After more than a decade of war, one might be forgiven for assuming that Syrians had seen almost every form of suffering imaginable. But that’s not what it looks like in rural parts of the country, where miserly rains, new twists in the conflict, and a grimmer macroeconomic outlook turned 2021 into arguably the worst…
By Peter Schwartzstein As snapshots of Syria’s environmental degradation go, Jebel Abdelaziz, in the northeastern part of the country, is hard to beat. The mountain’s rocky flanks offer little for livestock. The semi-arid surrounding plain offers little for man or beast. Extending over 50km (31 miles) from Hasakah into the lightly populated scrub in the…
By Ambassador Ahmet Üzümcü I watched a few days ago, via webcast, the proceedings of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) Conference of States Parties (CSP) held in The Hague. The main issue was, again, the use of chemical weapons (CW) in Syria. The CSP voted a draft decision submitted by western…
By Leah Emanuel In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, Matthew Vollrath, a journalism Master’s student at Stanford, has created a podcast entitled “Life in the Coronaverse.” This five-part series explores the linkages between the coronavirus and climate change, how we respond to both, the partisan divides impacting action, and more. In the third episode,…
In an interview segment released on July 17 by TRT World, Francesco Femia, the CEO of the Council on Strategic Risks and Co-Founder of the Center for Climate and Security, spoke with host Ghida Fakhry and WRI’s Rebecca Carter about the increasing evidence of a connection between climate change and conflict, the growing bipartisan consensus…