Agrégateur de flux

Organisateurs :
Réseau « Transfopress » (Réseau transnational pour l'étude de la presse en langues étrangères), Centre de recherches Europes-Eurasie (CREE) de l'Inalco, Centre d'histoire culturelle des sociétés contemporaines de l'Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines, Laboratoire de recherches sur les cultures anglophones (LARCA-UMR 8225) de l'Université Paris-Diderot, Association française d'études sur les Balkans (AFEBALK) et BNF.
Lieu : Salle du CREE, rue de Lille, Paris 7e
La péninsule (...)

Most people remember the first news reports on the political unrest in Syria in 2011. After the start of the Arab Spring in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, it was merely a matter of time before Syrians would take to the streets and demand the resignation of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Within weeks, the uprisings escalated into a fully-fledged civil conflict. Fighting broke out between the Syrian government, opposition forces, Sunni Arab rebel groups, the Kurds, al-Nusra and Daesh (Islamic State). To date, more than 465,000 people have died; more than ten million civilians have had to leave their homes.

Not many people know that extreme droughts and bad agricultural planning in Syria between 2006 and 2010 led to the collapse of the agricultural sector in the north-east of the country. It forced 1.5 million unskilled farmers to migrate to the cities, and it is broadly seen as a contributing factor to the civil unrest. Six years since the conflict began, policymakers in the region and in the West urgently need to give the issue of climate-induced migration the attention it deserves.

Traditionally, the agricultural system in north-eastern Syria produces more than 65% of the country’s crop yield. The region is heavily dependent on rain: more than two-thirds of water for agriculture comes from a six-month rain period each year. The rest of the water comes from irrigation and groundwater. The variability of year-to-year rainfall adds to the importance of groundwater reserves.

“More research is needed on the climatic drivers of civil unrest”

During the presidency of Hafiz Assad (Bashar Assad’s father) from 1971 to 2000, the country increased its dependence on agricultural production and started to exploit land and water resources. This led to depletion of the groundwater and made agricultural success even more reliant on weather conditions. When the country was hit by extreme drought in 2006, it had a huge impact on agriculture. The lack of rainfall and high temperatures caused the soil to dry out, and there was no groundwater to compensate this.

This was not the first time drought had occurred in Syria. Since 1931 the Fertile Crescent (a band of territory stretching across the top of the Arabian peninsula, from the Nile Valley to the Persian Gulf) has witnessed a 13% drop in winter rainfall, and droughts have occurred occasionally. But the 2006 drought came relatively quickly after the 1998-2001 drought, from which the agricultural sector had only just recovered. The 2006 drought also lasted longer than previous dry spells, causing the harvest to fail year-on-year.

The effects of the drought were not limited to agriculture. Vegetation for grazing became scarcer, causing herders to lose large parts of their livestock and forcing them to sell some of the remaining animals to pay for feed. As market prices were heavily influenced by the drought, prices for livestock were low while prices for food and seed increased. This happened at a time when food subsidies for farmers were abolished due to a fall in Syria’s oil revenue and as part of Assad’s new liberal market policy.

In 2009, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Human Affairs (OCHA) published a Syria Drought Response Plan, following remarks by the Syrian agriculture minister that the economic and social fallout from the drought was ‘beyond our capacity as a country to deal with’. Unfortunately, to date only 33.4% of the plan has been funded ‒ not enough to assist the herders and farmers and prevent a mass migration to the cities, as some 1.5 million Syrians from the north-eastern region migrated to Damascus, Aleppo and other urban areas.

These cities had already had to absorb more than one million refugees from Iraq in 2006, and so the new wave of refugees settled on the edges of the cities, where living conditions were poor and access to employment limited. The new influx of people also placed a huge strain on urban water supplies, which added to existing political unrest.

“The Syrian drought is one example of climate change as a threat multiplier”

In March 2015 climate scientist Colin Kelley published an article in which he compared models of greenhouse gas emissions from human interference with rising temperatures in the Fertile Crescent. He concluded that the increase in greenhouse gases due to human activity had an impact on the duration and severity of the drought. This is worrying. But what is more disturbing is that Kelley’s study and climate models by the International Panel on Climate Change suggest that this region will become drier in the future, as greenhouse gas concentrations continue. In fact, some studies suggest that the entire Fertile Crescent is likely to disappear by the end of the 21st century because of human-induced climate change.

This terrifying prospect requires that the phenomenon of climate refugees is taken seriously. The Syrian case demonstrates how dangerous climate change can be when it affects vulnerable populations in countries that are not resilient to changing weather conditions and mass migration. High vulnerability to rainfall and temperatures due to unsustainable agricultural policies led to the migration of unskilled labour to cities that lacked urban and infrastructural planning, adding to political instabilities.

