Syria may have fallen into its vicious civil war due, in part, to a drought caused by climate change, new research reveals.
Nearly 200,000 Syrians have died during the bloody uprising against President Bashar al-Assad. An uprising against the leader turned violent in March 2011, following the arrest and torture of teenagers who drew anti-government graffiti on the wall of a school. Military forces later fired into a group of protesters, killing several people. This action brought more people out onto the streets, and fueled the budding dissatisfaction with the government in Damascus.
A drought driven by global warming may have been a factor in spreading the war, new analysis reveals.
University of California, Santa Barbara researchers analyzed weather patterns in Syria from 1931 to the present. They found the country has been experiencing increasing temperatures and decreasing precipitation in winter, reducing crop yields. Regular, yearly cycles in the weather patterns were mathematically subtracted from the records, in order to isolate long-term trends.
Government subsidies for wheat production resulted in the over-pumping of ground water in northeastern Syria, the main agricultural center of the nation. This reduced the effectiveness of irrigation systems that farmers would normally use for crops in times of drought, further increasing damage from the drought.
From 2006 to 2009, a large percentage of crops failed in Syria, and when rains returned, a wheat fungus called yellow rust bloomed, destroying half the agriculture in the nation.
The government in Damascus cut subsidies for fuel and food, and did not supply disaster relief to the mainly Kurdish population of the northeast, perhaps, in part, due to political opposition in the region. This resulted in a mass migration of 1.3 million people into poor, urban areas already hosting a million Iraqis fleeing their homes.
"We're not saying the drought caused the war. We're saying that added to all the other stressors, it helped kick things over the threshold into open conflict. And a drought of that severity was made much more likely by the ongoing human-driven drying of that region," Richard Seager from the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, managed by Columbia University, said.
California has been experiencing its worst drought on record, which has been taking place since 2011. Although the state is not predicted to experience rainfalls lower than normal, warm, dry periods are expected to become longer, and more pronounced. These arid times damage crops in much the same way as they did in Syria, researcher report. The Golden State experienced wildfires and invasions of pests as a result of the drought.
Analysis of the Syrian Civil War, and how it may have affected the Syrian Civil War, was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.
