Fullerton College Diamonds Theory of Collapse Article Discussion

Climate change in the Fertile Crescent and implications
of the recent Syrian drought
Colin P. Kelleya,1, Shahrzad Mohtadib, Mark A. Canec, Richard Seagerc, and Yochanan Kushnirc
a
University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106; bSchool of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027; and cLamont?Doherty
Earth Observatory, Columbia University, Palisades, NY 10964
drought
| Syria | climate change | unrest | conflict
B
eginning in the winter of 2006/2007, Syria and the greater
Fertile Crescent (FC), where agriculture and animal herding
began some 12,000 years ago (1), experienced the worst 3-year
drought in the instrumental record (2). The drought exacerbated
existing water and agricultural insecurity and caused massive
agricultural failures and livestock mortality. The most significant
consequence was the migration of as many as 1.5 million
people from rural farming areas to the peripheries of urban
centers (3, 4). Characterizing risk as the product of vulnerability
and hazard severity, we first analyze Syria?s vulnerability to
drought and the social impacts of the recent drought leading to
the onset of the Syrian civil war. We then use observations and
climate models to assess how unusual the drought was within the
observed record and the reasons it was so severe. We also show
that climate models simulate a long-term drying trend for the
region as a consequence of human-induced climate change. If
correct, this has increased the severity and frequency of occurrence of extreme multiyear droughts such as the recent one. We
also present evidence that the circulation anomalies associated
with the recent drought are consistent with model projections of
human-induced climate change and aridification in the region
and are less consistent with patterns of natural variability.
Heightened Vulnerability and the Effects of the Drought
Government agricultural policy is prominent among the many
factors that shaped Syria?s vulnerability to drought. Despite growing
water scarcity and frequent droughts, the government of President
Hafez al-Assad (1971-2000) initiated policies to further increase
agricultural production, including land redistribution and irrigation
projects, quota systems, and subsidies for diesel fuel to garner
the support of rural constituents (5?9). These policies endangered
www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1421533112
Syria?s water security by exploiting limited land and water resources
without regard for sustainability (10).
One critical consequence of these unsustainable policies is the
decline of groundwater. Nearly all rainfall in the FC occurs during
the 6-month winter season, November through April, and this
rainfall exhibits large year-to-year variability (Figs. 1A and 2A). In
Syria, the rain falls along the country?s Mediterranean Sea coast
and in the north and northeast, the primary agricultural region.
Farmers depend strongly on year-to-year rainfall, as two thirds of
the cultivated land in Syria is rain fed, but the remainder relies
upon irrigation and groundwater (11). For those farms without
access to irrigation canals linked to river tributaries, pumped
groundwater supplies over half (60%) of all water used for irrigation purposes, and this groundwater has become increasingly
limited as extraction has been greatly overexploited (4). The
government attempted to stem the rate of groundwater depletion
by enacting a law in 2005 requiring a license to dig wells, but the
legislation was not enforced (6). Overuse of groundwater has
been blamed for the recent drying of the Khabur River in Syria?s
northeast (6). The depletion of groundwater during the recent
drought is clearly evident from remotely sensed data by the
NASA Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE)
Tellus project (Fig. 2C) (12).
The reduced supply of groundwater dramatically increased
Syria?s vulnerability to drought. When a severe drought began in
2006/2007, the agricultural system in the northeastern ?breadbasket? region, which typically produced over two-thirds of the
country?s crop yields, collapsed (13). In 2003, before the
drought?s onset, agriculture accounted for 25% of Syrian gross
domestic product. In 2008, after the driest winter in Syria?s observed record, wheat production failed and the agricultural share
fell to 17% (14). Small- and medium-scale farmers and herders
Significance
There is evidence that the 2007-2010 drought contributed to
the conflict in Syria. It was the worst drought in the instrumental record, causing widespread crop failure and a mass
migration of farming families to urban centers. Century-long
observed trends in precipitation, temperature, and sea-level
pressure, supported by climate model results, strongly suggest
that anthropogenic forcing has increased the probability of severe and persistent droughts in this region, and made the occurrence of a 3-year drought as severe as that of 2007-2010
2 to 3 times more likely than by natural variability alone. We
conclude that human influences on the climate system are
implicated in the current Syrian conflict.
