.jpg)
Overview
Syria is characterized by a predominantly arid to semi-arid climate, with much of its territory receiving less than 250 millimeters of annual rainfall. Historically, the Euphrates River provided a vital lifeline for agriculture, rural livelihoods, and urban water supply. However, prolonged droughts, exacerbated by climate change and Türkiye’s upstream damming, have significantly reduced water availability. Between 2007 and 2010, the country experienced one of its worst droughts in recorded history—an event widely seen as a precursor to mass rural displacement and deepening socioeconomic stress. The civil war that began in 2011 further weakened Syria’s environmental governance, degraded critical infrastructure, and disrupted climate adaptation efforts. Today, climate models project a continued rise in average temperatures of at least 2 degrees Celsius by 2050, paired with declining precipitation and increased frequency of extreme weather events such as heat waves and sandstorms. These changes threaten to aggravate Syria’s existing water crisis, deepen agricultural collapse, and heighten competition over dwindling natural resources.
Prior to the outbreak of conflict, oil and agriculture collectively accounted for nearly half of Syria’s GDP, with both sectors highly sensitive to environmental conditions. Decades of over-extracting groundwater and insufficient investment in rural infrastructure had already left the agricultural sector vulnerable. The war further decimated agricultural capacity, especially in eastern and northern Syria, where infrastructure damage, land degradation, and mass displacement have upended traditional farming systems. Meanwhile, water scarcity has reached crisis levels in parts of the country thanks to a combination of prolonged drought, transboundary water tensions, and damaged public utilities. The Euphrates has become a focal point of regional contention, with Turkish dam projects upstream significantly altering downstream flow and water security in Syrian territory.
As Syria emerges from over a decade of civil war, the new transitional government faces the dual challenge of reconstruction and climate resilience. While the Constitutional Declaration of March 2025 outlines broad governance reforms, it remains largely silent on environmental protection and climate adaptation. Moreover, the executive branch, which retained significant authority under the new framework, risks replicating past patterns of centralized decision-making that deprioritize environmental sustainability. Without a comprehensive national climate strategy, Syria’s fragile recovery is likely to be undermined by continued ecological degradation, rural-urban migration, and intercommunal tensions linked to resource scarcity. In this context, integrating climate risk into governance, infrastructure planning, and economic revitalization will be essential to achieving long-term peace and stability.
As Syria emerges from over a decade of civil war, the new transitional government faces the dual challenge of reconstruction and climate resilience.
National Approaches and Strategies
Syria’s Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) of 2018—its only formalized climate strategy—makes clear that the state’s environmental policy has been principally shaped by the pressures of war. The document identifies agriculture, irrigation, and energy as critical fronts for action, but progress is nearly always framed as limited by the material costs of conflict and international sanctions on Bashar al-Assad’s regime. At multiple points, the authors allege that the costliest disruptions to agricultural and water systems came at the hands of rebel groups, and that the “coercive” economic isolation of the state significantly hampered its response to environmental deterioration. Nevertheless, the document presents several trends that illustrate Syria’s unique vulnerability to climate change alongside a series of measures the former government claims to have pursued in response—claims that can be compared against the policies recorded in this database.
Syria’s greenhouse gas emissions totaled 79.07 teragrams of CO2 equivalent in 2005, the overwhelming majority of which originated from the energy (73 percent) and agriculture (18 percent) sectors, followed by minor emissions from waste (5 percent) and industry (4 percent). Forest cover, which extended over 32 percent of Syrian territory in the twentieth century, deteriorated to less than 3 percent, primarily because of drought, wildfire, and land encroachment. Extreme temperatures, pollution, and dust storms likewise severely impact natural habitats and ecological maintenance efforts. Reinforced by wartime stresses, these climatic changes have rendered Syria one of the most climate-vulnerable countries in the world, with the state possessing limited human and technological capital to effectively execute the mitigation and adaptation strategies discussed in the NDC. As a result, the institutional tools contained in this database consolidate a plethora of adaptive and mitigative measures into very few ministries.
