Climate stress in the form of severe droughts, extreme heat or rapid floods is not new to the Middle East, but the situation is worsening due to climate change and the increased vulnerability of e.g. war-affected communities. In our project, Societal Impacts of Climate Stress - An Integrated Assessment of Drought, Vulnerability and Conflict in Syria, we have moved away from the Syrian climate-migration-conflict narrative and explored how climate stress has actually affected Syrian society before and after the start of the Syrian civil war. In this seminar, we present our findings, which focus on drought patterns, drought-induced migration and land abandonment in Syria, the climate vulnerability of the agricultural system, and the risk of agricultural collapse. We also discuss some policy implications and the way forward for research on climate stress in Syria after the completion of the project.

Dr. Lina Eklund has a PhD in Physical Geography and Ecosystem Analysis from Lund University. She finished her PhD in 2015 with her dissertation “No Friends but the Mountains: Understanding Population Mobility and Land Dynamics in Iraqi Kurdistan”, for which she received an award from the Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography in 2016. Her current research is focused on land systems and conflict, more specifically on the links between drought, land use change, migration and conflict in Syria and Iraq. Another research interest of hers is the environmental dimensions of conflict, and mainly how conflicts affect land and agricultural systems, through e.g. the political context, fires, and migration. Lina Eklund teaches GIS and remote sensing at the Department of Physical Geography and Ecosystem Science. She is interested in science communication and making science more accessible to non-academic audiences.

Dr. Pınar Dinç has a Ph. D. in Political Science from the Department of Government at the London School of Economics. Her research interests lie in the areas of nationalism, ethnicity, social movements, memory, diaspora and the conflict-environment nexus in the Middle East and beyond. She is currently a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Political Science. She leads the interdisciplinary Exploring Conflict- Environment Interactions for Sustainable Development and Conservation Project, ECO-Syria, since September 2023, which is funded by the Strategic Research Area: The Middle East in the Contemporary World (MECW) at the Centre for Advanced Middle Eastern Studies, Lund University.

The talk is held at CMES, Finngatan 16 in Lund. If you are not able to attend in-person, there is an option to attend via Zoom. Please register here for Zoom attendance: https://lu-se.zoom.us/meeting/register/u5YlceuprDsuH9NTnlhr0wCKldJFTmkb…

This event is part of the CMES seminar series spring 2024. For more information, visit the CMES website.