High temperatures caused by climate change are driving an ongoing drought in the Middle East, according to a new rapid attribution analysis by the World Weather Attribution service.
Large parts of Iraq, Iran and Syria have been gripped by an intense drought for years. Low rainfall and high temperatures have caused crops to fail and driven water shortages across the region, pushing millions of people into food insecurity.
The study finds that, between July 2020 and June 2023, climate change made the drought more intense – mainly due to high temperatures that dried out the soil.
In a world without climate change, the dry period would not have even been severe enough to be called a drought, the study notes.
The authors find that climate change also made the event more likely.
In today’s climate, the drought in Iran was a one-in-five year event. However, without the influence of climate change, it would have been a one-in-80 year event.
Meanwhile, in the Tigris-Euphrates river basin that encompasses much of Iraq and Syria, climate change increased the likelihood of the drought from a one-in-250 to a one-in-10 year event.
The analysis shows that droughts of this intensity are “not rare anymore” due to climate change, one study author told a press briefing.
The study highlights that other factors, including conflict, water management and land degradation have also contributed to the severe impacts of the drought.
The Fertile Crescent
Tucked between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and the Mediterranean Sea, the Fertile Crescent – named for its rich soils – is often referred to as the “cradle of civilisation”. For thousands of years, this Middle Eastern region has been ideal for agriculture, allowing rural communities to cultivate crops and raise animals.
Today, the area is facing a severe multi-year drought driven by high temperatures and low rainfall. “In an already water-stressed region, agricultural practices consume 80%, on average, of freshwater resources,” Rana El Hajj, a senior technical adviser at the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre and author on the study, told a press briefing.
As the drought has caused crops to fail, tens of millions of people across Iraq, Iran and Syria are facing the combined impacts of water shortages and food insecurity.
In Syria, where around 70% of the wheat crop relies on rainfall, agricultural production was 80% lower in 2022 than it was in 2020.
The resulting spike in food prices has driven millions of people into poverty and hunger. The World Food Programme estimates that 12.1 million Syrians – more than half the population – are facing hunger, while another 2.9 million people are at risk of becoming food insecure.
In Iraq, the 2020-21 rainfall season was the second driest in 40 years, leading to a 29% and 73% drop in water flow in the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, respectively.
In April 2022, the Iraqi ministry of water resources warned that the country’s water reserves had halved since the previous year due to intense heat and low rainfall.
Almost 90% of Iraq’s rain-fed crops – mostly wheat and barley – failed in 2022. One Iraqi farmer called the water shortage a “catastrophic crisis“, explaining that “most of our agricultural lands have been transformed into barren scorching desert lands which lack basic living necessities”.
In Iran, only 180mm of rain fell across the country between September 2021 and September 2022 – a decline of about 24% compared to the long-term average. The drought has led to shortages of drinking water, crop failure and low hydropower output, and many Iranian farmers have been forced to travel to cities to find work.
The low rainfall came as intense heat baked the Middle East. Over the past few years, many regions have faced temperatures above 50C.
Multiyear drought
There are many ways to define drought. Hydrological drought focuses on the amount of rainfall a region receives, while pluvial droughts focus on surface and groundwater flows.
This study investigates agricultural drought, using a measure called the “standardised precipitation evapotranspiration index” (SPEI) – an index used to determine the onset, duration and magnitude of drought conditions in comparison with typical conditions.
Dr Ben Clarke – a researcher at Imperial College London’s Grantham Institute and author on the study – told a press briefing that SPEI gives a measure of available water balance on the land surface.
The study investigates two regions – Iran, and the crescent around the Euphrates and Tigris rivers which encompasses large parts of Iraq and Syria.
The map below shows SPEI in these regions over the 36 months between July 2020 and June 2023. The study regions are outlined in grey, with the Tigris-Euphrates river basin on the left and Iran to the right. The areas of darker shading indicate a more severe drought.
Over both regions, 2020-23 was the second worst drought on record, the study finds.
Dr Elham Ghasemifar is a researcher in satellite climatology at Iran’s Tarbiat Modares University and was not involved in the study. He tells Carbon Brief that according to his research, the seasonality of agricultural drought is different across the three countries. Iraq and Iran see the most severe droughts in summer and spring, while Syria sees them in autumn, he says.
