Putting the life back in science fiction

Not that I’m an expert on foreign policy or Syria (there’s someone with the same last name who is. We’re not related). The one thing I do understand, a little bit, is water politics, and that’s may well be one of the important drivers of the Syrian civil war. As Mark Twain said, “Whiskey’s for drinking, water’s for fighting over.” And good Muslims won’t drink whiskey. Since I’m interested in the deep future with climate change, this might be a portrait of things to come for other parts of the world, including where I live in the southwestern US.

Here’s the issue: between 2006 and 2011, the eastern 60 percent of Syria experienced “the worst long-term drought and most severe set of crop failures since agricultural civilizations began in the Fertile Crescent many millennia ago,” forcing 200,000 Syrians off the land (out of 22 million total in Syria) and causing them to abandon 160 towns entirely (source). In one region in 2007-2008, 75% of farmers suffered total crop failure, while herders in the northeast lost up to 85% of their flocks, which affected 1.3 million people (source). Assad’s policies exacerbated the problem. His administration subsidized for water-intensive crops like wheat and cotton, and promoted bad irrigation techniques (source. I’m still looking for a description of what those bad irrigation techniques were.).

These refugees moved to cities like Damascus, which were already dealing with over a million refugees from Iraq and Palestine. They dug 25,000 illegal wells around Damascus, lowering the water table and increasing groundwater salinity (source). The revolt in 2011 broke out in southern Daraa and northeast Kamishli, two of the driest parts of the country, and reportedly, Al Qaeda affiliates are most active in the driest regions of the country (source).

One thing that worsened the problem was Turkey. The Tigris, Euphrates, and Orantes Rivers flow out of Kurdistan in Turkey into Syria. Turkey, in a bid to modernize the Kurdish region, built 22 dams on these rivers up to 2010 in the Southeastern Anatolia Project. They’ve taken half the water out of the Euphrates, and used it to grow large amounts of cotton within Anatolia, doubling or trebling local income in that traditionally rebellious area.

So is drought destiny? Experts caution that it’s not that simple (source). In 2012, the American Midwest suffered a record drought, While that may have led to Tea Party outbursts in the 2012 elections, it didn’t lead to armed insurrection. (As an aside, you can figure out how well the drought map correlates with the 2012 Presidential election map. Washington might one day take note of this…). Still, when you couple drought, poverty, bad governance, and a witch’s brew of historical grievances and systemic injustice, drought can cause a civil war.

There are a couple of big problems here. The first is that the US didn’t see the revolt coming. Right up until the first protests started, they thought that Syria was immune to the Arab Spring (source). This isn’t all that surprising. Due to the War on Terror, the CIA and other agencies work closely with government intelligence agencies to hunt terrorists (source), and have little or no intelligence capability to learn what’s happening on the “Arab Street.” This led to the US missing the Arab Spring movement pretty much in its entirety. The US military has been talking about climate change for years, and they’re starting to get serious about preparing to deal with it (source), but they don’t seem to have a functional reporting system yet, let alone a good way to respond. To put it bluntly, no one in Washington or other capitals seems to watching things like water supplies, crop reports, rural migration to cities, or even the price of bread. Or if they are, they’re not being listened to. Spikes in bread prices throughout North Africa helped prepare the ground for the Arab Spring uprisings, and the region is still a major wheat importer (source).

The second problem is that, so far, our leaders haven’t officially acknowledged that water’s a problem. Basically, during the drought, Syrian per capita water dropped by almost half. While a lot of this could be returned by better management, growing different crops, convincing people not to eat bread in the place where wheat was first farmed, and so forth, there are probably too many people relative to the water supply, at least during droughts. Part of this is demographics. The population of the Middle East has quadrupled over the last 60 years, and the water supply, if anything, has shrunk (source). The brutal answer is to get rid of those people, which may be one reason why Assad was so willing to use chemical weapons. There are 1.851 million registered Syrian refugees at the moment, and that’s about one percent of the population outside the country. Assad (and whoever follows him) may not be interested in having them return, either. Syria likely would be more stable with fewer thirsty mouths.

What’s the solution? One important part is to get water on the negotiating table. Turkey officially helps Syria with water flows, but it’s not clear how diverting half a river is a friendly gesture, and the two countries are not on good diplomatic terms. If the Turks are using the Euphrates to water cotton, most of that water is lost to the air, rather than flowing back into the river where Syria can get it. Turkey could help stabilize Syria by letting more water out of its dams, but by doing so, it would risk insurrection in Kurdistan, so I don’t think they will voluntarily give up that water. Since Turkey’s water sources are secure for the moment, I suspect that quite a few Syrians are going to be resettling there, just as Iraqis and Palestinians are (or were) living in Damascus. More countries should volunteer to permanently take in Syrian refugees, especially in the north (as Sweden has). Why not? It increases populations in areas that are experiencing population decreases due to low birth rates, and it’s cheaper than trying to fight in the Middle East. Moving people to where there’s water is much less cruel than interring them in refugee camps in border deserts with inadequate resources and no hope.

One of the problems with climate change is that the northern edges of deserts are forecast to get drier, and the Middle East and the Mediterranean basin are one of those edges. If we want to avoid continual unrest in that region, it’s high time we all (in the international sense) start financing regional desalination plants in the Middle East and other dry areas. This has worked to secure water for Israel. Granted, it’s an energy intensive solution, but a large-scale desalination plant is cheaper than a single day of all-out ground war, US style (source).

The other lesson here is that politics and politicians matter. Drought isn’t necessarily destiny, but bad water management choices can turn a chronic problem of scarce resources into a bloody war. If you want to know why I’m not a libertarian, this is why. It’s nice to have liberty, but it’s necessary to have water. Good politicians work to get you enough of both, and we need more of them at the moment.