The Syrian crisis: the cause is more than "political economy"

A paper from 2013 called "Did Drought Trigger The Crisis In Syria?" is useful, but as is often the case for authors with a background in political science and economics, they see only part of the spectrum. The paper usefully describes policies which heightened inequality and which also increased irrigation, including from groundwater extraction, but the authors are especially blind to limits to growth, including demographic factors. 

Risk multiplication vs political economy: is there a pre-eminent cause?

The paper acknowledges that "invoking drought as a destabilizing force in Syria is intuitively appealing" but that if "terms such as ‘stressor’ or ‘threat multiplier’ are applied to drought, shifting rainfall patterns, floods, and other environmental events in the Middle East they often obscure rather than illuminate the causes of uprisings and political change. There is perhaps no better illustration of this dynamic than Syria, where a closer examination shows that government policy helped construct vulnerability to the effects of the drought during the 2000s."

Further: " When one delves into the details, drought as an external factor recedes and political economy takes center stage."

Political economy is usefully defined here as "the study of how those in power structure access to economic resources".

How can political economy be disentangled from the environment?

My fundamental criticism is that the paper refuses to accept the "risk multiplier" concept. Elsewhere, one of the authors has argued: "The environment is a quintessentially human category and susceptible to adaptation, not an external variable that mechanically triggers socio-political consequences." Sure, the environment is not an external actor, but it is surely an external variable to which people react. Also, how can something such as a drought be  a quintessentially human category?

In any case, I argue that the dysfunctional political economy is part of the milieu in which the drought interacted. Would the conflict have occurred so early, with abundant rain?

Eco-social tipping points

Secondly, the article does mention that the population of Syria was growing rapidly in recent decades. It does state "Before climate change was a commonly employed term, political rulers in the region faced dwindling per capita water resources, desertification, deforestation, soil salinity, and the like." However, I have long argued, there are thresholds of scarcity which matter .. societies, even poorly managed, can cope with declining per capita resources ... to a point.

Third – there is no hint of understanding of the demographic dividend, nor that an under-appreciated aspect of limits to growth is that co-operation is also not infinite.

PS There are many analyses of the Syrian conflict which are more balanced than the one which provoked this blog, such as Syria: Climate Change, Drought and Social Unrest

The curious silence about “eco-social" tipping points

This is adapted from a section of "Sounding the Alarm: Health in the Anthropocene" (Butler, C. D. (2016).  International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 13: 665; doi:610.3390/ijerph13070665.)

There is an increasing literature about environmental (or ecological) tipping points and it is intuitively obvious to some that sufficient environmental change will inevitably induce, or be accompanied by, large-scale social change. However, despite this intuitive attraction, there is comparatively little recent scientific literature on this subject, particularly in association with the Anthropocene, Earth system science, Planetary Boundaries, and Limits to Growth, though it is implicit. For example, the subtitle of the Planetary Boundaries articles is a “safe operating space” not for the Earth system, but for “humanity”.

If the environment changes sufficiently, can society remain largely unaffected?

This reticence appears in part be a reaction against “environmental determinism”, the largely shunned idea, first formulated in the 18th century, that many social and historical phenomena are influenced (even “controlled”) by environmental factors and changes. It is thus important to stress that social changes in response to major environmental shifts are not inevitable, but may occur. The concept is of importance if Limits to Growth and Planetary Boundaries are valid, because it means, beyond thresholds, such changes increase the risk to society, to health and, especially, to those who are poor  and vulnerable.

Extreme interpretations in the other direction (i.e., that environmental determinants are irrelevant to human well-being) not only violate the precautionary principle but appear ideological. But, of course, relationships are not simple, nor always inevitable. Eco-social tipping points may exist, but they can be avoided.

The rest is not adapted, and is previously unpublished:

Chinese sensitivities

There is a second reason for tabooing this idea. Curiously, it too relates to environmental determinism. When I was working (in 2015) on the health section of the Regional Assessment for the Asia Pacific, for the United Nations Environment Programme's Environmental Outlook, a reviewer asked me to mention how social inequalities contribute to poor health. In response, I inserted about two short sentences, with some examples from the Asia Pacific  - for example the discrimination faced by Indigenous people in Australia, the Rohingya in Myanmar, the Buddhist and Hindu minorities in Bangladesh, the dalits in India, and the Tibetans and Uighurs in China. But, this did not survive in the published report. A subsequent reviewer, who (unsurprisingly) was Chinese, censored this, claiming the report should only consider environmental determinants. In other words, this reviewer was saying, the physical environment should not be considered as interacting with society.

This is absurd; only has to think of the umbrage the Chinese have taken following Donald Trump's phone conversation with President Tsai Ing-wen of Taiwan. Almost all disputes, including wars, concern at their heart, tangible (environmental) factors, such as money, land, water and food. Yet, this link with physical factors is often downplayed and sometimes frankly denied.

