Syria’s political difficulties have lead to such problems as a stream of refugees fleeing to the Turkish border, exacerbated sectarian tensions and contributed to the deterioration of human rights in the region, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.

And new stories about regional security and humanitarian troubles in Syria have been emerging, despite the Syrian government’s intensive media blockade. But what rarely gets commented upon is the devastating drought that has gripped Syria since 2006 and reportedly driven more than 1.5 million people from the countryside to cities in search for food and economic normality.

Compounding the problem are the country’s so-called market reforms that have resulted in cutbacks in subsidies for food and fuel. Even as the political future of Syria and its President Bashar al-Assad remain uncertain, what is arguably a source of greater political instability in the long-term are the problems associated with drought and resource scarcity-induced migration that show no signs of abating.

WHEAT BEFORE JASMINE

Long before the start of the Jasmine Revolution that erupted earlier this year in Tunisia and Egypt, nearby Syria – the birth place of wheat and barley – has been experiencing severe livestock and crop loss.

More than a year before the current political turmoil started in the country, Syrian farmer Ahmed Abdullah, living in a ragged burlap and plastic tent with his wife and 12 children, remarked to an American journalist that “he once had 400 acres of wheat, and now it’s all desert. We were forced to flee. Now we are at less than zero – no money, no job, no hope”.

Ahmed Abdullah and his family are unfortunately not alone. Olivier De Schutter, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food observed in a reportearlier this year:

“The losses resulting from these repeated droughts have been significant for the population in the North-eastern part of the country, particularly in the governorates of El-Hassakeh, Dayr-as-Zawr and Ar-Raqqa. In total, 1.3 million people have been affected … 800,000 of which were severely affected.

“Most effected are small-scale farmers, the situation of many of whom has further worsened in 2010 as a result of the yellow rust disease affecting the soft wheat production; and small-scale herders, who often lost 80-85 percent of their livestock since 2005.”

The situation in Syria is in many ways a microcosm of an issue that the international community will be confronting in the future: what can be done about migration and other related complex humanitarian problems brought on by climate change and water scarcity concerns.

According to the 2009 report In Search for Shelter: Mapping the Effects of Climate Change on Human Migration and Displacement by CARE International, climate change is already contributing to displacement and migration.

Mexico and Central American countries are already experiencing the negative impacts of climate change, both in terms of less rainfall and more extreme weather, such as hurricanes and floods. Rainfall in some areas is expected to decline by as much as 50 percent by the middle of this century, “rendering many local livelihoods unviable and dramatically raising the risk of chronic hunger.”

As climate change increases the frequency and intensity of natural hazards such as cyclones, floods, and droughts, the number of temporarily displaced people will rise. This will be especially true in countries that fail to invest now indisaster risk reduction and where the official response to disasters is limited.

WHAT’S IN A NUMBER?

While the numbers of current and predicted displaced people are a source of great contention, the International Organisation for Migration estimates that there are now several million “environmental migrants”, and that this “number will rise to tens of millions within the next 20 years, or hundreds of millions within the next 50 years”.

Whether the actual number for climate change induced migration – or what some people refer to as “environmental migrants”  - is several million people or in the tens of millions of people, the actual number may be less important (beyond the news media headlines) than improving our understanding of the complex social-ecological relationship between human migration and environmental conditions.

Here are a few reasons why. First, there are many well-established examples of environmental and resource drivers of human migration and displacement. Some notable examples from a 2004 analysis of global warming and human migration include, among others:

•  The 1930s dust bowl in North America, which was caused by exploitative agriculture systems.

•  The drying out of Lake Aral in Central Asia, which was caused mainly by water diversion for large-scale irrigation schemes in the Soviet Union.

•  The Sahel drought and famine, which has transformed a huge arid zoneinto an extremely vulnerable region.

•  Rural exodus in many countries, worldwide, in both industrialized and non-industrialized countries: a long-term environmentally induced process, often linked to decreasing economic security and climate change.

• The structural insecurity in the Horn of Africa: a complex emergency with, at its roots, desertification, drought, conflict over land, war, and economic and political instability.

MIGRATION MANIA

Second, although there are still many important, as yet unanswered, questions about the climate change and resource scarcity-induced human migration process (e.g., whether climate change-induced migrants deserve different or special legal protection under international law), there is a strong contemporaryacademic scholarship on the environmental dimensions of human migration and displacement.

