1 - Climate Change and the Syrian Revolution

Summary

Chapter 1 establishes the Human–Environmental–Climate Security (HECS) framework and the context that links climate change and the Syrian conflict. Over the past few decades, a climate–conflict nexus has emerged drawing on narratives of collapse, and it has more recently been applied to the Syrian case. The author questions this line of reasoning given Syria’s history of climate, water, and food insecurity, arguing that government policies were at the heart of Syria’s vulnerabilities in the buildup to the uprising. To evaluate this central claim, the book introduces a new theoretical approach: the HECS framework. This introductory chapter shows that a new multidisciplinary framing is needed to examine the claim that climate change caused the conflict in Syria.