Syrian conflict has underlying links to climate change, Stabinsky quoted
Was the four-year-old military conflict in Syria, which has claimed the lives of over 200,000 people, mostly civilians, triggered at least in part by climate change?
A new study by Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory says “a record drought that ravaged Syria in 2006-2010 was likely stoked by ongoing man-made climate change, and that the drought may have helped propel the 2011 Syrian uprising.”
"Added to all the other stressors, it helped kick things over the threshold into open conflict." -- climate scientist Richard Seager
Described as the worst ever recorded in the region, the drought is said to have destroyed agriculture in the breadbasket region of northern Syria, driving dispossessed farmers to cities, where poverty, government mismanagement and other factors created unrest that exploded in spring 2011.
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Doreen Stabinsky, a professor of Global Environmental Politics at College of the Atlantic, Maine, U.S., told IPS that obviously the Syrian war is a complex situation that cannot be explained solely due to drought and the collapse of agricultural systems.
“Yet we know that agricultural production will be one of the first casualties of the climate catastrophe that is currently unfolding,” she noted.
Indeed, she said, climate change is not some far-off threat of impacts that will happen in 2050 or 2100.
