The Syrian Civil War Showed How Complicated the Climate Change-Conflict Connection Can Be

Triumphant rebels now control Damascus, a quick and stunning turn in the 13-year-old Syrian civil war that has seen the Bashar al-Assad regime fall and its leader flown to an undisclosed Russian location. The future of the country is deeply uncertain. Its past, meanwhile, is complicated as well: a decade ago, studies suggested that the conflict might represent one of the first real-world demonstrations of a long-predicted idea that the warming climate would precipitate geopolitical instability and war, through a variety of mechanisms. Since then, though, others have pushed back on the too-clean narrative; the reality, like people, and politics, and war, is probably in some murky middle ground.

“Analyses of observations and model simulations indicate that a drought of the severity and duration of the recent Syrian drought, which is implicated in the current conflict, has become more than twice as likely as a consequence of human interference in the climate system,” wrote researchers led by Colin Kelley, a climate scientist then at U.C. Santa Barbara and now at the Center for Climate & Security. Their paper, published in March 2015 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, had an obvious narrative appeal: they showed that the drought that had devastated Syria in the years preceding the conflict was “highly unlikely” without human-caused warming, that precipitation changes in the country were linked to changes to the Eastern Mediterranean, and that soil moisture was being drawn down as well. “No natural cause is apparent for these trends,” they wrote.

The authors relied on other research on the high numbers of internally displaced Syrians and their connection to collapsing farmland and devastating drought conditions. All that displacement, chaos, and suffering at least helped lead to the spark for the conflict beginning in 2011. “We have here pointed to a connected path running from human interference with climate to severe drought to agricultural collapse and mass human migration,” they wrote. “This path runs through a landscape of vulnerability to drought that encompasses government policies promoting unsustainable agricultural practices, and the failure of the government to address the suffering of a displaced population.”

These conclusions got a lot of attention. Major outlets — PBS, the New York Times, Scientific American, Time — spread the word, and at least on the surface it appeared to join the conflict in Darfur, Sudan, as among the world’s first climate change wars. Only, it wasn’t so straightforward, or, according to some, correct at all.

“Revisiting” that narrative in the journal Political Geography in 2017, researchers led by the University of Sussex’s (now at the University of Sheffield) Jan Selby found that “drought did not cause anywhere near the scale of migration that is often alleged… [and] there exists no solid evidence that drought migration pressures in Syria contributed to civil war onset.” Later, other studies poked holes in the narrative as well, like a 2022 paper that found “claims of an agricultural collapse cannot be substantiated as croplands saw a fast recovery after the 2007–2009 drought.” Another from January of this year found that internal “migration took place during both normal years and drought years,” and suggested that “long-term mismanagement of water resources along with changes in the political economy” drove more of the roots of the conflict.

Selby revisited the topic in 2020, writing: “Not only is the evidence behind this narrative weak. In addition, it masks what was really occurring in rural Syria (and in the country’s northeast region in particular) prior to 2011, which was the unfolding of a long-term economic, environmental and political crisis.” Marwa Daoudy, a Georgetown professor and author of a book on the Syrian civil war’s origins, agreed, writing in 2022 that “Climate change didn’t trigger the 2011 Syrian Revolution, elite ideology and government policy did.”

But these refutations were also not the last word on the concept. Book chapters published this year still assert that “scarcity, partly induced by environmental factors, was an important driver for” both the Darfur and Syrian conflicts. “Climate disruption was an amplifier and multiplier of the political crisis that was building up in Syria,” a former U.N. Special Envoy for Syria told the publication DW in 2021.

This is, obviously, complicated. Syria did experience a bad drought before the war began; but it had droughts before. Climate change is clearly warming the region, and reducing precipitation over several decades by an alarming amount; but the specific protests that started the civil war, as experts even told The Guardian in 2015 soon after the PNAS paper made the firm connection, could have had “dozens of different local factors at play.” Warming is brutal; so was the Assad regime.

The error here is in trying to offer a clean path from one thing to another, from warming to war, without much in the way of context. To be fair, many of the stories at the time did offer some of that context, saying that climate change likely contributed rather than caused; but the narrative got out there anyway, filling a public’s general desire for comforting, if disturbing, explanation. The reality is that the Pentagon’s and many other bodies’ long-held belief that climate change will be a “threat multiplier” for global conflicts is almost certainly true, but we won’t necessarily get to point to a given war and say “there, that’s one.”

Instead, as climate change worsens, its various tendrils will snake outward and ensnare more people, more countries, more borders, more watersheds, and more agricultural regions, and it will move people from one place to another and stress the places they left and the places they arrive in, and the more autocratic and venal leaders in the world will face down these challenges with varying degrees of violence and brutality.

“This is a vicious circle,” wrote Laurie Laybourn and James Dyke, both of the University of Exeter, on Monday in The Conversation. “Climate change is making geopolitics less stable, which harms climate action. This will worsen climate change, meaning more geopolitical instability, and so on.” This “doom loop” is out there but it isn’t, and never will be, a clean and perfect circle. Just as how every extreme weather event now starts from a new baseline, where the question is no longer “did warming influence this event” but “by how much did warming influence this event?” There might never be a true “climate change war.” It’s just that they all will be climate change wars.