The global climate continues to be a hot topic of discussion, and last week Bryan McFadden, an instructor in Winthrop University’s geography department, gave a lecture on how Syria’s climate is doing in regards to the drought that the country has been experiencing.
McFadden was introduced by Ginger Williams, a professor of history and the director of the peace, justice and conflict resolution studies department at Winthrop. Williams said that Syria has been in a state of crisis since 2011, pointing to the “political uprising” that took place that year and “led to civil war.”
“The Syrian crisis really hasn’t gotten any better — it’s really gotten worse. Over a third of the population of Syria has emigrated out of Syria since then, leading to one of the largest refugee crises in our world since the 1940s,” Williams said. “There are a lot of reasons for that but few people think of the geographical reasons for that and Mr. McFadden will talk to us tonight about the geographical reasons and the geographical issues that have exacerbated the refugee crisis in Syria.”
Williams added that the lecture was co-sponsored by the geography program, the department of interdisciplinary studies and the program of Peace, Justice and Conflict Resolution studies.
McFadden began the lecture by asking who knew that it was geography awareness week to which only two people raised their hands. McFadden followed this by noting that that day, Wednesday Nov. 13, was GIS day. GIS stands for geographic information systems which McFadden described as a “valuable tool” and a “powerful technology.”
McFadden said that there are “different measures” that he likes to use to “paint a picture of what’s going on in the country.” One of the measures is the Fund For Peace, which “looks at the civility of a country and ranks the country…based on all these factors,” which includes cohesion, economic factors, whether or not a country has public services and population growth/decline. McFadden said that adding up the various factors gives an idea of how civil a country is.
“Where do you think Syria ranks? When you crunch all the numbers, it ranks pretty low,” McFadden said.
McFadden said that Syria currently ranks in the bottom five in the world among “failed states” which are marked by “a significant amount of instability” and are in “full civil war today.” He noted, however, that this was not always the case for Syria.
He said that he also uses data and information from the United Nations in studying how Syria is doing, particularly their development index which tracks health, wealth and education.
“When you look at the numbers for Syria, this is what’s happening: You never want to see something like this because what it’s showing is [that] they were progressing as they were developing,” McFadden said. “In 2000, that’s when Bashar al-Assad took over for his father…there was a few years in the mid-2000s where people were having more access to things. They started getting cell phones, they started getting internet, things that we take for granted, they just starting to get those. They started seeing things, they started seeing how things were happening in other countries.”
McFadden went on to say that as the Syrian people began experiencing some of these “freedoms” that were “taken away” which created a culture of distrust towards the Syrian government.
McFadden said that there are stations in Syria that climatic data can be downloaded from but he noted that there has been a decrease in the number of stations which is an indication that Syrian infrastructure has been “destroyed by the civil war.” He said that only three of these stations are currently operating in Syria but that the data that has been gathered from them indicates that the temperature in Syria has been going up.
McFadden also noted that the data from 2006-2010 on the drought in Syria is estimated to be the “worst drought in 900 years.” Furthermore, there had been a marked decrease in the level of vegetation and that vegetation health as “dropped significantly.”
McFadden said that there has been “good news in terms of the weather” with Syria seeing “a lot of rain” at times last year. While this is a sign that things might be getting better, McFadden said that the increase in rainfall “has to happen for years on end” adding that “you don’t recover from a historic drought in one season.”
