Climate change is likely factor in Syria’s conflict
Researchers say climate change probably caused the savage drought that affected Syria nearly a decade ago − and helped to spark the country’s current civil war.
LONDON, 2 March, 2015 – In a dire chain of cause and effect, the drought that devastated parts of Syria from 2006 to 2010 was probably the result of climate change driven by human activities, a new study says.
And the study’s authors think that the drought may also have contributed to the outbreak of Syria’s uprising in 2011.
The drought, which was the worst ever recorded in the region, ravaged agriculture in the breadbasket region of northern Syria, driving dispossessed farmers to the cities where poverty, government mismanagement and other factors created the unrest that exploded four years ago. The conflict has left at least 200,000 people dead, and has displaced millions of others.
The study, by scientists from Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, US, is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The authors are quite clear that the climatic changes were human-driven (anthropogenic) and cannot be attributed simply to natural variability, but are careful to stress that their findings are tentative.
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