It has been over a month now since the EU-Turkey Agreement went into effect. The agreement – or “deal” as it is euphemistically called by its critics –stipulates that any person whose application has been declared inadmissible found crossing from Turkey to the Greek islands, be they asylum seeker or not, will be returned to Turkey. The EU will then relocate one Syrian refugee from Turkish refugee camps for every Syrian being returned to Turkey from the Greek islands. In return, the EU will reimburse Turkey for its efforts with an initial payment of €3 billion, followed by a second payment of €3 billion by 2018. Furthermore, the Turkey EU membership process will be re-energised, and visa requirements for Turkish citizens will be facilitated.
This agreement, however, has led to a new humanitarian crisis in Greece. On the eastern Greek islands, refugees are being contained and cable-tied together to be sent back to Turkey, while at the same time, in the Aegean, Sea the Turkish coast guard is trying to intercept refugee boats by any means necessary. On the north-western border between Greece and Macedonia, Macedonian police forces are using barbwire fences in combination with tear gas and rubber coated bullets to keep refugees from crossing the border. This does not only create an unbearable situation for the thousands of refugees, but it also puts enormous pressure on Greece’s infrastructure, finances, and communities that – although still suffering under the economic crisis – are doing their best to cope with and help the arriving refugees.
To help stem the challenges of the refugee crisis, international humanitarian organisations, independent groups, and sometimes even individuals, are trying to ease the burden on Greek communities and municipalities by providing donations, expertise, and support from all over Europe. One such group arrived inPolykastro near the Greek-Macedonian border, from Dorset. Jonathan Tutton, a psychiatric nurse and surf instructor from Poole, took his old Volkswagen van on an 1800-mile trip to Polykastro, picking up his friend Giada Degrandi on the way through the Italian Alps. Johnathan and Giada are based outside of Polykastro in a camp which provides basic support for the refugees who are now stuck at the Macedonian border. While bigger organisations provide food and clothing if necessary, Jonathan and Giada focus on providing education spaces for children and adults, built with some old marquees.
Most refugees arriving in Greece are from Syria and Iraq. The region is plagued by an ongoing civil war between the Syrian Assad regime and its affiliated groups, anti-Assad rebel groups, and the Islamic State (IS) which controls large parts of Eastern Syria and Northern Iraq.
This violent conflict has been raging on since at least 2011 and turned into a full on civil war in 2013. The conflict has the appearance of a stalemate, despite territorial loses for the Islamic State due to US bombing campaigns, Kurdish, and pro-Assad forces on the ground. Those losses for the Islamic State, however, do not mean an imminent end to the Syrian conflict and a possible end to the refugee crisis. On the contrary, the old proverb of my enemy’s enemy is my friend does not really apply here, as a defeat of the Islamic State would only mean that one group among nearly a dozen hostile towards one another to various degrees, would be defeated.
Another group of refugees, sometimes dismissed with the less desperate-sounding label of “economic migrant,” come from the African continent and cross the Mediterranean Sea from Libya and Tunisia, to arrive at the Italian island of Lampedusa, off the Sicilian coast. Before they make their way across the Mediterranean Sea, a trip which has taken more than 5700 lives since 2014, many refugees already have a harrowing journey behind them. Those coming from the Sahel region have crossed the vast Sahara Desert to reach the Libyan shores. Despite being called economic migrants, the reasons behind these people fleeing their homes and communities are not much different from those in Syria or Iraq.
For example, refugees are fleeing Senegal to avoid the Casamance conflict between the MFDC separatist movement and Senegalese army, which is increasingly costing civilian lives. This conflict, whose origins lie in Casamance, a region that is ethnically separated from the rest of Senegal, is geographically more arable than the northern parts and is referred to as the Senegal’s rice basket.
Additionally, the fight for oil fields in Sudan, which erupted into the second Sudanese civil war and lead to the independence of South Sudan, has still not calmed. Despite South Sudan’s independence in 2011, the fight for territory, especially for oil fields, still rages on, costing 2 million lives and displacing 4 million people since it started in 1983. These are just two of the conflicts raging in the Sahel region that are not much different from that in Syria and Iraq in terms of the impact they have on those who live there and who are subject to the violence and having to fear for their lives on a daily basis.
These conflicts, be it Syria, Iraq, Sudan, or Senegal, all have one common denominator: climate change. While climate change has not caused any of these conflicts directly, there are contributing and auxiliary factors that should not be ignored. Droughts or floods, for example, force farmers to migrate to more arable and fertile lands which obviously increases competition between the farmers and communities which already live there. More famers crowded onto shrinking amounts of arable land causes tensions, especially if there are ethnic differences. This is what is meant by auxiliary factors; it does not mean that conflicts break out because the climate is changing, though climate change is an accelerant as it exacerbates ethnic tensions because more and more farmers from different ethnic backgrounds have to live off fewer and fewer resources. Indeed, tensions are even higher when those farmers are forced to move into urban centers where the competition for jobs and the ethnic tensions are multiplied by overcrowding.
