theatlantic | A paper published earlier this year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences specifically connects a severe drought across the Levant to the Syrian conflict.
The case isn’t a direct one. “Before the Syrian uprising that
began in 2011, the greater Fertile Crescent experienced the most severe
drought in the instrumental record,” the authors write, arguing that the
drought is connected to a long-term change in the climate in the
Eastern Mediterranean. “For Syria, a country marked by poor governance
and unsustainable agricultural and environmental policies, the drought
had a catalytic effect, contributing to political unrest.” ISIS existed
in different form, as the Islamic State of Iraq, prior to the outbreak
of the civil war, but the collapse of the Syrian state, combined with
the fecklessness of the Iraqi armed forces and government, allowed the
group to expand its reach and influence, and declare a caliphate.
Of course, scientists and security consultants get nervous when the
media covers studies such as this one. They worry, in particular, about
the impression that wars can be reduced to a single cause. (As one told The Guardian in May about the PNAS study, “I’ll
put this in a crude way: No amount of climate change is going to cause
civil violence in the state where I live (Massachusetts), or in Sweden
or many other places around the world.”) Still, O’Malley did a
pretty good job compressing the study’s findings into a short
explanation and contextualizing it as creating the conditions for ISIS’s
success, rather than drawing a direct causal link between climate
change and the Islamic State.
It’s easy to see how the baldest summary of this claim—a presidential candidate says that global warming created a huge jihadist group!—comes
across as silly. But the unfortunate reality is that climate change
will likely produce more evidence in the years ahead of the connection
between resource scarcity and war—whether it’s fodder for presidential
campaigns or not.
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