Water scarcity, crop failure, and food insecurity, the three persistent pressures that were once a salient contributing factor to Syria’s social unrest-turned-civil war, are now looming as impediments to the country’s arduous road to recovery. Following its driest winter of 2024-2025, Syria is currently facing the worst drought in 36 years, characterised by recurring crop failures and an impending food crisis. While a familiar predicament, it poses itself in a new light, compounding the existing hardships of a people already exhausted by the protracted civil war.
Between 2006 and 2011, Syria endured a prolonged drought caused by years of resource mismanagement. It was particularly acute in 2008, when wheat production, crucial for food security and supporting the country’s subsidised bread program, fell from four million tons to just over two million tons. It forced the government to import 1.6 million tons to meet domestic needs. This environmental hardship was aggravated by a series of interconnected events that triggered a cascading effect, unravelling Syria’s precarious stability amid the upheaval of the Arab Spring sweeping across its neighbourhood since December 2010.
Adopted in 2005, the economic austerity measures coincided with the drought and led to the rapid phasing out of fuel and fertiliser subsidies, causing the desperate rural population to migrate to the cities. The consequent displacement and overcrowding of urban centres resulted in soaring unemployment alongside widespread food insecurity. These tensions snowballed into a social uprising sparked by the incarceration and abuse of teenage protestors on 6 March 2011 in the southwestern city of Daraa, which ultimately became the “cradle of Syrian revolution.”
Syria’s agricultural vulnerability stemmed from the fact that, despite its semi-arid climate, it relied heavily on rainwater rather than an efficient irrigation infrastructure. At the start of the conflict, about 67 percent of the country’s total cultivated land and 53 percent of wheat fields relied on rainwater. As of 2024, this dependence has only increased, with rain-fed agriculture constituting 75 percent of all crops. Although the war led to the loss of critical infrastructure, the irrigation system was already obsolete in the pre-war era, dominated by inefficient surface techniques, which led to significant water wastage and overexploitation of major river basins. Moreover, its major wheat-producing provinces, including the Al-Hasakah governorate, which is regarded as the wheat basket of Syria, have mainly remained rain-dependent, supplemented only by minor rivers, thus making them extremely vulnerable to drought conditions.
Environmental concerns are a crucial component of armed conflict and a definite feature of its aftermath, which extends and intensifies the lasting human suffering of post-conflict societies. In Syria’s case, the worsening climate crisis and ecological devastation caused by the long years of warfare have inflicted continued human suffering, blurring the boundaries between ‘traditional’ and ‘non-traditional’ security concerns.
During its last peak rainfall period, between November 2024 and March 2025, the country witnessed a marked decline in precipitation, which was 54 percent below its long-term average—the first half of this year registered its driest season since 1997. Moreover, as each passing year becomes increasingly rain-starved, its key rivers, such as the Euphrates, Orontes, and Khabour, suffer progressively dwindling water flow, becoming unsuitable for irrigation. These ongoing environmental problems are further exacerbated by Syria’s endemic impoverishment and a water infrastructure in shambles.
According to a 2025 UNDP report, an estimated 66 percent of the population is affected by extreme income poverty, falling below the international threshold of US$2.15 per person per day. Nearly 14 years of war have rendered two-thirds of the population dependent on humanitarian aid, while 90 percent struggle to afford essentials. Therefore, besides the drying up of rivers, farmers, confronted with chronic financial constraints, are ‘skimping’ on irrigation to cut costs and relying more on rainwater, a gamble that, this year, failed them spectacularly.
Finally, the forced displacement of its people has irreparably torn them from their communities and marred hope for meaningful resettlement. Twenty-six percent of the population is still internally displaced and is unlikely to return in huge numbers, given the persistent security worries, but more importantly, due to the lack of infrastructure and provisions to meet basic amenities. Out of the six million, about 500,000 have returned, while the vast majority remain uprooted, their connection to their land possibly ruptured permanently.
The cumulative impact of these stressors has pushed Syria into an agrarian crisis that is more alarming than the worst drought in 2008 and even the years of conflict. After a brief period of moderate recovery, this year’s harvest is projected to drop below the 2018 wartime low of 1.2 million tons to just 1.1 million tons. Therefore, what the Syrians are witnessing now is more dire and signals an incipient disaster that could render a nation once self-reliant in feeding its population excessively dependent on imports.
When faced with the immediate threat of armed violence, problems of environmental and climate adaptation appear too distant and secondary. Once the hostilities subside, as they eventually do, these indirect and hidden consequences come to the fore and mete out yet another war on a worn-down population. It is important to note that Syria continues to witness violent clashes in different pockets of the country, which blends with the ongoing environmental crisis to pose a complex challenge. Therefore, any post-war effort towards stability must address these intersection points without any prejudice to create a durable and resilient peace.
The author is a doctoral candidate at the Centre for West Asian Studies, JNU.