Climate Change in the Middle East and North Africa

15,000 Years of Crises, Setbacks, and Adaptation

William R. Thompson, Leila Zakhirova

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000403008
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Environmental factors in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) have played a crucial role in the historical and social development of the region. The book delves into a broad set of historical literature from the past 15, 000 years that neglected to consider environmental factors to their full effect.

Beyond the broad historic analysis, the chapters derive conclusions for today's debate on whether climate change leads to more social conflict and violence. Introducing a theoretical framework focused on adaptive cycling, this book probes and refines the role of climate in ancient and modern political-economic systems in the MENA region. It also underscores just how bad the 21st-century environment may become thanks to global warming. While the MENA region may not survive the latest onslaught of deteriorating climate, there is also some interest in how a region that once led the world in introducing all sorts of innovations thousands of years ago has evolved into a contemporary setting characterized by traditional conservatism, poverty, and incessant strife.

Emphasizing regional dynamics, the book's central question deals with the role of climate change in the rise and decline of the MENA region. The book will be a key resource to students and readers interested in global warming, including academics and policymakers.

1

15,000 Years of Climate Change in the MENA

Big history, big questions

Big questions and big history

One of the more fascinating questions in Big History is why do people in some parts of the world essentially get ahead of others who reside in other parts. It is argued, for instance, that the number of large mammals suitable for exploiting for transportation and other work made a major difference in which regions developed early. So, too, does the potential for East–West interaction patterns.¹ Similarly, to the extent that coal was critical to the advent of industrialization, easy access to large deposits of coal was at least instrumental to some regions becoming pioneers in industrialization.² Yet for every putative advantage there are also corresponding disadvantages. South America had few large mammals that could be exploited for much besides their wool. Sub-Saharan African interaction patterns tended to work from north to south. Change, as a consequence, moved very slowly through deserts, jungles, and long distances. India had and has access to large deposits of coal but lacks the appropriate climate that might have encouraged using coal extensively for heating purposes when that was an important prerequisite to innovating novel approaches to generating energy elsewhere in the world. Now that it is ready to use its fossil fuel inheritance, coal has gone out of fashion.

From this perspective of auditing pluses and minuses, what can we say about the rise and demise of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA)? After all, many of the initial breakthroughs to greater complexity in human affairs had their origins in southern Mesopotamia. Writing, urbanization, wheels, the secondary products revolution, large-scale irrigation projects, armies, states, empires – to say nothing of beer (but not wine) – all can be traced to Mesopotamia. For all of its precocities, Sumer and its predecessors and immediate successors no longer exist and have not been around for thousands of years. Its early lead may have owed a great deal to environmental variety (Algaze, 2008) but its Achilles heel has long been its environmental fragility. In the MENA, abrupt climate changes periodically set back the early leaders in greater complexity innovations. Ubaid, Uruk, and Akkad represent early peaks of innovation of different kinds. Ubaid traits spread throughout the immediate region. In the Uruk period, an extensive regional network was established to funnel resources back to southern Mesopotamia, making it possibly the first economic empire.³ Akkad constituted the first coercive empire buttressed by a standing army of 5,000 soldiers. Each movement toward greater complexity, however, was set back by climate change. Moreover, it turns out that this inherent fragility was not simply a southern Mesopotamian characteristic. It was and remains a liability characteristic of much of the MENA and one that has established significant parameters on what can be achieved and sustained in that part of the world. Contrary to what was mentioned earlier, South America no longer needs large mammals for transportation purposes. North–South interaction patterns in Africa can be overcome by planes, trains, trucks, and shipping. Coal has turned out to be more of a bane than a cure for generating energy. Middle Eastern environmental fragility, however, persists and could lead to the region, or large portions of it, becoming virtually uninhabitable in the current bout of climate deterioration.

J. R. McNeill (2013: 28) cautions against making such generalizations about the Middle East and North Africa without considerable temporal caveats:

I do not argue that these eccentricities [referring to water, grass, and energy characteristics] as a whole either favored or disadvantaged the region. Such generalizations cannot be sustained across time because conditions change. At certain times, such as during the later nineteenth century age of coal and steam, it is probably safe to say that the MENA stood at a disadvantage with respect to many parts of the world because most of it lacked coal. Such specific moments – anchored in particular historical moments-are plausible. But generalizations made for all time are not…⁴

We think most analysts would agree with his prudence and assumption that the Middle Eastern environment has been fairly intermittent in its impact on behavior. Yet the question is whether standing liabilities and specific moments are incompatible. If a disadvantage such as environmental fragility persists through at least recorded history and even beyond, the specific moments may appear distinctive even while the nature of the underlying environmental problems are more uniform. Such is the case, we think, with recurring episodes of cold and dry climates that have marked the region’s environmental fragility in the past – not just fluctuations in weather but severe and recurring onsets of unfavorable climate change for several centuries at a time. Life may go on but in a step forward, two steps backward pace.

