The desperate and the displaced of Syria’s war should not be cast as climate refugees, observers have told the Guardian, as this overstates the role of global warming in setting off the conflict.
Many agree that the collapse began in March 2011, when a group of Syrian teenagers sprayed the words “Ash-shab yurid isqat an-nizam” on a wall in the southwest Syrian town of Dara’a.
The words, which translate to ‘the people want to topple the regime’, were a rallying call of the Arab Spring in Tunis and Cairo. The boys were caught, beaten and tortured by president Bashar al-Assad’s secret police. Their powerful parents were enraged. Protests and repression spread and spiralled into the disaster that has sent hundreds of thousands of Syrians fleeing toward Europe’s uncertain reception.
The narrative has since been fleshed out by journalists and observers to incorporate the impact climate change was having on the lives of those youths.
“… drought, in addition to its mismanagement by the Assad regime, contributed to the displacement of two million in Syria. That internal displacement may have contributed to the social unrest that precipitated the civil war,” Francesco Femia director of the Center for Climate and Security told Time on Monday. After four years of the worst drought on record, the boys and those around them had simply had enough.
This is one story of how the Syrian crisis began. But the story is apocryphal – useful only as a way of identifying how things may have transpired. Global climatic events influence the lives of individual actors, before being diluted again in the beginnings of a complicated civil war that has many regional players. Along the way, a lot of nuance gets lost.
“This is what a climate refugee looks like,” read a headline in the National Observer over a picture of a policeman carrying the body of three-year-old Syrian boy Alan Kurdi up a beach in Turkey.
But David Butter, an associate fellow with Chatham House’s Middle East and North Africa programme said such a conflict “could have happened at any time in Syria, irrespective of the drought”.
“The fact that this did escalate nationally is all to do with the structure of the regime as a brutalising kleptocracy that has for years and years taken people off to jails and tortured them,” he said.
In the case of the protests in Dara’a “there could be dozens of different local factors at play”. This likely included the appropriation of a large swathe of nearby land for a wealthy cousin of Assad, Rami Makhluf, to create a large duty free zone along the Jordanian border.
Some elements of the story can be verified. While climate scientists shy away from linking any single extreme event to climate change, they are able to say how much more likely those events are today than before humans began warming the atmosphere. In the case of the 2007-2010 Syrian drought, one study found that such an abnormally long and severe drought is now two to three times more likely to happen.
Testing these probabilities was possible using climate models, said Andrew Solow, a scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. But extrapolating these findings to Syria’s human maelstrom was beyond the reach of science.
“You have a story. And I think that could be true,” he said. “But to pretend that you could make a real accurate model of how human beings respond to complex changes in the physical environment and the political environment, I don’t think that’s probably possible.”
Climate change is by nature ubiquitous, affecting every life on the planet to some degree. In this regard, its fingerprint on Syria’s war is hard to argue against. In May this year, US president Barack Obama recognised the contribution of the drought in Syria’s fall.
“I understand climate change did not cause the conflicts we see around the world, yet … It’s now believed that drought and crop failures and high food prices helped fuel the early unrest in Syria, which descended into civil war in the heart of the Middle East,” said the president in a commencement address to the US Coast Guard Academy in New London Connecticut.
But Doris Carrion, a colleague of Butter’s at Chatham House, said it was “one factor amongst many”.
“You can see a link between drought-induced displacement and the actions of a couple of children and the government’s response to that. But it’s a little bit too deterministic to assume that all of that is what lead to the war in Syria as we see it today,” she said.
The Guardian’s migration correspondent Patrick Kingsley said Syrians arriving on Europe’s borders did not consider themselves, even tangentially, to be climate refugees.
“In all my time interviewing people in the Middle East, no one has ever linked their struggle or flight to climate change,” he said, while noting that climate change would inevitably drive future mass migrations.
“I think [overstating the link between climate change and the Arab Spring] is a bit patronising to the political movements that focussed purely on political change and fighting political injustice, that were built up steadily over time as a response to the political situation in their countries, and that were ultimately the main engines of unrest in the Arab uprisings.”
And the president of the London-based Syrian Human Rights Committee Walid Saffour said he did not believe the drought was a factor in the uprising.
“Oppression, corruption and regional involvement (namely Iran) which enhanced the sectarian feelings and reaction, influenced by the Arab Spring movement encouraged the Syrian people to dash to streets calling for freedom and the collapse of Assad’s dictatorship,” he said.
But Carrion said studying the effects of climate change in Syria was far from redundant. “When we think about what is it going to take for Syria to eventually recover from war and to create the conditions for refugees to have something to return to, then climate change and the impact that that has on Syria’s potential for an agricultural industry that’s going to have to be addressed,” she said.
Globally, it is clear that the impacts of climate change are tipping the scales in favour of strife. The Pentagon was warning President Bush as much over a decade ago. And in 2010, the US military ranked global warming as a destabilising forcethat was fuelling conflict. “While climate change alone does not cause conflict, it may act as an accelerant of instability or conflict, placing a burden on civilian institutions and militaries around the world.”
Last year one of the UK’s most senior military figures, Rear Admiral Neil Morisetti expressed similar concerns. “Climate change will require more deployment of British military in conflict prevention, conflict resolution or responding to increased humanitarian requirements due to extreme weather impacts,” he said.
A 2014 analysis of climate-conflict research found that drought and rising temperatures “systematically increase the risk of conflict, often substantially”.
On Monday in the Guardian, Friends of the Earth chief executive Craig Bennett raised the prospect that more climate change will mean more refugees. The impossibility of joining the dots in Syria does not undermine his concern.
Note: An amendment was made to the age of the Syrian boy Alan Kurdi. The article originally said he was five, he is three. His body was found in Turkey, not Greece.
Source: http://bit.ly/2wVEBfG
