With each passing year, the detrimental effects of climate change are becoming ever more apparent, especially in regions like the Levant. As conditions worsen, they lead to social and economic crises in countries throughout the Levant which have struggled to adapt. Ultimately, climate change threatens U.S. interests in the Levant because it exacerbates instability, heightens social and economic problems, and weakens states’ ability to implement an effective response. 

Background 

The Climate of the Levant Region 

The Levant is a geographic region along the Eastern coast of the Mediterranean and includes Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Israel, and Palestine. Located in a transitional climate zone between North-Atlantic-influenced climate systems and monsoonal-influenced climate systems, the region has an arid to semi-arid climate, meaning it receives relatively little precipitation. Despite this dry climate, the Levant has historically been known as the Fertile Crescent for its rich soil and relatively high access to water, which comes from the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. 

These factors have allowed for high agricultural output in the Levant, which has helped many civilizations flourish over thousands of years. Climate change threatens this agricultural productivity and the humans who depend on it. 

Climate Change 

Climate change refers to long-term shifts in regional or global climate and weather patterns. Though these changes can result from natural processes, today, climate change is primarily driven by human activity. The IPCC notes that there is strong evidence for anthropogenic drivers of climate change, meaning man-made drivers. These include the burning of fossil fuels and other human actions—such as deforestation, increased livestock farming, and the use of fluorinated gasses—that have caused the Earth to warm. Global warming refers to the overall heating of the Earth due to the greenhouse effect, which occurs when greenhouse gasses, such as carbon dioxide, trap heat from the Sun in the Earth’s atmosphere. 

Since the Industrial Revolution, humans have exponentially increased the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to the extent that the Earth is warming at an unprecedented and accelerated rate. As the Earth’s temperature increases on a global level, regional climate systems are affected differently, meaning the climate is changing rather than simply warming.

Man-made global climate change is having and will continue to have many harmful effects. These include sea level rise; more frequent and extreme natural disasters; biodiversity loss; longer, hotter heatwaves and droughts; and changes in precipitation patterns, among others. As the Earth warms, these effects will exacerbate existing economic, social, and political problems. For this reason, climate change is widely considered a threat multiplier—it increases political instability and social upheaval and therefore poses a security risk to humans and governments around the world. 

The Physical Effects of Climate Change in the Levant 

In the Levant, the worst effects of climate change include longer and more severe droughts, desertification, hotter temperatures, decreased rainfall, and more frequent dust storms. These effects are occurring simultaneously today and will only get worse in the future. 

• Drought: According to a NASA study 1998-2012, the Levant region experienced its most severe drought of the past 900 years. During this recent drought, the Levant was 50% drier than at any other point in the past 500 years and 10-20% drier than the driest period during the last nine centuries. Because of climate change, droughts in the Levant and elsewhere globally are expected to be more intense, last longer, and set in quicker. 
• Desertification: The Levant’s dryland ecosystem is extremely susceptible to overexploitation and improper land use. These practices contribute to the region’s desertification—land degradation in arid, semi-arid, and dry sub-humid areas caused by human activities and climatic variations. This process causes reduced crop and livestock productivity, changes in the composition of plant species, and reduced biological diversity. Thus, in the Levant, it will cause a reduction in the amount of land suitable for agriculture. 
• Hotter Temperatures and Worse Heatwaves: Because of climate change, the Levant is expected to experience both increased average temperatures and more intense and longer heatwaves. Climate models predict that temperatures in the Levant will continue to rise, and the region will become increasingly hotter and drier. These climate change effects are already visible throughout the region as countries experience record-breaking heat. When combined with high humidity, extreme heat poses health risks, especially to the elderly and children. 
• Decreased Rainfall and Changing Patterns: Climate change is projected to decrease the average amount of rainfall in the Levant, a region that already does not receive much precipitation. This effect not only poses a problem for regional agriculture, which often relies on rainfall but is also connected to the other environmental problems the region faces. In the past, the Levant’s climate has been characterized by dry summers and more temperate, rainy winters. However, as the climate changes, rainfall patterns are shifting, which has meant drier winters. This shift in rainfall patterns, likely due to an atmospheric shift bringing drier air to the region, is important because rain-fed farming systems like many in the region are especially vulnerable to changes in rainfall patterns. 
• Sand and Dust Storms: Another major climate-related concern for the Levant is the increase and worsening of dust storms. These storms are remarkable for their intensity and the large size of their dust particles. The particles from the massive sandstorm that occurred in the region in September 2015 were bigger than any that had been recorded since 1995. The sandstorm created a thick layer of dust spanning Syria, Iraq, Israel, and Cyprus. Dust storms cause significant air pollution, which is a hazard for people’s health in itself, and these storms also increase aircraft and traffic accidents. 

