Syria May Be the First Climate Change Conflict, But It Won’t Be the Last

 A tangled knot of overlapping causes led to the bloody chaos that grips Syria today. But some of them have received more attention than others.

The match that set the country aflame–the Syrian government’s brutal suppression of Arab Spring protests in early 2011–has gotten plenty of coverage. But beginning in 2006, years before the first demonstration got underway in Daraa or the first shot was fired in Damascus, there was drought. But it wasn’t a typical drought. It was an extended dry spell that one expert characterized as “the worst long-term drought and most severe set of crop failures since agricultural civilizations began in the Fertile Crescent many millennia ago.”

According to Francesco Femia, director of the Center for Climate and Security, herders in the Northeast of the country saw 85 percent of their livestock get wiped out. In many of the Syrian communities that were most dependent on agriculture, 75 percent of farmers experienced total crop loss.

The drought, which had been aggravated by years of resource mismanagement by the regime of Bashar al-Assad, was a major shock for a society that already had a lot of social friction—ethnic, political and economic tensions that had long been percolating beneath the surface.

http://www.thenation.com/article/syria-may-be-the-first-climate-change-conflict-but-it-wont-be-the-last/