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

“The situation has now got really severe; we are talking about desert, rather than farming land,” said Abdel Qader Abu Awad, MENA (Middle East and North Africa) disaster management coordinator for the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC). “People cannot live in this environment any more and their final coping mechanism is migration.”

Syria‘s drought is now in its second year, affecting farming regions in the north and east of the country, especially the northeastern governorate of Hassakeh. Wheat production is just 55 percent of its usual output and barley is seriously affected, according to the UN’s drought response plan, drawn up following two recent multi-agency missions.

Blamed on a combination of climate change, man-made desertification and lack of irrigation, up to 60 percent of Syria‘s land and 1.3 million people (of a population of 22 million) are affected, according to the UN. Just over 800,000 people have lost their entire livelihood, according to the UN and IFRC.

No-one knows exactly how many people have migrated across the country because of the drought. The Syrian Ministry for Agriculture and Agrarian Reform’s estimate in July was 40,000 to 60,000 families, with 35,000 from Hassakeh alone. But with people moving all the time, the figure is likely to be an underestimate.

The UN’s drought response plan found there had been a “dramatic increase in the already substantial migration out of the affected areas”. Migrants head for the cities of Damascus, Aleppo and Homs, according to the report.

“It is very difficult to monitor the scale of migration as it is constantly happening,” said Awad. “When NGOs head to a settlement, there is no guarantee anyone will still be there.”

“Nothing left for us there”

In July, Hassan Hami Hami and his family moved to a suburb of Damascus after he lost his livelihood as a wheat farmer in Qamishle on the northeast border with Turkey, around 650 km from Damascus.

“There is nothing left for us there,” he said. “Farming stopped and I sold plastic for a while, but it was not enough. We had to borrow so much money from people just to survive.”

He said moving was a last resort. “It is not our home but with my son and daughter-in-law working we can just about manage.”

Hassan and his wife, his son and daughter-in-law and their four children now share a small, bare apartment. Between them his son and daughter-in-law earn SYP 9,000 [US$196] a month by working shifts in a local factory. Downstairs and in next-door buildings live other families who have moved because of the drought.

Knock-on effects

The migration is causing knock-on social problems for these families as they have left behind the tight-knit communities they belonged to. Crime rates are on the rise in areas where drought migrants have settled, because of poverty, say locals.

A UN joint mission report in July said more and more children were being sent to work rather than going to school.

“The drought is causing a high drop-out rate,” Sherazade Boualia, the resident representative of the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in Syria, said. “It is vital that children do not miss out on education. We are trying to give support to people so their children do not need to leave school in order to work. For those who move, we are trying to make sure they enrol in new schools.”

Families left in the area who cannot afford, or do not want, to move are suffering. The UN’s drought response plan lists problems including the drying up of drinking water; and water from unclean sources is threatening to cause disease. Prices are rising as food becomes scarce; people are surviving on bread and sugared tea, said the UN.

Aid designed to stall migration

In August, IFRC gave US$300,340 from its emergency fund to the Syrian Arab Red Crescent (SARC) to distribute food to the most vulnerable people. The organizations will launch a joint appeal to fund water purification equipment in schools and promote hygiene. The government and UN agencies have distributed food packages and seeds in the past.

Agencies hope the emergency measure can stall further migration. “When you get to the point where you decide to give up and move, things have gone very far,” said Awad. “But many families do not want to leave their homeland and those who have, want to return.”

Aid agencies say a sustainable long-term plan for the affected areas is needed. “We need to do studies to identify a disaster risk reduction strategy on how to overcome climate change and have better farming practices,” said Awad.

“These include planting new trees, good irrigation and legislation to prevent overuse of the land,” he said. “No one will go back if they don’t have a livelihood to go back to.”

Source: IRIN

Related Links:
» Somalia: Pastoralists Leave Drought-Hit Villages – IRIN (Jun 23, 2009)
» 160 Syrian Villages Deserted ‘Due to Climate Change – AFP (Jun 2, 2009)

A Syrian man sits in the village of Ain al-Tineh, 70 kms southwest of Damascus. Photo credit: AFP

June 2, 2009 (AFP) – Some 160 villages in northern Syria were deserted by their residents in 2007 and 2008 because of climate change, according to a study released on Tuesday.

The report drawn up by the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) warns of potential armed conflict for control of water resources in the Middle East.

“The 2007/8 drought caused significant hardship in rural areas of Syria. In the northeast of the country, a reported 160 villages have been entirely abandoned and the inhabitants have had to move to urban areas,” it said.

In Syria and also in Jordan, Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories, “climate change threatens to reduce the availability of scarce water resources, increase food insecurity, hinder economic growth and lead to large-scale population movements,” the report said.

“This could hold serious implications for peace in the region,” the Canada-based institute said.

The study, financed by Denmark, predicts a hotter, drier and less predictable climate in the Middle East, “already considered the world’s most water-scarce and where, in many places, demand for water already outstrips supply.”

Oli Brown, who co-wrote the report with Alec Crawford, said: “Climate change itself poses real security concerns to the region. It could lead to increased militarisation of strategic natural resources, complicating peace agreements.”

“Israel is already using climate change as an excuse to increase their control over the water resources in the region,” he said.

In the study’s conclusions, Brown and Crawford said: “As a region, the Levant produces a tiny fraction of global emissions — less than one percent of the world total.

The exception among Levant countries is Israel, “whose emissions — 11.8 metric tonnes per capita — exceed the European average of 10.05 tonnes,” they said.

“This may exacerbate the existing deep mistrust of the West, including Israel, which would be seen as causing a problem that it is unable or unwilling to resolve,” they said.

The study also revealed the challenge posed by population growth.

“The combined population of the Levant will grow to 71 million by 2050 from 42 million in 2008″ with major implications for water demand, food supply, housing and jobs, it said.

The IISD report said there is much that Middle Eastern governments and authorities, civil society and the international community can do to respond to climate change and the threats it may pose to regional peace and security.

“They can promote a culture of conservation in the region, help communities and countries adapt to the impacts of climate change, work to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and foster greater cooperation on their shared resources,” it said.

The report says climate change could affect farm productivity in Syria, where agriculture represents 23 percent of gross domestic product and employs 30 percent of the economically active population.

“Some 13 percent of agricultural land was downgraded between 1980 and 2006 because of… urban expansion and agricultural, industrial and tourism activities,” Fayez Asrafy, a desertification expert, told AFP.

“Rainfall shrank by 10 millimetres (a year) between 1956 and 2006 while temperatures rose by (an average) 0.5 degrees Celsius, though below the worldwide average of 0.6 degrees,” Syrian meteorologist Khales Mawed said.

The IISD predicts even modest global warming would lead to a 30-percent drop in water in the Euphrates, which runs through Turkey, Syria and Iraq, while the Dead Sea would shrink in volume by 80 percent by the end of the century.

Source: AFP