The Syrian Refugee Crisis, Climate Change and a Grim Future

The refugee crisis on the borders of Europe has dominated international news in recent weeks, with attention focused on the flood of hundreds of thousands of refugees, mostly from Syria but also from countries like Afghanistan and Eritrea, who have been trying to get into the European by boat from Turkey to Greece and overland through the Balkans, sometimes with tragic consequences. There are a lot of issues related to this topic that are worth addressing, such as the failure of the international community to do more to end the war on Syria (while much of the blame goes to Russia and Iran for their insistence on propping up the murderous Assad regime, the West could certainly have done and being doing more) or to do more for the millions of refugees still stuck in camps in the region, not to mention the poor response of Europe and the US to the immediate crisis, not only the disgustingly nationalistic and xenophobic actions of people like Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and his supporters, but also the failure of countries like the UK and the US to offer to take in much larger numbers of refugees (kudos to Martin O’Malley for being the first US presidential candidate to call for the US to offer a home to a substantial number of the refugees). But I’d like to focus on an aspect of this crisis that has been less discussed, except on a few more progressive and environmentally oriented sites, namely the relationship between the Syrian crisis and climate change and what it bodes for the future.

While it is of course an exaggeration to say that climate change was the sole or even the major cause of the Syrian crisis (the Assad government’s violent response to peaceful protests, for one thing, had more than a little to do with it), it is almost certain that it was a contributing factor. The distinction between a sole cause and a contributing factor is one that some people have a hard time comprehending, especially when talking about climate change. It is impossible to directly attribute any weather event entirely to climate change, but that doesn’t mean climate change is not affecting these events. For example, we can’t say that any particular typhoon or hurricane was “caused” by climate change in the sense that we can be sure it wouldn’t have happened without the global warming caused by humans, but we can say that climate change makes typhoons more likely and increases their severity. Another example of this is drought, such as the extremely severe one afflicting the west coast of the United States, particularly California. This drought might still have occurred if humans had not changed the climate, but it almost certainly would not have been as severe. What’s more, if warming trends continue, such droughts will become more common.

This brings us back to Syria. Over several years preceding the uprising against Assad, Syria and its neighbors had been hit by one of the worst droughts in recorded history. This caused great suffering among ordinary Syrians, so naturally there was a high level of discontent. It didn’t take much for this discontent to erupt into first mass protests and then, when the government reacted violently, open rebellion, and the widespread nature of the hardships meant that more Syrians were receptive to the call to revolt. Of course it is impossible to state for sure that the rebellion wouldn’t have occurred or have been as widespread without the drought, just as it is impossible to say that anthropogenic climate change alone caused the drought itself. But it is almost certain that climate change exacerbated the drought, and it is highly probable that the drought was at least one cause of the rebellion. This is hardly without precedent; many rebellions, migrations, and other upheavals throughout history have been shown to have natural disasters such as famines, floods and so forth as a major cause. What is different about the Syrian crisis is that this drought was almost certainly worsened by global warming, a worldwide problem that humanity is still failing to address properly.

The reality is that f we do not take dramatic steps in the immediate future, current warming trends will continue, which means that droughts, floods, and other weather events influenced by climate change will become more frequent and severe. This in turn means that the refugee crisis that we are seeing now is just a harbinger of worse things to come. Either we take immediate action to deal with climate change, or in coming decades we can expect to see many refugee crises, whether caused directly by natural disasters or by wars that result from them, some of which will be as bad as or even worse than the one we are seeing now. For example, right-wingers in the US like to rail against undocumented immigrants from Latin America (despite the historically low numbers coming in recent years); climate change is expected to cause severe droughts not only in the western US but in Mexico and Central America. If that happens the US is likely to see a flood of migrants in numbers out of the worst nightmares of American xenophobes. So it is highly ironic that it is for the most part the exact same people that most fear and hate refugees and migrants that are preventing action on climate change. Of course given the complex nature of the relationship between climate change and refugee crises, it will be hard to change the attitudes of people who seem to even lack the intellectual capacity to understand and accept the simple reality of climate change itself.