Did global warming cause the Syrian uprising?

Since the drought began, temporary settlements composed largely of displaced rural people have formed on the outskirts of Damascus, Hama, Homs, Aleppo, and Dara’a — the latter city being the site of the first significant protest in the country in March 2011. This migration has exacerbated economic strains already caused by nearly two million refugees from neighboring Iraq and Palestine. A confidential cable from the American embassy in Damascus to the US State Department, written shortly after the drought began, warned of the unraveling social and economic fabric of Syria’s rural farming communities due to the drought. It noted that the mass migration “could act as a multiplier on social and economic pressures already at play and undermine stability in Syria.” Reporting during the uprising in late 2011, the late New York Times correspondent Anthony Shadid recounts: “There’s that sense of corruption in the society itself, that the society itself is falling apart, being pulled apart; that the countryside is miserable; that there’s nothing being done to make lives better there.” Reports show that the earliest points of unrest were those that were most economically devastated by the drought and served as migratory settlement points.

“The regime’s failure to put in place economic measures to alleviate the effects of drought was a critical driver in propelling such massive mobilizations of dissent,” concludes Suzanne Saleeby, a contributor to Jadaliyya, a digital magazine produced by the Arab Studies Institute. “In these recent months, Syrian cities have served as junctures where the grievances of displaced rural migrants and disenfranchised urban residents meet and come to question the very nature and distribution of power.”