Before the Syrian civil war erupted, the Fertile Crescent suffered from the worst drought in recorded history. The Fertile Crescent is an area spanning from the Nile valley and the Nile delta east across Israel, Lebanon, Jordan, parts of Turkey, and Syria before turning south to follow the twin rivers Euphrates and Tigris through Iraq and Kuwait in to the Persian Gulf. When the drought hit, 1.5 million rural Syrians flocked to the big cities in the hope of a better life and a more stable future. While livestock died and food prices soared, those rural Syrians did not only encounter the hardships of living in an overcrowded city, they also encountered thousands of Iraqis fleeing their war torn country. The combination of the worst drought in recorded history, overcrowded urban areas, lack of food and soaring prices, and a regime that seemed indifferent to the human suffering of its people in the streets of Damascus and Daraa, pushed an already volatile region into full on civil war.
Of course, this is not unique to the Middle East. The Sahel region has seen four droughts in the last decade, with the latest being the worst in 60 years, affecting 20 million people. However, the Sahel is not only plagued by ever worsening droughts and declines in rainfall, but also by desertification; the Sahara Desert taking formally arable land. Again, this is not to say that climate change is to blame for a thirty-year civil war in the case of Sudan or the Senegal. However, a drought that leaves 23 million people’s food sources at risk, and displaces 3.5 million across the Sahel region, is a factor that accelerates tensions and puts enormous pressure on an area that is already plagued by civil wars, ethnic tensions, and numerous other conflicts, from Sudan in the east to the Senegal in the west. When water becomes a precious resource and grassland becomes rarer with every season that passes, it should not come as a surprise that conflicts about the few remaining patches of land and oil rich areas are likely to increase, especially with almost 90% of South Sudan’s income being dependent on oil and with 80% of the population being cattle keepers. The Casamance conflict in the Senegal paints a similar picture with its civil war and separatist struggles in the most fertile region of the country. It does not require a lot of imagination to predict what the consequences will be if the draughts in theSahel worsen even further.
These may be only three examples and one may make the case that conflicts have always existed, and that brining the climate into the discussion is just another attempt to put climate change at the top of the agenda. But what if even the US military agrees with the threat of climate change? What if the US military, an institution not exactly famous for environmentalism and left-wing conspiracies, sees climate change as the biggest long term threat to national security? Well, it does. Even the CIA published reports on the risk of climate change to national security. Climate change is already a risk-multiplier that causes areas under ethnic and political tension to tip into full on civil wars. As early as 2003 the US Department of Defense published a report predicting “that climate change could lead to food shortages and drought, which can exacerbate instability in vulnerable countries.”
More than a decade later we are witnessing the effects of climate change on conflicts such as Syria, South Sudan or the Senegal and as a consequence millions of refugees are trying to flee those countries landing on our shores.
Talking about the sheer numbers of people having to flee their countries and landing on our shores, one has to keep in mind the size of the European Union and the proportions and scale one is talking about here. For example, the European Union with a population of over 500 million can easily cope with an additional million or so refugees. Countries like Syria, Iraq, Sudan, and Senegal on the other hand are struggling immensely under the burden of hundreds of thousands of refugees being internally displaced. Even if those countries were to have similar infrastructure to the European Union and a functioning state apparatus, the proportions would still be too high for any country to cope with. In Syria, for example, 1.5 million people have been displaced internally since 2011, this is almost ten percent of the Syrian population. The equivalent in the UK would be if 6.5 million people suddenly decided to move from rural areas into the two or three largest cities. 1.5 million additional people in the European Union however, wouldn’t even make a dent in population growth. After all, 1.5 million people would be merely 0.3 percent of the European population.
Yet all European policies towards stemming the refugee crisis seem significantly more concerned with treating the symptoms than fighting the root causes of the crisis itself, one of them being climate change. The EU-Turkey agreement will not stop the flow of refugees in the long term if we do not address the role climate change is playing in those conflicts. What it will do instead is increase the burden on the shoulders of humanitarian organisations and individuals like Jonathan and Giada. In other words, what it will do is fail so catastrophically that it will make things worse. If we want to prevent future crises like the ones we are witnessing now, we need not only to prevent civil wars, we need to fight climate change!
Daniel Wiseman