Author contributions: C.P.K., S.M., M.A.C., R.S., and Y.K. designed research; C.P.K. performed research; C.P.K., S.M., M.A.C., R.S., and Y.K. analyzed data; and C.P.K., S.M., M.A.C.,
R.S., and Y.K. wrote the paper.
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.
1
To whom correspondence should be addressed. Email: [email protected].
This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.
1073/pnas.1421533112/-/DCSupplemental.
PNAS | March 17, 2015 | vol. 112 | no. 11 | 3241?3246
ENVIRONMENTAL
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Before the Syrian uprising that began in 2011, the greater Fertile
Crescent experienced the most severe drought in the instrumental
record. For Syria, a country marked by poor governance and unsustainable agricultural and environmental policies, the drought
had a catalytic effect, contributing to political unrest. We show
that the recent decrease in Syrian precipitation is a combination of
natural variability and a long-term drying trend, and the unusual
severity of the observed drought is here shown to be highly unlikely
without this trend. Precipitation changes in Syria are linked to rising
mean sea-level pressure in the Eastern Mediterranean, which also
shows a long-term trend. There has been also a long-term warming
trend in the Eastern Mediterranean, adding to the drawdown of soil
moisture. No natural cause is apparent for these trends, whereas
the observed drying and warming are consistent with model studies
of the response to increases in greenhouse gases. Furthermore,
model studies show an increasingly drier and hotter future mean
climate for the Eastern Mediterranean. Analyses of observations and
model simulations indicate that a drought of the severity and
duration of the recent Syrian drought, which is implicated in the
current conflict, has become more than twice as likely as
a consequence of human interference in the climate system.
EARTH, ATMOSPHERIC,
AND PLANETARY SCIENCES
Edited by Brian John Hoskins, Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom, and approved January 30, 2015 (received for review November 16, 2014)
Fig. 1. (A) Six-month winter (November-April mean) Syria area mean precipitation, using CRU3.1 gridded data. (B) CRU annual near-surface temperature (red
shading indicates recent persistence above the long-term normal). (C) Annual self-calibrating Palmer Drought Severity Index. (D) Syrian total midyear population. Based on the area mean of the FC as defined by the domain 30.5?N?41.5?N, 32.5?E?50.5?E (as shown in Fig. 2). Linear least-squares fits from 1931 to
2008 are shown in red, time means are shown as dashed lines, gray shading denotes low station density, and brown shading indicates multiyear (=3) droughts.
suffered from zero or near-zero production, and nearly all of their
livestock herds were lost (15). For the first time since self-sufficiency in wheat was declared in the mid-1990s, Syria was forced to
import large quantities of wheat (13). The drought?s devastating
impact on vegetation is clearly evident in Moderate Resolution
Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) Normalized Difference
Vegetative Index (NDVI) version 5 satellite imagery (Fig. 2D)
(16). Atieh El Hindi, the director of the Syrian National Agricultural Policy Center, has stated that between 2007 and 2008,
drought was a main factor in the unprecedented rise in Syrian food
prices; in this single year, wheat, rice, and feed prices more than
doubled (17, 18). By February of 2010, the price of livestock feed
had increased by three fourths, and the drought nearly obliterated
all herds (16, 19). There was a dramatic increase in nutritionrelated diseases among children in the northeast provinces
(20), and enrollment in schools dropped by as much as 80% as
many families left the region (21). Bashar al-Assad, who succeeded his father in 2000, shifted to liberalizing the economy by
cutting the fuel and food subsidies on which many Syrians had
become dependent. These cuts continued despite the drought,
further destabilizing the lives of those affected (22). Rural
Syria?s heavy year-to-year reliance on agricultural production
left it unable to outlast a severe prolonged drought, and a mass
migration of rural farming families to urban areas ensued.
