Is Climate Change Behind the Mass Migration from the Middle East?

There are a myriad of complex reasons behind the current strife that is unfolding in the Middle East. The refugee crisis facing Europe has been the subject of mainstream media for many months – but now, it appears there may be an unexpected contributing factor to its development.

According to a study conducted by NASA, the area has been affected by its most serious drought in almost a millennium – which could be in part to blame for the mass exodus of civilians from the Levant region.

The Worse Drought in 900 Years

 The political problems in Syria have been well-documented, but what may have slipped under most people’s radars are the simultaneous meteorological problems it has been experiencing. Along with other surrounding countries, such as Turkey, Lebanon, Cyprus, Israel and Jordan, the nation has been in the throes of a mega-drought which can be traced back all the way to 1998.

It’s the first time that a drought in the Middle East has endured for more than 15 years for over 900 years. It’s also an even drier drought than any others in that time period by quite a significant margin. “The range of how extreme wet or dry periods were is quite broad, but the recent drought in the Levant region stands out as about 50% drier than the driest period in the past 500 years, and 10%-20% drier than the worst drought of the past 900 years,” explained a NASA statement.

As a result, it’s only natural that people living on the affected land would have their livelihoods and even their very lives jeopardised. Year after year, the repeated failures of crops and the increasing frequency of dust storms have led to widespread disillusionment with life in the Middle East and the natural need to seek refuge elsewhere. New technologies, such as large-scale evapotranspiration measurement can help to quantify the problem and further knowledge of how to alleviate it, but do little to negate it entirely.

Since both the eastern and western areas of the region are similarly affected, the adverse conditions can lead to dispute amongst nations. When lives are at stake, tempers can inflame and tensions boil over. As such, the drought can be seen as a contributing factor to the current political issues in the Levant region, which in turn has led to mass migration to Europe.

Climate Change Behind the Drought?

Weather monitoring – especially in relation to climate change – has been a common scientific pursuit for many years now, though the technique used in the NASA study is quite a singular one. By analysing the rings on trees, scientists are able to determine how much water it has been consuming and how conducive the conditions were to its growth and nourishment. In this manner, they were able to determine that the current drought differs from those recorded over the last 900 years.

The fact that the drought is significantly worse than any other experienced in the region in the best part of a thousand years points to the idea that climate change caused by human activity is behind it. As Ben Cook (lead author on the paper) explains, “If we look at recent events and we start to see anomalies that are outside this range of natural variability, then we can say with some confidence that it looks like this particular event or this series of events had some kind of human caused climate change contribution.”