Was Syria’s Revolution Climate-Driven?
A new report by the Center for Climate and Security has added evidence to suspicions that climate change played a role in sparking Syria’s revolution.
Immediately before political demonstrations began in the now war-torn nation, Syria’s economy had been ravaged by a historic, five-year drought. Citing NOAA and USDA statistics, the report claims the drought was unusual for the region. A NOAA analysis concluded climate change was a cause of the rain shortage.
As many as 800,000 Syrian farmers lost their livelihoods in the disaster, when “from 2006 to 2011 up to 60 percent of Syria’s land experienced, in the terms of one expert, ‘the worst long-term drought and most severe set of crop failures since agricultural civilizations began in the Fertile Crescent many millennia ago.’”
The crop failures caused a massive migration from rural towns to Syria’s cities, with as many as 200 towns virtually emptying in one region. By 2011, as Arab Spring revolutions took hold in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, Syria’s important agricultural sector was a shambles. A mass migration, and its attendant tensions, resulted. From the report:
http://www.psmag.com/blogs/the-101/was-syrias-revolution-climate-driven-54196
= new reply since forum marked as read