In fact, the modern conception of what subsequently became known as climate change-induced migration and displacement began in the mid-1970s with a publication on global population co-authored by Lester Brown, founder of the Worldwatch Institute.

Former executive director of the United Nations Environmental Programme, Mostafa Tolba, wrote in a 1989 Bioscience journal article that “as many as 50 million could become environmental refugees if the world did not act to support sustainable development” while British environmentalist Norman Myers wrote a number of reports, journal articles, and books in the 1990s and more recently, about the growing problem of climate change-induced migration and displacement.

One important development that allowed the term “environmental migrants” to go viral as a global policy concern was the release of the World Disasters Report in 2001 by the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, which reported that an average of 211 million people were killed or affected by natural disasters – seven times greater than the figure for those killed or affected by traditional military and political conflicts for each year from 1991 to 2000.

Another important policy development occurred when the International Organization for Migration (IOM) took the step of defining environmental migrants as “those displaced by extreme environmental events but also those whose migration is triggered by deteriorating environmental conditions”, although IOM makes it clear that the use of the term “environmental refugees” should be discouraged and currently does not have any legal standing in international refugee law.

HERE AND NOW

Third, even as we discuss the wisdom of using “environmental refugees” and debate whether there will be one million or tens of millions of cases of climate change induced migration and displacement in the future, the drought and other resource scarcity conditions that forced Syrian farmer Ahmed Abdullah and his family to live in plastic tents and to lose any meaningful hope for the future are producing humanitarian disasters impacting 10 million people across a wide stretch of Africa in such countries as Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia and Uganda.

In a country like Somalia, a complex interplay of high food prices, domestic insecurity and drought has caused more than 2.5 million people in the south of the country (including 1 in 3 children) to currently require emergency humanitarian assistance.

Even as the scientific case for climate change being a “factor” in intensifying the complex humanitarian dilemmas in Syria and in the Horn of Africa remain strong, it would be difficult if not impossible to establish a direct cause-effectand the possibility of having some kind of incontrovertible DNA evidence of a climate change-migration and displacement link seems highly unlikely.

On the ground, the true test of the international community’s willingness to help the world’s poor rests less on generating emergency food supplies and more on helping farmers like Ahmed Abdullah and his counterparts in the Horn of Africa to make sure that they have some hope for food and resource self-sufficiency and resilience.

There is strong evidence, for example, that climate risk management techniques like drought insurance could have worked in Africa even as far back as 2007, before the drought problem had the potential to turn the risks of hunger to full-blown famine in the Horn of Africa.

There is an old saying in the health care field that the big difference between medicine and poison is dosage. That is, that medicine one might take to contain heart disease can just as easily kill the patient if the wrong dosage is used.

In a similar fashion, the difference between sustainable and unsustainable climate change adaptation may not only be the types of policy approaches used, but also when the adaptation assistance can be applied in the problem cycle. And that means, diagnosing the problem early and accurately: after all, prevention is better than cure.

Source: AlertNet

Aisha Alim 42, a former Lake Chad farmer, now earns a meager leaving selling fried peanuts in Briketteri after watching his farmland near Lake Chad run out of water.

“It has been a bitter reality to swallow and a battle for survival,” he said. “The desert keeps encroaching on farmland as the water recedes and this makes it difficult for farming activity to thrive. I used to grow onions, peppers and maize but my farming area turned dry and I had no choice except to relocate.”

Mahmadou Bello, 52, who once fished in Lake Chad, similarly brought his wife and six children to Cameroon’s capital two years ago when the lake could no longer provide enough fish.

“We used to make enough money as fishermen by the shores of the lake and my wife was also involved in fish smoking because there was enough catch,” he said. Now, however, he has had to take up work as a butcher to support his family, he said.

Lake Chad, a large shallow freshwater lake that borders Chad, Niger, Nigeria and Cameroon, has shrunk in size by as much as 90 percent over the last four decades, forcing a growing number of farmers, fishermen and herders who depend on it to seek new livelihoods elsewhere.

A recent study by NASA and the German Aerospace Centre blames climate change – particularly more erratic rainfall – and human activity – including population hikes, overgrazing and overuse of lake water for irrigation – for the gradual disappearance of one of Africa’s biggest lakes.

