Photo: Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain.Syria saw the worst drought in its history between 2006 and 2010. This drought led to a mass exodus of farmers, facing ruin from failed crops, to urban areas that were themselves reeling under gross mismanagement by the government led by President Bashar al-Assad. Such factors and others social issues caused severe social unrest that eventually pushed the country into an uprising against the government in 2011. This civil war in the land of the Fertile Crescent has since brutally escalated into a conflict that has left over 200,000 dead, six million displaced and affected more than half of the country's population.
“We're not saying the drought caused the war," said a cautious Richard Seager, a climate scientist at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, who co-authored the study. “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." Climate change models have long predicted that countries in the Mediterranean will be badly affected by the rise in temperatures and change in climatic patterns that would cause the region to dry out in the course of time.
Author: Purva Variyar.