Estimates of the number of people internally displaced by the
drought are as high as 1.5 million (3, 4, 13). Most migrated to the
peripheries of Syria?s cities, already burdened by strong population growth (~2.5% per year) and the influx of an estimated
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1.2?1.5 million Iraqi refugees between 2003 and 2007, many of
whom arrived toward the tail end of this time frame at the beginning of the drought and remained in Syria (23). By 2010, internally
displaced persons (IDPs) and Iraqi refugees made up roughly 20%
of Syria?s urban population. The total urban population of Syria in
2002 was 8.9 million but, by the end of 2010, had grown to 13.8
million, a more than 50% increase in only 8 years, a far greater
rate than for the Syrian population as a whole (Fig. 1D) (24). The
population shock to Syria?s urban areas further increased the
strain on its resources (11).
The rapidly growing urban peripheries of Syria, marked by
illegal settlements, overcrowding, poor infrastructure, unemployment, and crime, were neglected by the Assad government and
became the heart of the developing unrest (13). Thus, the migration in response to the severe and prolonged drought exacerbated a number of the factors often cited as contributing to the
unrest, which include unemployment, corruption, and rampant
inequality (23). The conflict literature supports the idea that rapid
demographic change encourages instability (25?27). Whether it
was a primary or substantial factor is impossible to know, but
drought can lead to devastating consequences when coupled with
preexisting acute vulnerability, caused by poor policies and unsustainable land use practices in Syria?s case and perpetuated by
the slow and ineffective response of the Assad regime (13). Fig. S1
presents a timeline summarizing the events that preceded the
Syrian uprising.
Kelley et al.
Regional Climate Variability and Trend
Agriculture in Syria depends not only on the precipitation that
falls within Syria and on local groundwater but also on water
from the Euphrates and Tigris rivers and their numerous tributaries.
Kelley et al.
PNAS | March 17, 2015 | vol. 112 | no. 11 | 3243
EARTH, ATMOSPHERIC,
AND PLANETARY SCIENCES
The Drought in Context
Having established Syria?s vulnerability to droughts, we now examine the 2007?2010 drought itself. The severity and persistence
of the drought can be seen in the area mean of FC rainfall
according to the University of East Anglia Climatic Research
Unit (UEA CRU) data (Fig. 1A) and in the two Global Historical
Climatology Network (GHCN) stations located closest to Syria?s
northeastern agricultural region, Deir ez-Zor on the Euphrates
River and Kamishli near the Turkish border (Materials and
Methods). The 2007/2008 winter was easily the driest in the observed records. Multiyear drought episodes, here defined as three
or more consecutive years of rainfall below the century-long
normal, occurred periodically over the last 80 years (CRU), in the
late 1950s, 1980s, and 1990s (Fig. 1A, brown shading). Although
less severe, these droughts raise the question of why the effects of
the recent drought were so much more dramatic. We offer three
reasons: (i) the recent demand for available resources was disproportionately larger than in the 1950s; in addition to the recent
emphasis on agricultural production, the total population of
Syria (Fig. 1D) grew from 4 million in the 1950s to 22 million in
recent years; (ii) the decline in the supply of groundwater has
depleted the buffer against years with low rainfall; and (iii) the
recent drought occurred shortly after the 1990s drought, which
was also severe; Syria was far more vulnerable to a severe drought
in the first decade of the 21st century than in the 1950s, and the FC
never fully recovered from the late 1990s drought before collapsing
again into severe drought. In fact, the region has been in moderate
to severe drought from 1998 through 2009, with 7 of 11 years receiving rainfall below the 1901?2008 normal. It is notable that three
of the four most severe multiyear droughts have occurred in the last
25 years, the period during which external anthropogenic forcing
has seen its largest increase.