The Syrian drought is one example of climate change as a threat multiplier. Droughts, limited natural resources and mass migration will be extra burdens on existing difficulties. Accommodating refugees regionally is only possible if resources are available to house and feed them. As temperatures continue to rise, more parts of the Middle East will become uninhabitable.

More research is needed on the climatic drivers of civil unrest. But for now, it is crucial that countries most affected by climate change, as well as nations in the global North, take the phenomenon of climate refugees seriously and develop effective emergency plans for the migration of climate refugees.

IMAGE CREDIT: CC/Flickr – Joel Bombardier

The post Syria shows it’s time to take climate migration seriously appeared first on Europe’s World.

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Americas

• The US DoD has announced the successful test of its Ground-based Midcourse Defense (GMD) interceptor against a ICBM-class target. During the test, the US Missile Defense Agency launched an unarmed ICBM from Kwajalein Atoll, while the exoatmospheric hit-to-kill interceptor was launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California. Various defense firms announced their involvement in the test, which saw Raytheon provide the interceptor as well as its sea-based X-band radar and AN/TPY-2 radar, Boeing with its Ground-based Midcourse Defense system, while Orbital ATK provided its ICBM target rocket for the national security system test.

• ATK Orbital has announced that it has received a $90 million contract from Northrop Grumman for composite materials meant for maintenance of the B-2 Spirit heavy stealth bomber. The deal will also include the production and delivery of 17 Hot Trailing Edge (HTE) parts for the bomber as well as Non-Recurring Engineering (NRE) work. Work will be conducted over a five-year term and contains options for follow-on orders.

• Triumph Group will continue to manufacture parts for the V-22 aircraft if Boeing Bell successfully negotiates its next V-22 Osprey Multi-year 3 contract with the US Navy. In a renewed statement of work, Triumph added that it will also manufacture cargo ramps and doors for the aircraft, in addition to components including the empennage, elevator, ramp extensions, ramp mounted weapons system floor boards, main landing gear doors. Deliveries of the components in support of the Multi-year 3 contract would begin in 2019.

Middle East & North Africa

• Turkish defense electronics firm Aselsan is looking to secure s contract to supply very high frequency (VHF) radios to the Ukrainian armed forces. As many as 600 VHF units are being sought by Kiev, who are assessing proposals in accordance with the following: cost effectiveness; scalability and application potential; compatibility with the systems used by the Ukrainian Army, Navy and Air Force; NATO compliance; transfer-of-technology, offsets (e.g. co-production) and credit. Aselsan’s software defined radios (SDR) have already been exported to Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.

Europe

• PGZ, a Polish defense firm, has moved to purchase Naval Shipyard (SMW) from the Polish Treasury in a deal expected to reach $60.1 million. Announcing the deal, Polish Deputy Defense Minister Bartosz Kownacki added that after the shipyard’s finances are overhauled, it will take part in a multi-billion dollar program to build three submarines. Three companies have applied to take part in the procurement procedure: France’s DCNS, Sweden’s Saab and Germany’s ThyssenKrupp Marine Systems, but ministry officials have emphasized they expect the selected supplier to closely cooperate with Poland’s defense industry on the contract.

Asia Pacific

• South Korea’s Defence Ministry intentionally omitted details about the Terminal High Altitude Area Defence (THAAD) system battery (THAAD) in a report last week, according to a probe issued by President Moon Jae-in. The report failed to include details stating that four additional launchers have been added to the THAAD site as the new government was preparing for Moon’s summit with US President Donald Trump next month. An earlier version of the defense ministry report specified the total number of launchers being prepared for deployment and the name of the US military base where the four were being kept, but the reference was removed in the final version delivered to the government, according to presidential Blue House spokesman Yoon Young-chan.

• The Indian government has decided to cancel its Short Range Surface to Air Missile (SR-SAM) contest and will instead buy more of the indigenous Akash air defense missile system. A $2.7 billion contract released by New Delhi calls for two regiments of the system which will be delivered and inducted into the Indian Army in 2018, bringing to four the total number of Akash systems deployed with the service. The return to the Akash to the Indian Army comes after officials complained that the system experienced deficiencies in forward deployed locations which resulted in an upgrade of the system and which added systems required by the Army.

• Pakistan has received seven surplus Sea King helicopters from the British Royal Navy. Officials in Islamabad said that the helicopters will first undergo maintenance services undertaken by M/s Vector Aerospace before being shipped to Pakistan for deployment later this year. Built under license by Westland Helicopters, the deal for them was signed by Pakistan and Britain’s Ministry of Defense last year.

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