Key Findings:
Syria's civil war cannot be traced to a single environmental cause but is deeply rooted in policy and socioeconomic failures that increased agricultural vulnerability.
The 2007-2009 drought caused a temporary spike in fallow land, but the agricultural sector rebounded quickly the following year.
19% of Syrian cropland was abandoned between 2001 and 2016 due to a mix of political, socioeconomic, and environmental changes rather than drought alone.
Rapid expansion of water-intensive agriculture followed by abrupt subsidy cuts eroded farmers' resilience and amplified vulnerability to drought.
Migration before the war was primarily internal and temporary, serving as an adaptive economic strategy rather than a permanent flight.
The onset of conflict in 2011 shifted migration patterns from adaptive labor movements to forced, external displacement driven by insecurity.
Satellite imagery proves that cropland activity rebounded to a near-record high in 2010, covering approximately 90% of cultivable land just one year before the war began
Richmond Hill, Ontario, Canada – 18 December 2026: The Syrian civil war, which began in 2011, has been widely framed as a "climate conflict" and a mass migration and uprising triggered by a severe drought mass migration and uprising. This very well-known and media-popular narrative is now debunked in the new report by the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH).
By looking at historical land-use changes and migration patterns, the report argues that what caused the collapse of Syrian rural livelihoods was indeed a systemic failure in governance not an environmental stressor. By looking at satellite data and interviewing the affected farmers, the authors were able to better understand the root causes and the trajectories of events, revealing that the seeds of crisis were sown long before the 2007-2009 drought.
The report " The Drought-Migration-Conflict Nexus: Was the Syrian Civil War Really Caused by Climate Change? " dismantles the popular "climate war" theory. It shows that while a meteorological drought in Syria was a reality, the mass abandonment of farmland was an economic disaster engineered by years of maladaptive policies. The analysis shows that 19% of cropland was abandoned between 2001 and 2016, a structural collapse that began well before the 2007-2009 drought, driven by deep inequities and sudden subsidy cuts that left the poorest farmers defenseless.
"We found that migration before the war was a common adaptation strategy among rural residents, even during years with no drought. Blaming the lack of rain ignores the political decisions that stripped farmers of their safety nets" said Dr. Lina Eklund , a Research Fellow in Environmental Security, Conflict and Migration at UNU-INWEH and the Lead author of the report. "The data shows that while the drought was severe, the agricultural system actually recovered after the drought. It was the combination of conflict and long-term mismanagement that led people to leave their lands."
The report challenges the widely held belief that the 2007–2009 drought caused an immediate agricultural collapse that triggered the 2011 uprising. Contrary to the "collapse" narrative, satellite imagery proves the agricultural sector was surprisingly resilient: cropland activity rebounded to a near-record high in 2010, covering approximately 90% of cultivable land just one year before the war began. However, this recovery masked a deep fracture between "winners and losers." While state-backed irrigation continued in privileged areas, smallholder farmers in the rain-fed Northeast faced a perfect storm when fuel and fertilizer subsidies were removed in 2008 and 2009, tripling the cost of irrigation diesel overnight.
The study finds that pre-war migration was largely internal and circular, acting as a traditional coping mechanism for economic survival. It was only after 2011, driven by the violence of the civil war, that migration shifted from an adaptive strategy to forced, permanent displacement with little chance of return. In contrast, regions with better water governance, such as parts of neighboring Türkiye, mitigated similar climate stresses, illustrating stark disparities between low- and high-income contexts.
The report identifies a complex web of barriers that exacerbated the crisis, rooted primarily in unsustainable agricultural dependencies and governance failures rather than environmental factors alone. Decades of state policies promoting water-intensive crops like cotton and wheat depleted groundwater reserves, creating a "socio-economic drought" that persisted even when rains returned. This vulnerability was compounded by an abrupt transition to a 'social market economy,' where the slashing of safety nets and removal of subsidies left farmers in the Northeast with no financial buffer against climatic shocks. Ultimately, the study confirms that the conflict itself became the dominant driver of displacement, destroying infrastructure and preventing the return to abandoned lands, thereby cementing the crisis beyond the reach of agricultural recovery.
"This report is a wake-up call for the intelligence and security communities with interest in water, environment and climate. Labelling complex geopolitical crises simply as 'climate wars' lets bad governance off the hook," said Professor Kaveh Madani , Director of UNU-INWEH. "Reductionist narratives and conspiracy theories based on simple correlations can create a lot of media buzz, but they miss the complex causal relationships that must be understood to achieve stability, security and justice. We cannot solve the water-related national security problems by only looking at the sky; instead, we need to fix the systems that decide who gets water and who goes thirsty."
Read the Publication:
von der Kammer, R., Dinc, P., & Eklund, L. (2025). The Drought-Migration-Conflict Nexus: Was the Syrian Civil War Really Caused by Climate Change? United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health. doi: 10.53328/INR25LER002