Government Mismanagement in the Levant 

While climate change has caused or exacerbated these physical effects, related issues have contributed to the problems the region faces today. Namely, pollution and other consequences of government mismanagement have further worsened environmental and living conditions in the region. Poor governance and corruption make people in the Levant less able to feel relief from extreme heat and other climate change effects, as citizens face water and electricity shortages when they need these resources the most. In other words, there is less water now, and of what water there is, the public cannot access it. 

The Effects of Climate Change on Humanity in the Levant 

Between the intensifying impacts of climate change and inadequate government responses to these effects, the people living in the Levant face worsening living conditions due to a number of climate-related problems. These include water scarcity, food insecurity, climate migration, more disease, worsening economic conditions, and social strife. 

• Water Scarcity: Due to climate change and its drying effects on the Levant region, freshwater resources have become more scarce, in both quantity and quality. Additionally, pollution and the salinization—increased salt concentration in water—of rivers and other water sources worsen water quality. An increasing number of people in the region are facing a lack of access to clean water, which is a public health concern as well. The effects of climate change, such as increased rainfall, flooding, and droughts, can often degrade water quality even as population growth increases its demand. As clean water becomes increasingly inaccessible, the risk of water-borne illnesses like cholera goes up as people are forced to consume contaminated water. For instance, contaminated water in Gaza leaves people more vulnerable to illnesses and infections, including cholera, Salmonella, diarrhea, polio, and viral meningitis. 
• Food Insecurity: As temperatures continue to rise, water supplies continue to fall, and environment degradation worsens, food insecurity is likely to increase throughout the Levant. Agriculture productivity has and will continue to decrease because of droughts, desertification, and dust storms. The latter is particularly damaging to crops and can remove nutrient-rich topsoil further reducing food production. Food insecurity has serious public health consequences, especially for children, since malnutrition can stunt development physically and intellectually. Moreover, Syria’s food shortage prior to the civil war caused the mass displacement of farmers, who could not remain in their homes after they lost both their source of income and sustenance. Food insecurity in the country has only grown worse since 2011, as millions of Syrians continue to go hungry. 
• Climate Migration: Another effect of climate change is an increase in forced internal and international migration throughout the Levant. Extreme weather events, like severe flooding, will at least temporarily displace tons of people and destroy tons of acres of crops, taking away people’s livelihoods in the long term. More slow-onset events like desertification will permanently displace people as more and more areas become uninhabitable. Climate change has already caused the mass migration of millions of people in the Levant alone. In Iraq, for example, water scarcity has led to a dramatic increase in forced migration and urbanization. 
• More Disease and Illness: As the Earth warms, mosquitoes are able to travel outside of their normal regions, increasing the spread of infectious diseases and reaching new populations. Indeed, climate-related effects will result in more disease transmission in the Levant in multiple ways. Malnutrition from lack of access to nutritious food can increase the likelihood of contracting an infectious disease. According to the United Nations, change in land use is the “primary transmission pathway for emerging infectious diseases of humans, over 60% of which are zoonotic.” Other issues are the negative health outcomes that come from extreme temperatures, including dehydration, heat exhaustion, heatstroke, and death. Extreme heat also reduces health systems’ capabilities to address issues and increases the number of accidents and the transmission rate of illnesses. All of these climate factors are present in the Levant.
• Worsening Economic Conditions: Climate change will exacerbate existing economic issues and deepen poverty in the Levant as well. It has and will continue to increase employment fragility as it threatens economic productivity and many industries like agriculture. It will also increase competition for low-skill jobs as displaced people search for work. The rising costs of climate change put additional pressure on national economies while constraining governments’ capabilities to implement sustainable policies and invest in sustainable infrastructure. On a macro and micro level, climate change poses a great risk to people’s economic fortunes. 
• Social Strife: In addition to the economic and societal problems described above, global climate change drives social unrest and accelerates armed conflict in the Levant. As U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and others have noted, “The climate crisis isn’t coming. It’s already here,” and it brings with it instability and conflict in Yemen, Syria, and elsewhere. Furthermore, resource mismanagement by governments in the Levant exacerbates the climate change effects, thereby worsening living conditions even more.

Conclusion

Climate change and its effects have already worsened living conditions in the Levant and will continue to exacerbate problems in the coming years. Furthermore, as the impacts of climate change worsen economic and social conditions, these bad social and economic conditions can cause further climate effects in a devastating feedback loop. For example, scientists believe that the Syrian civil war may have created the conditions for a deadly dust storm across the region. This terrible cycle will intensify as the temperature of the planet continues to rise and as these climate effects wreak more and more havoc on people throughout the Levant.