Climate change and the Syrian civil war revisited (Political Geography, Sept. 2017)
►http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0962629816301822
We find that there is no clear and reliable evidence that anthropogenic #climate change was a factor in northeast Syria’s 2006/07–2008/09 drought; we find that, while the 2006/07–2008/09 drought in northeast Syria will have contributed to migration, this migration was not on the scale claimed in the existing literature, and was, in all probability, more caused by economic liberalisation than drought; and we find that there is no clear and reliable evidence that drought-related migration was a contributory factor in civil war onset. In our assessment, there is thus no good evidence to conclude that global climate change-related drought in #Syria was a contributory causal factor in the country’s civil war.
A comment on “climate change and the Syrian civil war revisited”
▻http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0962629817301531
To the extent the dominant narrative got the Syrian case “wrong”, it will ultimately make it harder for scholars and scientists to communicate the very real economic and security implications of climate change more broadly.