The study warns that urgent action is needed by members of the Lake Chad Basin Commission (LCBC), charged with overseeing the water body, to avoid further dramatic shrinking of the lake, which provides water or livelihoods for more than 20 million people in the region.

FEAR OF POTENTIAL CONFLICTS

At the last World Food Security Summit in Rome, Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi sounded a warning on the dangers associated with Lake Chad’s decline, saying the loss of water might well spur serious conflict in the region.

“Something has to be done to save Lake Chad from the advancing desert. If it dries up it will be a real danger not only to the basin population but to the entire African continent that depends on the fish and agricultural products from the area,” he argued.

Already there are growing conflicts among herders scrambling for limited pasture and fishermen fighting over declining stocks of fish, as well as confrontations – including some violent clashes – between migrating herders and fishermen and the people already living in the new communities where the migrants settle.

“In Nigeria and Cameroon, cattle herder migrants who move southward end up competing for land resources with host communities. This has led to some of the recent conflicts between herders and farming communities in northeastern Nigeria and the Adamawa region of Cameroon,” a report by the Lake Chad Basin Commission said.

Water shortages are already causing a serious shortage of animal feed in the Lake Chad region, resulting in cattle deaths and plummeting livestock production, the report said.

On the whole, average household income in the region has fallen by more than half in recent years, the study said, and fish catches that hit 140 metric tons a year in the 1960s and 1970s have now fallen to below 80,000 metric tons a year.

Farming – which employs over half of the lake basin’s population – also has been hard hit, producing growing food scarcity, said Abdullam Urmar, executive secretary of the Lake Chad Basin Commission.

Of the 1.6 million hectares that would benefit from irrigation in the lake drainage area, only 115,000 hectares are actually irrigated, largely as a result of falling water levels, he said.

SAVING THE RECEEDING LAKE

Efforts to stem the problems at Lake Chad are complicated by the fact that so many countries are involved.

According to Aboubakari Sarki, Cameroon’s minister of livestock, fisheries and animal husbandry, protecting the lake cannot be the work of a single country.

“This is a decision that has to be taken by the five member countries of the commission – Cameroon, Chad, Niger, Nigeria, and the Central African Republic. More so, the commission is under the supervision of the United Nations Development Programme (and) that has to be consulted,” he said.

One of the measures put in place by the commission already to try to protect the lake is strict regulation of the use of its water under a standing charter signed in 1994 by the lake’s neighbors and other lake water users in the region, including Algeria, Sudan and Libya.

Other proposals include channeling the water of the Oubangui River in the Central African Republic to Lake Chad, an effort that has yet to find funding.

Patrick Akwa, Cameroon’s secretary general of the Ministry of Environment, said the feasibility study alone for the project would cost more than $50 million.

“The project involves damming the Oubangui River at Palambo in the Central African Republic and channeling some of its water through a navigable canal to Lake Chad,” he said.

Elias Ntungwe Ngalame is an award-winning environmental writer with Cameroon’s Eden Group of newspapers.

Source: Reuters AlertNet

As always, caveats abound. The social consequences of global warming are always the hardest things to predict. Immigration rates are never driven by physics alone, but depend on plenty of other factors, such as U.S. border policies or the changing structure of Mexico’s economy. And it’s always difficult to tie specific social trends to climate change. People in rural areas have been migrating for a long time, whether to seek out work or because the rainfall’s dried up or the soil’s eroded. Global warming will exacerbate these pressures, yes, but it’s hard to attribute any single event—or single migrant—to man-made climate change. That’s one reason why forecasts of “climate refugees” vary so wildly.

Still, climate-driven migration is a concept that’s received a lot of attention in recent years. As the planet heats up, droughts spread, and sea levels rise, millions of people are going to be uprooted from their homes and farms and move elsewhere. According to a 2007 World Bank report, the vast bulk of this migration is expected to take place within developing countries, with people moving from rural villages to urban centers. One big concern here is that places like Lagos or Dhaka are already swelling exponentially, and their infrastructure can barely keep up, which is why so many “megacities” now sport massive slums.

But there’s also likely to be a fair amount of migration between countries—and the consequences there are much harder to predict. As the rising oceans chomp away at Bangladesh, for instance, as many as 15 million people may have to abandon their towns and villages by mid-century. Partly in response, India has been constructing a 2,100-mile long fence to barricade itself against the predicted influx of climate refugees. This old Greenwire piece by Lisa Friedman features a number of national security experts in India openly fretting about how rising seas will destabilize the borders between the two countries.