The existence of the concept of eco-social tipping points (eg in Syria, Yemen, Burundi, Rwanda, Sudan) is important, because it thus follows that there are limits to physical growth, and that humans need to co-operate, on a global scale, if we are to survive as an advanced civilization.

Signs of impending social collapse and what we can do

A version of this is to be published by the Frank Fenner Foundation.

The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) has published, in late September 2016, a paper called Anticipating societal collapse; Hints from the Stone Age. This repeats speculation that the Syrian conflict has in part been triggered by the worst drought in the Fertile Crescent in its instrumental record, and it lists several mechanisms for why societies can sometime be so slow to take evasive action that collapse becomes inevitable. 

One of these is called the “sunk-cost effect” – essentially, people have invested so much effort and time in something that once worked, that they keep on with the same approach, even though it is like sending more money after bad. A second is the “bystander effect.” We are herd creatures and behave like those around us. A third is that elites have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, thus blocking change – this mechanism surely is easy to see today, in modern Australia and elsewhere.

The paper reviews evidence that science can increasingly detect incipient collapse (by finding evidence of falling “resilience”) and concludes by suggesting that science and big data be used to scan the globe for empirical indicators of such declines, in the hope that this will finally shift society’s behaviour. That seems reasonable, but evidence alone will not be enough to overcome either the sunk-cost effect or to convert predatory human elites into benevolent change agents. Furthermore, does one really needs big science to sense that resilience is in decline – is not the massive increase in global refugee numbers sufficient evidence of a major problem?

Much of my own academic work (since 1991) has been relevant to social collapse. In particular, I have been making the case that if societies collapse then this will do immense harm to public health. Therefore, public health and medicine more broadly would be well served – indeed they have a duty of care – to  recognise these issues and to try to prevent collapse. The bystander effect could switch from a liability to an asset – humans can change their collective behaviour, not only to do harm (e.g. by going to war) but to transform society in ways that mean civilisation can survive, e.g. by switching to clean energy, eating less meat, and establishing a fairer, more bio-sensitive world.

In the last three months I have published two more articles about these topics, called Sounding the Alarm: Health in the Anthropocene and Planetary overload, limits to growth and health. They are both open access. I welcome any comments.

Injustice and conflict in the Anthropocene

The Anthropocene is accelerating towards an eco-social tipping point beyond which lies either recovery or civilizational collapse. Environmental and other forms of injustice are no longer local, and no longer restricted to ethnic and religious minorities, together with the economically vulnerable. Though modern and future injustice still particularly affects these groups, the descendants of people who today lead comfortable, reasonably secure lives as part of the global middle class (or second “claste”) are vulnerable to a constellation of cascading, interlinked, and potentially catastrophic phenomena, unfolding during this century.

The attacks on the US on September 11, 2001 are, so far, the most prominent events in a “War on Terror” which today appears endless. This “War” is related not only to the increasing proximity of planetary boundaries but to global policies which either ignore or deny the significance of their closeness. In turn, recognition of these issues is slowed by numerous social factors, including multi-scalar inequality, high population growth in low-income settings (further prolonging, or even deepening poverty traps and inequality) and a pervasive lack of sufficient “biosensitivity”. In particular, too many economists naively believe that different forms of capital are more or less fully substitutable.

Ongoing, piecemeal disintegration of the high quality, quasi-global civilization that once appeared in reach (long promised by adherents of eco-socially juvenile policies) towards an “enclave” world that in some ways mimics the Dark Ages should not be dismissed as an absurd future, given recent trends including of conflict. The war in Syria is arguably related to a drying climate, worsened by poor governance. It has in turn fuelled a spreading Islamist insurgency, powered not only by the policies of nominally Christian governments but by a steady inflow of international youth, motivated by what seems to many of them to be hypocrisy. (Missiles fired from a drone over Pakistan controlled by an operatorin Colorado can also be interpreted as acts of terror.)

Debates over the fine details of pathways to conflict have distracted policy makers (and many academics) from recognition of their major underlying eco-social drivers, including of “terrorism”. Some social factors are recognized, but environmental and ecological drivers (other than, partly, oil) are not; and the interconnections and feedbacks even less so. This leads to piecemeal, ultimately fruitless attempts to suppress terrorism rather than to promote the factors which will instead lead to its pacification. Recognition of such factors is urgently required if we are to avoid collapse.

This abstract was rejected in April 2015 by the Canberra Conference on Earth System Governance. Not sure why - was my language too frank? Nonetheless,  senior politicians (eg Senator John Kerry) are increasingly recognising links between drought and conflict.  We also recently published a paper called Climate change, conflict and health in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine.