At the Colorado School of Mines, Hussein A. Amery is a professor of water politics and policy, where he teaches courses on the political economy of resources, the Middle East and water politics and policy — course titles include the likes of “Geopolitics of Natural Resources.”
His academic expertise is in human and environmental security, transboundary water conflicts, and in identifying and analyzing threats to critical infrastructure in the Arab Gulf states and the wider Middle East. He’s also an expert on Islamic perspectives on water management and the natural environment, and it’s this wide array of expertise he brings to the Interfaith Lecture Series at 2 p.m. today in the Hall of Philosophy, contributing to the theme of “Water: A Metaphor for Life.”
A fellow of the International Water Resources Association, Amery is co-editor of Water in the Middle East: A Geography of Peace and the author of Arab Water Security: Threats and Opportunities in the Gulf States — an exploration of the Arab Gulf states’ reliance on desalination plants, and the first systematic and comprehensive discussion of threats to the Middle East’s freshwater supply.
“I have been studying various aspects of water and food security in the Middle East for a long time,” Amery wrote for The Conversation in 2019. “Now I have begun a new project studying the social and economic conditions needed to repatriate rural refugees to the farming communities in Syria.”
Interviewing Syrian refugees living in Lebanon, Amery noted that many from the northern and northeastern regions could more accurately be viewed as climate refugees; they weren’t fleeing the worsening conflict of the Syrian Civil War, but drought.
“The land,” one farmer from Raqqa told Amery, “has been giving less and less.”
Droughts are becoming more and more frequent — every seven or eight years, compared once every 55 years in past centuries, he wrote — directly impacting the Fertile Crescent, situated between the Tigris and Euprahtes and home to some of humanity’s earliest civilizations. A study in 2011 found that Syrian households had lost 19.5% of their income as a result of droughts and other environmental factors. Rain-dependent farmers — typically poorer — were hit harder than those who relied on irrigation systems, too.
“There is not a direct, immediate relationship between changing climate and the drive to migrate. The climate can change slowly, and people don’t usually respond instantly when circumstances shift,” he wrote. “Thousands of Syrians have been leaving northern and northeastern parts of the country over the past 20 years or so.”
Many of the refugees Amery interviewed, he wrote, told him that even if it were safe to return to Syria, they wouldn’t.
“They feared they would be unable to eke out a living from the increasingly arid land,” Amery wrote, noting damaged water infrastructure that awaited the farmers should they return. “… Together, the drought and the war’s destruction mean it’s unlikely that many of these refugees will leave Lebanon anytime soon — if at all. The Syrian civil war may end one day, but the land’s problems will remain.”