Two pages later, McNeill (2013: 30) remarks that:

The second eccentricity of water that shaped life and history in the MENA is more familiar: the sharply uneven distribution of fresh water, the prevalence of aridity, and the consequent ecological responsiveness to even modest climate change. That responsiveness took the form of florescence in times of plentiful rainfall … and of crisis in times of low rainfall.⁵

This last statement is precisely the long-term environmental fragility that we have in mind. It is one that encompasses at least the last 15,000 years and definitely continues today.⁶

Curiously, though, the full MENA climate story remains relatively unknown and under-appreciated. Historians of the Middle East have been reluctant to give much weight to climate change in their analyses, preferring instead to emphasize personalities, dynasties, and culture. It has only been fairly recently that some analysts have begun to move away from the assumption that the Middle Eastern climate has been relatively constant over the past 10–15 millennia. Historians tend also to compartmentalize their analyses temporally. Just as archaeologists tend to specialize in interpreting specific mounds of trash, historians specialize in the ancient world, Byzantium and early Islam, or more contemporary interactions. The possibility that certain continuities influence behavior across the entire time span of Homo sapiens occupation in the Middle East, as a consequence, has not been tested very often.

Another propensity is to instinctively explain what happens in terms of what people do and have done. Agency is paramount. Things do not simply happen. Humans must be responsible for whatever damage they have done. While this instinct is preferable to an older propensity to explain things in terms of the fickleness of the gods, it can get in the way of telling the story appropriately. For example, one school of thought emphasizes “overshoot.” Decision-making and human activity exploit its resource base until the exploitation boomerangs. Deforestation, soil erosion, or soil salinization from over-irrigation undermine the possibility of agricultural productivity. Large populations, the beneficiaries of growth and exploitation, are at risk. Only Malthusian remedies will suffice.

Alternatively, another school of thought stresses the resilience of human populations. Collapses may come and go but people persist. The complexities they have developed at one point in time may need to be dispensed with as conditions dictate but people do not vanish. Instead, they simplify. If large cities cannot be sustained, they fall back on living in small villages until large cities can once again be constructed and maintained.

Still other, older arguments have emphasized barbarian attacks, trade disruptions, and the rise and fall of dynasties to explain what has transpired. Lean, mean savages from the mountains or the deserts periodically swarm down on defenseless cities and destroy civilization. Periods of increased economic integration fall apart when something intervenes – be it war, more barbarians, or disease – to block the gains accruing from exchanges of information and commodities. The framework for summarizing ancient Egyptian history is most revealing. The Old Kingdom dynasties give way to the Middle Kingdom dynasties that in turn are replaced by the New Kingdom dynasties. Each dynastic cluster is separated by an “intermediate” period of turmoil, disaster, and disorder.

Our point is not that these interpretative emphases are wrong. Humans, individually and collectively, possess variable amounts of agency and resilience. Decision-makers zig when they might have zagged given the same operative environmental conditions. If people did not have some resilience, the human population would have withered away long ago as another failed experiment in species development. Barbarians from the mountains and deserts have roles to play in history. Periods of increased economic integration do give way to setbacks before more integration is accomplished. Governments do rise and fall. However, what is often missing is an important common denominator, and especially so in Middle Eastern stories. It is climate change that helps weave together these various strands of emphasis. Climate change does not trigger resource overexploitation but it exacerbates it. Climate change does not necessarily overwhelm resilience in every instance but it can if the deterioration of environmental conditions is sufficiently severe and prolonged. Barbarian attacks are not random. They are driven by pastoralists and nomads looking for water, pastures, and more benign climates. Some easy loot on the side would not be a bad thing either. These goals tend to be realized or at least attempted by moving toward cities. Thus, nomads come into increased contact and conflict with more sedentary populations. Interruptions of economic integration can often be traced to fundamental changes in climate that lead to breakdowns in exchange patterns. Governments fall, especially in an agrarian era, when they can no longer extract taxes from farmers who can no longer grow crops because it is too cold, hot, or dry. In other words, climate change is not deterministic but it is extremely influential in bringing together a number of problems that are sometimes too difficult to overcome or survive. It provides a context for when these types of problems are more or less likely to occur.

