Blog Re-post "Syria, Water, Climate Change, and Violent Conflict"

The issue of controlling water has been an issue that catalyzed many wars and conflicts, the earliest war being recorded at least 4500 years ago. In recent years, droughts have seriously affected the Middle Eastern areas that rely heavily on water for agriculture. I wanted to re-post this blog from Peter Gleick where he examines how water scarcity exasperated the already unstable political climate in Syria. Below I posted the first 3 paragraphs of the post and if it interests you please click here for the full blog.

[ There is a long history of conflicts over water – the Pacific Institute maintains an online, searchable chronology of such conflicts going back 5,000 years. There were dozens of new examples in 2012, in countries from Latin America to Africa to Asia.  (A full update for 2012 has been posted.) Access to water and the control of water systems have been causes of conflict, weapons have been used during conflicts, and water systems have been the targets of conflict.

One especially disturbing example of a major conflict, with complicated but direct connections to water, has developed over the past two years: the unraveling of Syria and the escalation of massive civil war there. Syria’s political dissolution is, like almost all conflicts, the result of complex and inter-related factors, in this case an especially repressive and unresponsive political regime, the erosion of the economic health of the country, and a wave of political reform sweeping over the entire Middle East and North Africa region. But in a detailed assessment, Femia and Werrell noted that factors related to drought, agricultural failure, water shortages, and water mismanagement have also played an important role in nurturing Syria’s “seeds of social unrest” and contributing to violence.

Water has always been a scarce resource in the region – one of the driest in the world. Syria receives, on average, less than 10 inches of rainfall annually. All of its major rivers (the Tigris, Euphrates, Orontes, and Yarmouk) are shared with neighboring countries. And Syria, like the region as a whole, experiences periodic droughts. Over the past century (from 1900 to 2005), there were six significant droughts in Syria, where the average monthly level of winter precipitation dropped to only one-third of normal. Five of these droughts lasted only one season; the sixth lasted two. Starting in 2006, however, and lasting into 2011, Syria experienced a multi-season extreme drought and agricultural failures, described by Mohtadi as the “worst long-term drought and most severe set of crop failures since agricultural civilizations began in the Fertile Crescent many millennia ago”. ]

*Peter Gleick is a co-founder of the Pacific Institute, an NGO addressing the connections between the environment and global sustainability.