The U.S. military predicted some years ago that global warming/climate change would cause food shortages in the Middle East, leading to social unrest. And it has happened.
http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2012/04/08/460221/tom-friedman-on-climate-change-and-the-other-arab-spring/
By Joe Romm on Apr 8, 2012 at 12:14 pm
“The Arab awakening was driven not only by political and economic stresses, but, less visibly, by environmental, population and climate stresses as well. If we focus only on the former and not the latter, we will never be able to help stabilize these societies.”
New York Times columnist Tom Friedman has a terrific column on how climate change has already begun to impact the Middle East — and how it is only going to get much worse if we don’t act soon.
Friedman is one of the few journalists and columnists to win 3 Pulitzers, his first for coverage of the war in Lebanon, then for his coverage of Israel, and finally for commentary on global terrorism. His bestseller From Beirut to Jerusalem won the 1989 U.S. National Book Award for Nonfiction.
He opens today’s column, “The Other Arab Spring,” with some telling details:
ISN’T it interesting that the Arab awakening began in Tunisia with a fruit vendor who was harassed by police for not having a permit to sell food — just at the moment when world food prices hit record highs? And that it began in Syria with farmers in the southern village of Dara’a, who were demanding the right to buy and sell land near the border, without having to get permission from corrupt security officials? And that it was spurred on in Yemen — the first country in the world expected to run out of water — by a list of grievances against an incompetent government, among the biggest of which was that top officials were digging water wells in their own backyards at a time when the government was supposed to be preventing such water wildcatting? As Abdelsalam Razzaz, the minister of water in Yemen’s new government, told Reuters last week: “The officials themselves have traditionally been the most aggressive well diggers. Nearly every minister had a well dug in his house.”
Then he goes on to excerpt an important analysis from the Center for Climate and Security (which I reposted here):
“Syria’s current social unrest is, in the most direct sense, a reaction to a brutal and out-of-touch regime,” write Francesco Femia and Caitlin Werrell, in a report for their Center for Climate and Security in Washington. “However, that’s not the whole story. The past few years have seen a number of significant social, economic, environmental and climatic changes in Syria that have eroded the social contract between citizen and government. … If the international community and future policy makers in Syria are to address and resolve the drivers of unrest in the country, these changes will have to be better explored.”
From 2006-11, they note, up to 60 percent of Syria’s land experienced one of the worst droughts and most severe set of crop failures in its history. “According to a special case study from last year’s Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction, of the most vulnerable Syrians dependent on agriculture, particularly in the northeast governorate of Hassakeh (but also in the south), ‘nearly 75 percent … suffered total crop failure.’ Herders in the northeast lost around 85 percent of their livestock, affecting 1.3 million people.” The United Nations reported that more than 800,000 Syrians had their livelihoods wiped out by these droughts, and many were forced to move to the cities to find work — adding to the burdens of already incompetent government.
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A key point is that it’s now increasingly clear that the climate models that had been predicting the countries surrounding the Mediterranean would start to dry out were correct
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If you ask “what are the real threats to our security today,” said Brown, “at the top of the list would be climate change, population growth, water shortages, rising food prices and the number of failing states in the world. As that list grows, how many failed states before we have a failing global civilization, and everything begins to unravel?”
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