In 2023 we have so far managed to publish two articles and update our bibliography. Read more about our publications and find their links below: Syrian farmers in the midst of drought and conflict: the causes, patterns, and aftermath of land abandonment and migration Abstract: The prevailing narrative on the Syrian Civil War attributes it…
First publication out in Nature’s Communications Earth and Environment: Societal drought vulnerability and the Syrian climate-conflict nexus are better explained by agriculture than meteorology Abstract: Droughts are often suspected to increase the risk of violent conflict through agricultural production shocks, and existing studies often explore these links through meteorological proxies. In Syria, an alleged agricultural…
We have produced an annotated bibliograhy with the intention to provide an overview of the debate around the Syrian Climate-Migration-Conflict Nexus, as part of our research project. We aim to update this bibliography as new papers are published on the topic, during the course of the project. By Gianna Angermayr, Pinar Dinc, Bénédicte Anthony and…
Here, we share a little bit more about the fieldwork process, and how we worked around the problem of not being able to go to the field during the first years of our project. A significant part of the Climate Stress Syria project consisted of data collection in Turkey, which we hoped would allow us…
Although a not so active year on the blog, in 2021 we have made good progress in the project. Below is a short summary our activities for 2021: Surveys/Interviews Pinar has spent much of her time on the field work that had to be re-arranged due to the pandemic. Together with our research assistant Orwa…
The year 2020 has certainly not been an easy one, and I believe many scholars have had to find creative solutions to the situation, from teaching to field work. We have done most of our activities online and it has worked quite well. Here is a list of things that we have managed to do…
Since 2019, I’ve been (loosely) involved in a Marie Curie project on fire and conflict in the Middle East: FIRE – Fighting Insurgency Ruining the Environment. In this project we have looked into the spatiotemporal dynamics of forest/wild fires and conflict. There is a lot to learn and understand about fires in order to study…
This post describes the workshop that was held online on October 14th, 2020, as the first workshop in the Climate Stress Syria project. It was co-written by Cecilia Axelsson Örberg, Pinar Dinc and Lina Eklund who were the workshop organizers. As part of the Climate Stress in Syria-research project, we held a closed interactive online…
Main project team: The core team consist of Lina Eklund, Pınar Dinç and Petter Pilesjö, from the Department of Pysical Geography and Ecosystem Science/Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Lund University. We also have a few people helping out in different parts of the project, listed below. Lina Eklund has a Ph.D. in Physical Geography and…
In March 2020, our new FORMAS project on climate stress in Syria was started. The project is a three-year interdisciplinary project for early career researchers, coordinated by Lina Eklund, with Pinar Dinc and Petter Pilesjö as collaborators. The project starts from the Syria Climate-Conflict narrative, and asks in-depth questions about the affected socio-ecological systems. For…
Doing a review of the past year is such a great way to sum up accomplishments and formulate goals for the next year. Having such posts is also a nice way to be able to go back in time and remember what were the big events of that year. Thus, this is a short summary…
On Tuesday this week it was the United Nations’ (UN) International Day for Preventing the Exploitation of the Environment in War and Armed Conflict (November 6th). Throughout the day, various organizations and people shared articles about how conflict affects the environment and how we need to prevent further exploitation of the environment due to conflict. Along with 58 civil society organisations and…
This is a question I keep asking myself when reading news articles and research articles about climate change and migration, or as they are usually framed: climate refugees. A few weeks ago I read a debate article in my local Swedish newspaper with the headline: “In 30 years, 200 million people will be forced to…
I still see a lot of people claiming that the 2007-2009 drought in the Middle East CAUSED the Syrian civil war. This is used as an example of how climate change can (will) lead to conflicts and migration in the future, based on the idea that this alarmist narrative will lead to more climate action.…
Climate data, including rainfall and temperature, are important for studying climate and water issues in an area. A major issue with doing research in the Middle East is getting access to reliable and complete data. In this blog I’ve talked about access to, and quality of, data, in posts like “Your guide to the “data…
Population and Environment in the Middle East 