More than four years after the start of the Syrian civil war, the familiar narrative of the conflict’s beginning, in the midst of the contagion surrounding the Arab Spring of 2010-2011, has been woven into news reports, scholarly articles, debates, and other explanations of the conflict. Separating the catalyst from the causes, theories emerged linking the eruption of Syria’s war to geopolitics, religion, poverty, and the other usual suspects. New research has, however, looked beyond the traditional explanations of realpolitik and religion-related clashes to embed the conflict in an even more complex chain of causation that implicates climate change as yet another catalyst in the conflict.

Yes, climate change—the ever-looming dinosaur in the room that the international community has failed to act on can no longer be relegated to the realm of tree-huggers and hippies, left for unlucky future generations to cope with. As a recently published article by Kelley et al. in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) demonstrates, the environmental degradation, and the resulting societal damage, is an issue that is already beginning to rear its ugly head.

The article highlights how Syria’s drought from approximately 2007-2010, the worst in recorded history, “exacerbated existing water and agricultural insecurity and caused massive agricultural failures and livestock mortality.” More importantly, however, the authors note that the country’s extended dry spell helped precipitate the mass migration of up to 1.5 million people in Syria from rural areas to the peripheries of urban centres. This, in turn, overburdened these areas—areas that were already heavily strained by the influx of Iraqi refugees in the preceding years.

As a result, the authors note, these areas were “marked by illegal settlements, overcrowding, poor infrastructure, unemployment, and crime, were neglected by the Assad government and became the heart of the developing unrest.” In conjunction with poor agricultural policies on the part of the Assad government, a drier climate likely contributed to the scale and speed of the resulting conflict, though, the article notes, it is difficult to determine degrees of responsibility.

This is not the first time that research has linked climate change to the outbreak of conflict. The civil war-turned-genocide in the Darfur region of western Sudan, too, had researchers connecting the dots between climate change and conflict. A UN Environmental Programme report released in 2007 detailed how the rising ethnic tensions in the region correlated with shifting migratory patterns of Arab nomads, who were forced into the territory of the southern Nuba tribe because of drought. Difficulties resulting from a drier climate included trouble finding sufficient water and food supplies to sustain themselves and their herds.

The report on Darfur warned of the potential for environmental damage and climate change to cause further conflicts with similar dynamics to that in Darfur. Over eight years later, Darfur continues to face serious conflict and instability—it has been in a state of emergency since August of 2014—and the international community continues to fail in implementing any sort of comprehensive climate change legislation to protect against these dangers, as well as the numerous other issues associated with anthropogenic climate change.

As the countdown to the 2015 United Nations Conference on Climate Change in Paris this autumn continues, it is absolutely imperative that world leaders stop bending to the will of wealthy fossil fuel companies and stop prioritizing power and politics over the future viability of the planet. And it is absolutely imperative that we, global citizens, stop allowing them to do so; the stakes are simply too high to do otherwise.

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