ENVIRONMENTAL
SCIENCES
Fig. 2. (A) Observed winter (November-April) precipitation climatology,
1931?2008, UEA CRU version 3.1 data. (B) The spatial pattern of the CRU
change in 6-month winter precipitation from 1931 to 2008 based on
a linear fit (shading); those GHCN stations that indicate a significant (P < 0.1)
trend over their respective records are shown as circles and crosses (indicating drying/wetting). (C) The difference in liquid water equivalent (LWE)
between 2008 (annual) and the mean of the previous 6 years using the NASA
GRACE Tellus project data. (D) The difference in the Normalized Difference
Vegetation Index (NDVI) between 2008 (annual) and the mean of the previous
7 years.
These rivers have long provided water to the region via precipitation
in their headwaters in the mountains of eastern Turkey. Despite
Turkey?s control over the water flows of the Euphrates and Tigris
through its upstream placements of dams, Syria and Turkey have
cooperated in recent years, and Turkey increased water flow to
Syria during the recent drought (28). It has been previously
shown that natural winter-to-winter rainfall variability in western
Turkey is due largely to the influence of the North Atlantic
Oscillation (NAO) (29). For eastern Turkey and in Syria and
the other FC countries, however, the NAO influence is weak
or insignificant. This has allowed observational analyses to identify
an externally forced winter drying trend over the latter half of
the 20th century that is distinguishable from natural variability
(30?32). Furthermore, global coupled climate models overwhelmingly agree that this region will become drier in the future
as greenhouse gas concentrations rise (33), and a study using
a high-resolution model able to resolve the complex orography of
the region concluded that the FC, as such, is likely to disappear by
the end of the 21st century as a result of anthropogenic climate
change (34).
That the neighboring regions of southeast Turkey and northern
Iraq also experienced recent drought, to a lesser extent, perhaps
begs the question as to why the effects in Syria were so grave.
Syria was far more vulnerable to drought, given its stronger dependence on year-to-year rainfall and declining groundwater for
agriculture. Water scarcity in Syria has been far more severe than
in Turkey or Iraq, with Syria?s total annual water withdrawal as a
percentage of internal renewable water resources reaching 160%,
with Iraq at 80% and Turkey at around 20% in 2011 (35). Furthermore, Turkey?s geographic diversity and investment in the
southeast region?s irrigation allowed it to better buffer the drought,
whereas the populace in northwest Iraq is far less dependent on
agriculture than their counterparts in northeast Syria (36, 37).
To address the question of whether the recent drought was
made more severe by a contribution from long-term trends, we
first determined the long-term change in winter rainfall. The FC
as a whole has experienced a statistically significant (P < 0.05)
winter rainfall reduction (13%) since 1931 (Fig. 1A). Observational uncertainty was large before 1930 due to sparseness of
station data. Further examination of the linear trends present in
the individual GHCN stations for the FC corroborate the drying
trend, as 5 of 25 stations exhibited a statistically significant (P <
0.1) negative rainfall trend (Fig. 2B). The pattern of this trend
(Fig. 2B) is similar to the climatological rainfall pattern (Fig. 2A),
concentrated along the coast and in northeastern Syria. The longterm drying trend is closely mirrored by recent changes in satellite
measurements of groundwater (measured in terms of liquid water
equivalent) (Fig. 2C) and, to a lesser extent, by estimates of vegetation changes (Fig. 2D).
The annual surface temperature in the FC also increased significantly (P < 0.01) during the 20th century (Fig. 1B). The warming
in this region since 1901 has outpaced the increase in global
mean surface temperature, with much of this increase occurring
over the last 20 years (all years from 1994 through 2009 were
above the century-long mean) (Fig. 1B, red shading). The trend
during the summer half year (1.2 degrees, Fig. S2) is also important, as this is the season of highest evaporation, and winter crops
such as wheat are strongly dependent on reserves of soil moisture.