There are even consequences for Western politics. Over in Europe, a variety of ultra-right-wing nativist groups take these climate-migration forecasts very seriously. In his excellent book Forecast, Stephan Faris talked to members of Britain’s BNP, which is trying (unsuccessfully) to forge an alliance with greens. A lot of them rant on about how immigration is terrible for the environment, since a person’s carbon footprint swells when he or she moves from a poor country to a rich country. Similarly, in France, Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front has started hitting on environmental themes of late. Few actual environmentalists want anything to do with these parties, and there doesn’t seem to be anything comparable in the United States, though if global warming does put pressure on immigration, it’s certainly possible that green nativists could find a toehold here.

Source: The New Republic

The UN Dispatch says: Build a wall made out of sand and bacteria!

Build a giant wall. 6,000 kilometers long. Made out of sand. Stuck together with bacteria. No, seriously.

“The threat is desertification. My response is a sandstone wall made from solidified sand,” said Mr Larsson, who describes himself as a dune architect.

The sand would be stabilised by flooding it with bacteria that can set it like concrete in a matter of hours.

Take his word for it; he’s a dune architect. And desertification is not something to mess around with. But with a gigantic, bacteria-reinforced dune wall, buttressing a “Great Green Belt” of trees, unchecked it will not be. As long as we can figure out minor details like politics, funding, and where to obtain “giant bacteria-filled balloons.”

If this seems similar to ad hoc geo-engineering schemes of righting the climate, well, it does to me, too.  Except that I’m more comfortable building walls to stop desertification than, say, attaching tubes to giant zeppelins that pump the air full of sulfur dioxide to block the sun and cool the planet.

Source: UN Dispatch

(The Guardian UK) May 18, 2009 – When the desert winds tear up the sands outside his front door, Huang Cuikun, pictured below in a dried-up riverbed near his home, says he is choked by dust, visibility falls to a few metres and the crops are ruined.

Dust storms hit his village in Gansu province more often than in the past. The water table is falling. Temperatures rise year by year. Yet Huang says this is an improvement. Three years ago the government relocated him from an area where the river ran dry and the well became so salinated that people who drank from it fell sick.

“Life is easier now,” he says, puffing on a cigarette in the new brick home that the authorities have given him. “When we lived in Donghuzhen, we had little water and the crops couldn’t grow. Our income was tiny and we were very poor.”

Huang is one of millions of Chinese eco-refugees who have been resettled because their home environments degraded to the point where they were no longer fit for human habitation. The government says more than 150 million people will have to be moved. Water shortages exacerbated by over-irrigation and climate change are the main cause.

The problem is most severe in the north-west, where desert sands are swallowing up farmland, homes and towns. Huang lives in Mingqin, a shrinking oasis area that government advisers privately describe as an “ecological disaster area”.

The Yellow river is diverted more than 62 miles (100km) to replenish dried-up reservoirs and aquifers in Minqin, where the population has swollen from 860,000 to 2.3 million over the last 60 years, even as water supplies have declined.

It is not enough. The Tengger desert is encroaching from the south-east and the Badain Jaran desert from the north-west. Since 1950 the oasis has shrunk by 111 square miles (288 sq km), while the number of annual superdust storms has increased more than fourfold. In Liangzhou district, 240 of the 291 springs have dried up.

Global warming is adding to the problem. Evaporation rates are rising, along with temperatures. According to a study by the Centre for Agricultural Water Research in China, 64% of the reduced stream-flow in the area is attributable to climate variation.

The government pays many farmers to cease production and has relocated thousands of others, like Huang, out of the worst affected areas. The government has given him a new home and land, but the desert winds still howl outside the door and his fields are bordered by sand dunes. Workers in the fields wear masks to protect their faces from the dust storms that whip in from the dunes.

Huang likes his new home, but with the climate getting hotter and drier, he cannot be complacent that it is secure from the sands.

“It’s just 2km or 3km from here to the desert, says Huang, so we have taken every measure we can think of to stop the desert moving closer.To survive, we must control the desert. Huang know the trees alone cannot save his home. “In Minqin, our greatest need is water. That is our lifeline. Without water, we cannot survive.”

Source: The Guardian UK

Related Links:
“China: Environmental Refugees” – Sean Gallagher, for the Pulitzer Center