Climate change and geopolitics: the Egyptian and Syrian examples
Recent dramatic events in Paris, where the COP21 conference on climate is to be held from November 30 to December 11, have shed light on what seems to be much more urgent problems than climate change. Political instabilities in the Middle East have very short term and tragic implications, both locally and worldwide, whereas the effects of climate change tend to be regarded as more remote in time. However, if a great variety of factors are responsible for the current political realities of the Middle East, climate change may very well have been the trigger of the recent revolutions in Egypt and in Syria and their later consequences such as the war in Syria, as a 2013 report edited by the Center for Climate and Security suggests.
Climate change has indeed important impacts in the Mediterranean littoral and the Middle East, as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration wrote in a 2011 communication. Even if it was not entirely due to climate change, the drought that Syria experienced from 2006 to 2011 was probably made worse by its effects. Combined with demographic pressure and water-resources mismanagement, this led to a massive crop failure on more than half of Syria’s farmlands and, ultimately, to the exodus of numerous agriculturally dependent rural families to cities. Many of them were driven to poverty and the inadequate reaction of the public administration strengthened the case of the opposition claiming for political change. Although they were not the direct cause of Syrian political and social unrest, local effects of climate change may very well have hastened the deterioration of the social contract between the citizens and the government and, finally, precipitated the civil war in the country, with all the geopolitical implications that we observe now.
In the globalized economy, local effects of climate change can also have broader effects than one could have expected. Changes in weather patterns around the globe in 2010 led to wheat supply shortages, as Tony Sternberg claims in the aforementioned report (page 13), especially in China. As a result, the Chinese government purchased wheat on the international market, driving the prices up and affecting heavily Egypt, a major wheat importer where shortages had already led to bread riots in 2008, and a country where a house- hold usually spends more than a third of its revenues on food. The doubling of global wheat prices between June 2010 and February 2011 amplified public support to other political concerns and fuelled the claims of the opposition, which eventually led to political change. Local impacts of climate change such as change in weather patterns and drought can trigger cascade effects and have, beside regional impacts on food supply, much broader consequences and large political implications.
Even if political instability and regime changes in the Middle East do not have a single cause, the examples of droughts in Syria and China and their influence on local and global food supply stress the importance of climate change as a facilitator of geopolitical changes. Understanding and taking into account these complex interactions is key to the upcoming negotiations in Paris to tackle effectively the major challenge that climate change poses.