Reductions in winter precipitation and increases in summer
evaporation both reduce the excess of precipitation over evaporation that sustains soil moisture, groundwater and streamflow.
The recent strong warming is concomitant with the three most
recent severe multiyear droughts, together serving to strongly dry
the region during winter and summer.
The century-long, statistically significant trends in both precipitation and temperature seen in Fig. 1 suggest anthropogenic
influence and contributed to the severity of the recent drought.
The FC area mean of the self-calibrating Palmer Drought Severity
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57
47
1930
1950
1970
B
1990
2, 5, 10% quantiles
(of total)
mm/month
total
CO2 fit
residual
37
probability
Frequency of Multiyear Droughts
For Syria and for the greater FC, natural multiyear droughts?
here defined as three or more consecutive years of rainfall below
the long-term normal?occurred periodically during the 20th
century (Fig. 1A). It is a generic property of a time series consisting of a natural oscillatory part and a downward trend that
the minimum is most likely to occur toward the end of the time
period when the negative influence of the trend is greatest and
when the oscillation is also at a minimum. The century-long
trends in precipitation and temperature, here implicated as evidence of anthropogenic influence, point toward them being key
contributors to the recent severe drought. We therefore estimated the increased likelihood of an extreme 3-year drought
such as the recent one due to anthropogenic trend.
We did this in two ways. First we separated the observed anthropogenic precipitation trend from the residual, presumably
natural, variability by regressing the running 3-year mean of observed (CRU) 6-month winter precipitation onto the running
3-year mean of observed annual global atmospheric carbon dioxide
(CO2) mixing ratios from 1901?2008 (39, 40). The latter time
series was used as an estimate of the monotonic but nonlinear
change in total greenhouse gas forcing (Materials and Methods).
After removing the CO2 fit from the total observed winter precipitation timeseries (Fig. 3A), we constructed frequency distributions of the total and residual timeseries (Fig. 3B) and
applied gamma fits to the distributions. The difference in the
total and residual distributions is significant (P < 0.06), based on
a Kolmogorov-Smirnoff test, and is due almost entirely to the
difference in the means. Thresholds are shown at 10%, 5%, and
2% (in percent of the total sample size of 76 3-year means) in the
dry tail for the timeseries (Fig. 3A) and for the distribution of the
total (Fig. 3B). The result is that, when combined, natural variability and CO2 forcing are 2 to 3 times more likely to produce
the most severe 3-year droughts than natural variability alone.
Residual, or natural, events exceeding the 10% threshold of the
total occur less than half as often (3 versus 8, out of 76). For the
residual alone, no values exceed the 5% threshold of the total.
The trend contribution would be quite similar if we simply
calculated a linear time trend. There is no apparent natural explanation for the trend, supporting the attribution to anthropogenic greenhouse gases. Further support comes from model
simulations. We used 16 Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase five (CMIP5) models (Materials and Methods and
Table S1) to construct similar distributions, providing a larger
sample size than for the observed 3-year droughts. In this case,
rather than removing the CO2 forcing as in the observed case, we
compare the historical and historicalNat runs. The former include all external forcings during the 20th century, including the
change in greenhouse gas concentrations, whereas the latter include only the natural forcings (Materials and Methods). In this
analysis, the models were normalized to the observed CRU mean
and standard deviation (SD) (see Fig. S3 for model comparison
before normalizing). The resulting distributions support the observed finding, as the driest 3-year events occur less than half as
often under natural forcing (historicalNat runs) alone (Fig. 3C).
The agreement between the model and observational analysis
Three-year running means of Fertile Crescent precipitation
(six-month winters, Nov-Apr)
A
2010
residual (CO2 removed)
total (including CO2)
CRU observed clim. 1931-2008
2, 5 and 10% quantiles (of total)
total(%).
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