The Drought Migration–Conflict Nexus: Was the Syrian Civil War Really Caused by Climate Change?

Summary, in English

Climate change is increasingly recognized as a major security concern, with drought–migration–conflict linkages attracting significant attention in both policy and research. While some narratives portray drought as a direct driver of migration and conflict, evidence shows a far more complex relationship: climate stress can lead to more migration in some contexts and less in others, with internal movements generally more common than international ones. For conflict, research generally finds socio-economic and political factors to be more important than climate stress. This report by the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH) analyzes the linkages between climate change impacts, agricultural dynamics, migration, and armed conflict in the Syrian Arab Republic (Syria). Its findings challenge oversimplified accounts of the 2007–2009 drought as a singular trigger for the 2011 uprising, instead situating drought impacts within a longer history of unsustainable agricultural development, resource overexploitation, and governance shortcomings. The Syrian climate-conflict nexus narrative focuses on how a meteorological drought between 2007 and 2009 led to widespread crop failures and rural to urban migration, the years before the Syrian uprising in 2011, which rapidly turned into a civil war. This narrative has been put forward both in media publications and in academic literature but has also been widely criticized for being overly simplistic and disregarding the history of the region, the socio-political context in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) as a whole, and for the overreliance on meteorological measures of drought, rather than agricultural and socio-economic perspectives. This report draws mainly on meteorological data, satellite-based land use monitoring, and field research with Syrian farmers in the Republic of Türkiye to capture the complex interactions between climate stress and societal responses. It underscores that migration and agricultural challenges were already present before the drought and were later intensified by the civil war, rather than being its direct consequence. The report identifies little drought related land abandonment, and high levels of cropland activity in 2010, just before the Syrian uprising started. The war, on the other hand, likely drove land abandonment due to shifting migration dynamics from an adaptive measure towards forced displacement with little chance of return to the land.

• Author: Pinar Dinc; Lina Eklund; Rupert von Der Kammer
• Department/s: Centre for Advanced Middle Eastern Studies (CMES); Department of Political Science; MECW: The Middle East in the Contemporary World; Dept of Physical Geography and Ecosystem Science; BECC: Biodiversity and Ecosystem services in a Changing Climate; LU Profile Area: Human rights; Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences (MGeo); Centre for Geographical Information Systems (GIS Centre)
• Publishing year: 2025
• Language: English
• Publication/Series: UNU-INWEH Reports
• Links: http://dx.doi.org/10.53328/INR25LER002
• Document type: Report
• Publisher: United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment, and Health (UNU-INWEH)
• Topic: Physical Geography; Social and Economic Geography
• Status: Published
• Project: Societal impacts of climate stress: An integrated assessment of drought, vulnerability, and conflict in Syria; The United Nations University Hub: Water in a Changing Environment (WICE)
• ISBN/ISSN/Other: ISBN: 9789280861341