Attribution
Attribution is a fast-growing field of climate science that aims to identify the “fingerprint” of climate change on extreme-weather events. In this study, the authors investigate the impact of climate change on drought across Iran, Iraq and Syria.
To put the drought into its historical context and determine how unlikely it was, the authors analysed a timeseries of SPEI for each region. They also use climate models to compare the world as it is today to a “counterfactual” world without human-caused climate change.
The authors find that in today’s climate, which has already warmed by around 1.2C above pre-industrial temperatures due to human-caused climate change, the drought in Iran was a one-in-five year event. Without the influence of climate change, it would have been a one-in-80 year event, they find.
If the planet continues to heat, reaching a warming level of 2C above pre-industrial temperatures, Iran could expect a drought of this severity every other year, the authors add.
The graphic below illustrates these results, where a pink dot indicates the number of years in every 81 that an event like the 2020-23 drought over Iran would be seen at different warming levels.
The authors also performed the same analysis for the Tigris-Euphrates river basin in Syria and Iraq. They find that in a pre-industrial climate, today’s climate and a 2C climate, the drought would be expected once every 250, 10 and five years, respectively. These results are shown in the graphic below.
The study shows that droughts such as those recorded in Iran, Iraq and Syria over 2020-23 are “not rare anymore”, Prof Mohammad Rahimi – a professor of climatology at Iran’s Semnan University and author on the study – told a press briefing.
The authors also find that, in both regions, climate change made the drought more intense. Without the influence of climate change, neither event would have even been classified as a drought, the study suggests.
To look more closely at the causes of the drought, the authors also analyse temperature and rainfall trends separately. They find that the change in rainfall was “relatively extreme, but not necessarily affected by climate change”, while the temperatures recorded would have been “virtually impossible” with climate change, Clarke told the press briefing.
This indicates that the drought was caused by “naturally low precipitation coinciding with really, really high temperatures”, Clarke explained.
(These findings are yet to be published in a peer-reviewed journal. However, the methods used in the analysis have been published in previous attribution studies.)
Water insecurity
High temperatures and low rainfall are not the only drivers of water insecurity across Iraq, Iran and Syria. Rajj told the press briefing that other human-caused factors, such as poor water management, land-use change, rapid urbanisation and conflict are also key.
In Syria, more than a decade of war has resulted in underdeveloped irrigation infrastructure, as well as a “devastated economy, damaged infrastructure and increasing poverty”, says the New York Times. Many farmers have also been forced from their lands by shelling, and the the Syrian currency has collapsed to a record low.
Water scarcity is also leading to tension between countries in the Middle East, with many regions building dams or overusing water at the expense of others.
For example, the Tigris and Euphrates rivers are Iraq’s primary sources of water, but both rivers originate in Turkey and flow through Syria first. As Turkey and Syria began developing hydropower projects on the two rivers in the 1970s, water flow to Iraq began to dwindle. Today, dams along the rivers have reduced inflow to Iraq by around 30-40%.
The post Climate change: Intensity of ongoing drought in Syria, Iraq and Iran ‘not rare anymore’ appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Climate change: Intensity of ongoing drought in Syria, Iraq and Iran ‘not rare anymore’
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Lena Luig is the head of the International Agricultural Policy Division at the Heinrich Böll Foundation, a member of the Global Alliance for the Future of Food. Anna Lappé is the Executive Director of the Global Alliance for the Future of Food.
As toxic clouds loom over Tehran and Beirut from the US and Israel’s bombardment of oil depots and civilian infrastructure in the region’s ongoing war, the world is once again witnessing the not-so-subtle connections between conflict, hunger, food insecurity and the vulnerability of global food systems dependent on fossil fuels, dominated by a few powerful countries and corporations.
The conflict in Iran is having a huge impact on the world’s fertilizer supply. The Strait of Hormuz is a critical trade route in the region for nearly half of the global supply of urea, the main synthetic fertilizer derived from natural gas through the conversion of ammonia.
With the Strait impacted by Iran’s blockades, prices of urea have shot up by 35% since the war started, just as planting season starts in many parts of the world, putting millions of farmers and consumers at risk of increasing production costs and food price spikes, resulting in food insecurity, particularly for low-income households. The World Food Programme has projected that an extra 45 million people would be pushed into acute hunger because of rises in food, oil and shipping costs, if the war continues until June.
