Many analysts have been warning for years that a lack of water could lead to war, and most of us have laughed at the idea, but it is really not so far-fetched an idea at all. Water is life, and without it we die, as simple as that.
With a world population that straining our water resources and global warming causing climate changes that are creating flooding in some areas that were arid before and droughts in others, even in regions that were previously lush with plant life, a global water-war is looming.
How a Water Shortage Helped Spark a Civil War
Recent research has provided a deep and disturbing look at how climate change may have already sparked violent political unrest, specifically in the case of the Syrian war.
According to the study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, it was water shortages in the Fertile Crescent in Syria, Iraq, and Turkey that drove Syrian farmers to eventually abandon their crops and flock to cities in search of water and a living, and this helped trigger the civil war.
In a time when Syria was exploding with immigrants from the Iraq war, the drought that killed thousands of livestock, drove up food prices, and cause children to become ill was the catalyst that drove around 1.5 million rural residents to the cities, and this is has shown us just how armed conflict can be caused by water shortages.
Of course the war was also influenced by a corrupt leadership, a massive population growth, rampant inequality, and the government’s inability to curb human suffering, but the severe drought may just have been the tipping point.
Co-author of the study, Richard Seager, a climate scientist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, stated that “Being able to, in a specific region, draw this story line together we think is pretty significant. The entire world needs to be planning for a drier future in that area. And there will be lots of global implications.”
The US Military and various scientists have for years been warning that that rising temperatures globally would most likely result in waves of human migration that could end up in wars being fought over increasingly scarce resources—particularly water. It seems from this study that they were correct in their assumptions.
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