Why Prince Charles is Wrong on Syria and Climate Change

There is no good evidence that climate change contributed to the
country’s civil war

By: Jan Selby and Mike Hulme
30 November 2015

This week Prince Charles made headlines by claiming that the Syrian civil war was partly caused by climate change. ‘There is very good evidence indeed that one of the major reasons for this horror in Syria was a drought that lasted for about five or six years,’ he told Sky News, adding that climate change is having a ‘huge impact’ on conflict and terrorism.

The Prince is not alone on this one: he joins a chorus of voices who have claimed similarly. In the US, President Obama, Al Gore, and democratic Presidential hopefuls Martin O’Malley and Bernie Sanders have all talked of a link between climate change and the Syria conflict, Sanders going so far as to argue that ‘climate change is directly related to the growth of terrorism’. In the UK, the Syria connection has been drawn in government-commissioned reports and by leading NGOs. And it has been repeated by scores of activists and commentators, ranging from Charlotte Church and Russell Brand to George Monbiot and Owen Jones.

There is good reason to doubt the veracity of these claims. First, most of the public and policy discourse on the conflict implications of climate change is politically not scientifically driven. The earliest reports on the subject were not scientific studies, but military-led attempts to dramatise the importance of climate change by linking it to security interests. And the recent outpouring of claims about Syria’s civil war is motivated by a similar attempt – in our view misguided – to ‘securitise’ climate change ahead of the Paris summit. While some scientific studies do find that climate change has conflict and security implications, just as many disagree.

In fact we have been here before. In 2007 it was Darfur which was being portrayed as a ‘climate war’, following Ban Ki Moon’s contention that ‘the Darfur conflict began as an ecological crisis, arising at least in part from climate change’. But this thesis has since been roundly dismissed by a host of academic studies which have shown, amongst other things, that the war could not have been caused by drought because rainfall levels in Darfur increased prior to the start of the war.

This time around there at least appears to be some scientific support for the climate-conflict thesis: a study by earth scientists at Colombia University published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which found that ‘climate change is implicated in the current Syrian conflict’. The problem is that this study is deeply flawed.

Firstly, the study is not even about Syria specifically nor about the links between Syria’s drought and civil war. Rather its key finding is that there was a multi-year drought during the late 2000s across the Fertile Crescent, a region defined as stretching from southern Russia to Saudi Arabia; through statistical modelling it is then claimed that this drought was made two to three times more likely by human-caused climate change. Onto this analysis the authors simply bolt a few dubious secondary assertions about the links between drought and conflict in Syria.

Key amongst these is that pre-war drought in Syria led to the displacement of as many as 1.5 million people to Syria’s cities. But this figure – widely reproduced in media reports – is almost certainly wrong: the sole source for it is a single short news report, and it is completely out of line with Syrian government, UN and other estimates, most of which suggested numbers in the region of 250,000.

Moreover, whatever the level of pre-war internal migration within Syria, it is misleading to pin this mainly on drought. Syria’s cities were growing throughout the 2000s thanks to economic liberalisation. And most of the ‘drought migration’ occurred in 2009, in the wake of an overnight cancellation of subsidies on diesel and fertilisers. According to researcher Francesa De Châtel, these subsidy cuts were for many farmers ‘a greater burden than the [three] successive years of drought’.

Most important of all, the Columbia authors present no serious evidence whatsoever that Syria’s ‘drought migrants’ helped spark the civil war. The basis for their claims is just twofold: testimony from a single Syrian farmer (one farmer!); and a more general, un-evidenced assertion that the presence of migrants exacerbated stresses in Syria’s cities. They offer no evidence that any of the early unrest was directed against these migrants – which one would surely expect if they were indeed a cause of social stresses. And this, to put it bluntly, is because there is no such evidence.

The case for international action on climate change is strong enough without relying on dubious evidence of its impacts on civil wars. Claims such as these are mostly rhetorical moves to appeal to security interests, or achieve sensational headlines, and should be recognised as such. Prince Charles and others would do well to steer clear.

Jan Selby is Professor of International of International Relations, University of Sussex. Mike Hulme is Professor of Climate and Culture, King’s College London.

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