Pesticides and synthetic fertilizer leave system fragile
On the face of it, this looks like a supply chain issue, but at the core of this crisis lies a truth about many of our food systems around the world: the instability and injustice in the very design of systems so reliant on these fossil fuel inputs for our food.
At the Global Alliance, a strategic alliance of philanthropic foundations working to transform food systems, we have been documenting the fossil fuel-food nexus, raising alarm about the fragility of a system propped up by fossil fuels, with 15% of annual fossil fuel use going into food systems, in part because of high-cost, fossil fuel-based inputs like pesticides and synthetic fertilizer. The Heinrich Böll Foundation has also been flagging this threat consistently, most recently in the Pesticide Atlas and Soil Atlas compendia.
We’ve seen this before: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 sparked global disruptions in fertilizer supply and food price volatility. As the conflict worsened, fertilizer prices spiked – as much from input companies capitalizing on the crisis for speculation as from real cost increases from production and transport – triggering a food price crisis around the world.
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Since then, fertilizer industry profit margins have continued to soar. In 2022, the largest nine fertilizer producers increased their profit margins by more than 35% compared to the year before—when fertilizer prices were already high. As Lena Bassermann and Dr. Gideon Tups underscore in the Heinrich Böll Foundation’s Soil Atlas, the global dependencies of nitrogen fertilizer impacted economies around the world, especially state budgets in already indebted and import-dependent economies, as well as farmers across Africa.
Learning lessons from the war in Ukraine, many countries invested heavily in renewable energy and/or increased domestic oil production as a way to decrease dependency on foreign fossil fuels. But few took the same approach to reimagining domestic food systems and their food sovereignty.
Agroecology as an alternative
There is another way. Governments can adopt policy frameworks to encourage reductions in synthetic fertilizer and pesticide use, especially in regions that currently massively overuse nitrogen fertilizer. At the African Union fertilizer and Soil Health Summit in 2024, African leaders at least agreed that organic fertilizers should be subsidized as well, not only mineral fertilizers, but we can go farther in actively promoting agricultural pathways that reduce fossil fuel dependency.
In 2024, the Global Alliance organized dozens of philanthropies to call for a tenfold increase in investments to help farmers transition from fossil fuel dependency towards agroecological approaches that prioritize livelihoods, health, climate, and biodiversity.
In our research, we detail the huge opportunity to repurpose harmful subsidies currently supporting inputs like synthetic fertilizer and pesticides towards locally-sourced bio-inputs and biofertilizer production. We know this works: There are powerful stories of hope and change from those who have made this transition, despite only receiving a fraction of the financing that industrial agriculture receives, with evidence of benefits from stable incomes and livelihoods to better health and climate outcomes.
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Inspiring examples abound: G-BIACK in Kenya is training farmers how to produce their own high-quality compost; start-ups like the Evola Company in Cambodia are producing both nutrient-rich organic fertilizer and protein-rich animal feed with black soldier fly farming; Sabon Sake in Ghana is enriching sugarcane bagasse – usually organic waste – with microbial agents and earthworms to turn it into a rich vermicompost.
These efforts, grounded in ecosystems and tapping nature for soil fertility and to manage pest pressures, are just some of the countless examples around the world, tapping the skill and knowledge of millions of farmers. On a national and global policy level, the Agroecology Coalition, with 480+ members, including governments, civil society organizations, academic institutions, and philanthropic foundations, is supporting a transition toward agroecology, working with natural systems to produce abundant food, boost biodiversity, and foster community well-being.
Fertilizer industry spins “clean” products
We must also inoculate ourselves from the fertilizer industry’s public relations spin, which includes promoting the promise that their products can be produced without heavy reliance on fossil fuels. Despite experts debunking the viability of what the industry has dubbed “green hydrogen” or “green or clean ammonia”, the sector still promotes this narrative, arguing that these are produced with resource-intensive renewable energy or Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), a costly and unreliable technology for reducing emissions.
As we mourn this conflict’s senseless destruction and death, including hundreds of children, we also recognize that peace cannot mean a return to business-as-usual. We need to upend the systems that allow the richest and most powerful to have dominion over so much.
This includes fighting for a food system that is based on genuine sovereignty and justice, free from dependency on fossil fuels, one that honors natural systems and puts power into the hands of communities and food producers themselves.
The post Middle East war is another wake-up call for fossil fuel-reliant food systems appeared first on Climate Home News.
Middle East war is another wake-up call for fossil fuel-reliant food systems
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