To be sure, the problems with attributing causal significance to climate change in history are daunting. The evidence is often sketchy. Historical climate data are measured in longer time units than are political and economic behaviors of interest. We have data measured in centuries. Yet governmental regimes often collapse in specific years. Can the longer-term data be correlated with the shorter-term behavior? Moreover, archaeologists revise their data periodically on the timing of dynastic rise and falls. Sometimes events once thought to be influenced by climate change turn out to have occurred prior to the climate change after the dates are revised. Moreover, rival hypotheses abound and frequently there is even less data to address them. Can we be confident that climate change is the key when it is difficult to assess the power of alternative explanations?

We seek to be reasonable in our undertaking. Sometimes the data support climate change playing a significant causal role. Other times, the evidence is lacking. If scholars allow themselves to take these data problems too seriously, analytical paralysis is the likely outcome. Instead, we need to do the best we can with what evidence we can develop. Ironically perhaps, one advantage that is found in looking at climate impacts is that we usually are not attempting to link the amount of rainfall in say one day, week, month, or even year to behavior in that same time period. The kind of climate change that we are examining in the present study tends to persist for long periods of time – even centuries. It is the prolonged change that is so powerful, and all the more so if it is a rather severe change. As Knapp and Manning (2016: 113) note:

The minimum criterion needed to assess whether climate can be considered in any way directly associated with historical change is to establish a chronological linkage. Thus, if climate can be shown to be particularly positive, or negative, as relevant to a particular region or even throughout a hemisphere, during years X1 to Xn, and there is good archaeological or documentary evidence of historical impact and change (plausibly associated with such climate) in or immediately following those years, then it would be reasonable to assess whether there is a real linkage and a case of climate forcing, or affecting, history… Generally, significant change does not involve regular, high frequency, single-year ‘blips,’ whether good or bad: human societies are usually well adapted to overcome lean or bad years. Rather, it is longer, multi-year, even multi-decade climactic episodes that may undermine long-standing agrarian, economic, and/or political regimes and that might precipitate historical change.

We propose to take chronology one step further by looking at multiple cases over a very long period of time.⁷ One way to underscore the role of climate in Middle Eastern affairs is to focus on salient cases in order to assess how much difference climate change might have made. Conventionally, authors stay within modest temporal parameters and look at, say, the fall of Akkad thousands of years ago or the Ottoman Empire in the 17th century CE. Less conventionally, another approach is to string together an overview of salient episodes of behavioral changes that occur within roughly predicted windows of climate change periods. We attempt the latter approach in this examination, beginning with the Younger Dryas era and the origins of agriculture question going back many millennia and ending our historical review with the Ottoman Empire that disintegrated in the 20th century. Throughout we rely heavily on other scholars’ analysis. We do not have incredibly novel things to say about either the Younger Dryas era or the Ottoman Empire. But we think there is some definite value added by looking at and comparing episodes of rise and decline in the MENA that appear to be strongly influenced by climate change. We do so for the longitudinal advantages of examining the longue duree of 15,000 years. If we find recurring behavior when similar types of climate change prevail throughout history, it will help our case. We also do it because we think the previous history has value for anticipating what might happen to MENA in the next and ongoing bout of climate deterioration. That is why we are confining our examination to MENA climate changes and human behavior. Contemporary global warming is not totally similar to the repetitive bouts of cooling that we will be examining in the book. Yet the outcome may be similar in kind if both extreme cooling and warming lead to drought, famine, food insecurities, disease, and, possibly, increased conflict.

Climate change will have repercussions throughout the world but it seems set to transform the MENA region into something never experienced before. Should this come as a surprise? Climate change, after all, has been given a great deal of credit by some for once shaping socio-economics and politics in the ancient Middle East. But it was also there that the significance of climate was beaten down as grossly exaggerated as an important explanatory factor. Yet it is not so much a case of rampant determinism bestowed on an ancient single driver as it has been much easier to make a deterministic case in the ancient world than in subsequent years. That may change. If climate change becomes so horrendous that it is near deterministic in terms of what can and cannot be done in MENA, we will have returned to an earlier phase in the history of MENA.

One way to interpret this situation from a long-term perspective is that climate change was initially a major driver of M...