Compounding Vulnerabilities: Climate Change in Damascus

Misbah carries his hoe, heading to his land to till it after months of drought, but the rising cost of fuel and the lack of seeds and fertilisers have brought his work on the land to a halt. – Orient News, 2017

Misbah's predicament is only a glimpse into the struggles of many urban-fringe farmers in Damascus. Syria's position within the arid and semi-arid belt of the eastern Mediterranean has rendered it increasingly exposed to climate change – most acutely expressed through growing drought frequency, rising temperatures, and accelerating water depletion. Yet these climatic pressures do not act upon a neutral landscape. In Eastern Ghouta, once the primary agricultural hinterland of Damascus and today a peri-urban zone, decades of authoritarian, exclusionary and inadequate governance – compounded by the devastating effects of conflict – have left communities with a deeply eroded capacity to withstand climate impacts.

While climate vulnerability and adaptation have been extensively theorised, their application to cities simultaneously grappling with conflict remains underdeveloped. Damascus offers a quintessential case through which to interrogate these intersections. Drawing on Henrique and Tschakert's (2021) framework of adaptation pathways, politics and practice, this essay argues that climate-induced drought in Damascus functions as an accelerator of latent structural inequalities – exposing decades of state inaction toward peri-urban communities, followed by selective hyper-action that preserved elite interests. This trajectory, exacerbated by conflict, has eroded communities' capacity to cope, with the burden falling heaviest on the most socio-economically precarious. Mainstream narratives of the water crisis contain significant silences, obscuring how state development policy – rather than climate or demographics alone – produced the conditions for scarcity, and in doing so legitimised market-based reforms that may deepen existing inequalities.

Damascus is simply an oasis, that is what it is. For four thousand years its waters have not gone dry or its fertility failed. – Mark Twain, 1872