Water securitySyrian crisis altered region’s land and water resources
The Syrian civil war and subsequent refugee migration caused sudden changes in the area’s land use and freshwater resources. Using satellite imagery processed in Google Earth Engine, researchers determined the conflict in Syria caused agricultural irrigation and reservoir storage to decrease by nearly 50 percent compared to prewar conditions.
The Syrian civil war and subsequent refugee migration caused sudden changes in the area’s land use and freshwater resources, according to satellite data analyzed by Stanford researchers.
The findings, published in the 5 December issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, are the first to demonstrate detailed water management practices in an active war zone. Using satellite imagery processed in Google Earth Engine, Stanford researchers determined the conflict in Syria caused agricultural irrigation and reservoir storage to decrease by nearly 50 percent compared to prewar conditions.
“The water management practices in Syria have changed and that’s visible from space,” said study co-author and principal investigator Steven Gorelick, the Cyrus Fisher Tolman Professor in Stanford’s School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences. “The Syrian crisis has resulted in a reduction in agricultural land in southern Syria, a decline in Syrian demand for irrigation water and a dramatic change in the way the Syrians manage their reservoirs.”
Stanford U says that the study focuses on impacts from 2013 to 2015 in the Yarmouk-Jordan river watershed, which is shared by Syria, Jordan, and Israel. Study co-author Jim Yoon, a Ph.D. candidate in Earth system science at Stanford, thought of the idea to study the Syrian war’s impact on water resources when he noticed an increase in Yarmouk River flow based on streamflow data from Jordan’s Ministry of Water and Irrigation.
“The big challenge for us was that it was going to be next to impossible to get on-the-ground data in Syria,” Yoon said. “We couldn’t really close the story without this information in Syria – that was what led us to use remote sensing data.”
Using composite images of the eleven largest Syrian-controlled surface water reservoirs in the basin, researchers measured a 49 percent decrease in reservoir storage. Irrigated crops are greener than natural vegetation during the dry summer season. This characteristic was used to show Syria’s irrigated land in the basin had decreased by 47 percent.
Gorelick and his team looked at water management and land use on the Jordanian side of the Yarmouk basin and in Israel’s Golan Heights as a baseline for understanding areas unaffected by the refugee crisis.
