It has been repeatedly claimed that refugees fleeing Syria are victims of climate change as well as being victims of a vicious civil conflict.
Scientific American declared global warming “” the war, and US president Barack Obama “drought and crop failures and high food prices helped fuel the early unrest…” The latest intervention comes from UK royal Prince Charles, who echoed those views in a TV broadcast yesterday.
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But critics are unconvinced. They say the link between climate and conflict is not sound, and some social scientists warn that implicating global warming in this way may take the heat off unsavoury regimes, including that of Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad.
The idea that the Syrian conflict is a climate war has been around since 2012. But it really made headlines in March this year with a paper by Colin Kelley of the University of California, Santa Barbara, and colleagues ().
The researchers argued that drought between 2006 and 2009 in north-eastern Syria, the country’s breadbasket, was the worst recorded in the region and had been made more likely by long-term, probably human-induced climate change.
So far, so uncontroversial. But Kelly then noted how, after their crops and livestock were lost, many farmers and their families moved to cities where rebellions against Assad later took place. While he didn’t go as far as saying the drought caused the war, he concluded that “human influences on the climate system are implicated in the current Syrian conflict”.
That last part of the narrative is particularly disputed. Was the drought itself the true trigger of internal migration? How big was the flight of people? And did the movements drive the unrest that preceded war?
There is a nuanced debate about the first question, the extent to which failed rains triggered the migrations. Most analysts, including Kelley, agree that there were compounding factors, such as ill-conceived government irrigation and agriculture schemes that left water reserves dangerously low even before the drought. But Kelley says the drought, and by inference human-induced climate change, was a significant factor.
On the second question, the size of the pre-war migration is more openly contested. Kelley said it involved “as many as 1.5 million people”. That figure rests on a media from a Syrian minister. Some other estimates, which Kelley lists but does not quote from, are far lower. In 2010, after the drought was over, the and the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas, which is based in the heart of the drought and conflict zone in Aleppo, settled on a figure of around .
Kelley said that the higher figure came from “anecdotal but not citable sources” but was “more realistic”.
Finally, to the third question; whether these migrants, by swelling slums in Syrian cities, caused the unrest that triggered the civil war. Here, as well as a quote from a migrant in the , Kelley cited a news from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. That turned out to be about some of the 1 million Iraqi refugees who arrived in the same region before the drought. It says nothing at all about drought refugees or internal Syrian migrants.
When I pointed this out, Kelley said this reference was probably incorrect, and suggested , which said, among other things, that ““. This take might explain why the first signs of conflict did not emerge until 2011, almost two years after the drought ended in autumn 2009.
Sociologists critical of the Syrian climate-war argument have a problem with climate scientists making links between natural events such as a drought and political consequences, including war.
One of them is Betsy Hartmann of Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, who says the climate-war narrative repeats that used for the bloody conflict in in Sudan a decade ago, which saw government-backed tribal militias killing pastoral communities.
In 2007, the UN Environment Programme a widely held view that the root cause was drought and desertification, and that “Sudan is unlikely to see a lasting peace unless widespread and rapidly accelerating environmental degradation is urgently addressed”.
And yet the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change last year that most studies of the Darfur conflict said that “government practices [were] far more influential drivers than climate variability”. But, says Hartmann, “the story just moved on to Syria”.
Apart from complaining about natural scientists dabbling in social sciences, her beef is that such explanations are open to the accusation that they let the real perpetrators off the hook by suggesting that Sudanese ministers or Assad in Syria are mere bit-part players in a wider climatic disaster, rather than the principal instigators.
Of course climate researchers have every right to examine possible links between droughts, migrations and conflicts. Given the ferocity and duration of the war and its growing impact beyond the region with the rise of ISIS and the refugee crisis in the Middle East and Europe, their concern is understandable.
However, it is just as fair for sociologists to question the jump from natural science to ideas of causality in the highly complex human sphere.
We hear much talk about the need to adapt to unavoidable climate change. One thing both sides would probably agree on is that a lot of the ability to adapt to climate shifts will come from ensuring stable, flexible and fair societies in countries on the front line. All turned out .
Fred Pearce is a consultant for 91av
(Image: Khaled Khatib/AFP/Getty Images)
