody fighting, the Assad regime finally fell. Of Syria’s original population of 22.5 million, about 500,000 had been killed, untold thousands had been imprisoned and tortured in the most unimaginably sadistic of “human slaughterhouses”, at least 7 million had been internally displaced, and 6 million had been sent adrift as asylum seekers in Europe and elsewhere in the largest tide of refugees since World War II.
The Syrian disaster was exacerbated by the abject brutality of the nearly 53-year reign of the al-Assad regime (1971-2024), by the political complexity of the Middle East, and by Russia’s perverse foreign policy of supporting dictatorships and of creating social and political chaos wherever and however it can. Add these ingredients to the stresses caused by global climate change, and the prognosis for a peaceful and prosperous future is not encouraging.
This future, unfortunately, is arriving sooner than expected. How the climate crisis is contributing to political and social instability may not always be conspicuously obvious, but it now lurks almost everywhere that people are in turmoil. Moderating its disruptive influence will require our collective patience, tolerance, calm, forgiveness, flexibility, co-operation, resourcefulness and ingenuity as never before. It will also take a pervasive and lasting peace. We desperately need to be addressing the global climate crisis. But this is exactly the opposite of Russia’s objectives.
Perhaps the most tragic part of this scenario, however, is that a demonstrably ruthless dictator like Vladimir Putin is going to exploit and even foment this unsettling climate crisis to advance his goal for an enlarged and imperial Russia. Meanwhile, a brutal despot such as Bashar al-Assad has fled to the safety of Moscow, where a more dangerous and devious version of the former tyrant of Syria will be doing his best to make a bad situation even worse.
Ray Grigg for Sierra Quadra
Top image credit: Riding through desert ruins in Syria by Marc Veraart via Flickr (CC BY ND 2.0)