Syrian mitigation measures focus mainly on agriculture and forestry—rehabilitating degraded pastures, promoting sustainable agriculture, recycling agricultural waste for energy—and “modernizing” irrigation and energy systems. The vast majority of these actions were assigned to the Ministry of Agriculture and Agrarian Reform (MAAR) and, to a lesser extent, the Ministry of Irrigation (which was renamed the Ministry of Water Resources in 2012 and consolidated into the Ministry of Energy in March 2025). Some policies, such as MAAR’s resolutions on the cultivation of certain crops based on soil health and drought periods, are comprehensive and generally align with the NDC’s prescriptions. At least four such resolutions were implemented between 2005 and 2014, with one establishing a fund dedicated to mitigating the effects of drought and natural disasters on agricultural production. Other policies address granular, often administrative concerns such as the issuance of licenses for olive presses, which can contaminate irrigation channels with solid and liquid waste (Resolution No. 119 of 2007).
Prior to the war, the Syrian state had taken some actions to mitigate consumer greenhouse gas emissions, which yielded limited results: Industrial and non-industrial carbon emissions only rose before 2011. One such measure was the Environmental Protection Fee (Legislative Decree No. 42 of 2005), which levied a fine that increased based on a vehicle’s year of manufacture and the quality of its exhaust fumes, but it is unclear how substantially this policy was enforced. Months after that law’s passage, Syria ratified the Kyoto Protocol (Legislative Decree No. 73 of 2005) without discussing any concrete steps to meet the targets outlined in that commitment. In 2018, the state claimed that it was continuing its focus on the transportation sector through efforts to restrict used car imports, develop public transport, and enhance vehicle inspection. It also noted that some of the most dramatic emissions decreases came from the involuntary effect of international sanctions on industrial emissions. Though the energy industry has consistently made up a dominant share of the Syrian economy, demand in that sector collapsed in 2011 and carbon emissions decreased by over 50 percent in the five years thereafter.
Syria directs much of its adaptive strategy toward the issues of water management and biological conservation. Most consistently, it has delineated environmental habitats, such as Alkhatouneya Lake and Ghazala Spring, as “protected areas” subject to protection and management by MAAR or the Ministry of Local Administration and Environment. Most protected areas are forests or critical water sources concentrated in the northeast and the southernmost provinces, the areas most affected by dry seasons. Many of these designations have not proven sufficient to prevent deforestation, pollution, or the total elimination of these areas: Ghazala Spring and other water sources in the southern province of Daraa have deteriorated or entirely dried up in the latest drought gripping Syria. Another measure, issued contemporaneously with the NDC, is Law No. 6 of 2018, which establishes comprehensive limits on forest exploitation with an explicit commitment to the sustainable management of lumber resources. Yet environmental degradation remains more pervasive than ever. Rises in illegal logging were recorded as recently as the final months of the Assad regime, driven by both the lucrative charcoal industry in milder coastal areas and seasonal fuel shortages in cold-prone southern provinces.
Syria’s climate strategy during the Assad regime represents a patchwork of mitigative and adaptive gestures whose impact has been severely limited by protracted civil war and ineffective enforcement. The state insists on the need for climate action, but much of its reflection is defensive, with past efforts emphasized and shortcomings blamed on the actions of rebel groups rather than capacity issues outright. Many commitments to preserving the environment and mitigating carbon emissions have been made, but they lack specific timetables and suffer from severe compliance issues.
Syria’s climate strategy during the Assad regime represents a patchwork of mitigative and adaptive gestures whose impact has been severely limited by protracted civil war and ineffective enforcement.
Budgetary Analysis
This budgetary analysis demonstrates that the Syrian state under Assad did not prioritize investment in its climate governance strategy and instead aimed to keep pace with massive and persistent decreases in the purchasing power of the Syrian pound. For almost every year accounted for in our database, the national budget sharply increased, sometimes doubling, while real spending sharply decreased, sometimes halving, as it did from 2020 to 2021. As a result, the agriculture, water resources, and local administration ministries all saw nominal funding increases—but in constant terms, purchasing power eroded, which undermined their capacity to substantively govern climate issues.
The observable shock in 2020 and the years afterward can be explained in large part by the economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on an already isolated Syria, as there was mild growth in real spending from 2017 to 2019. However, that pre-pandemic growth did not always translate to linear increases in the proportion of the budget dedicated to climate governance: Between 2018 and 2019, nearly every relevant ministry’s share of the budget decreased by 10 to 20 percent. The only exceptions were the Ministry of Industry and the Ministry of Electricity, which saw 7 percent and 30 percent growth respectively.
Despite its key role in food security, MAAR commanded only a 1.66 percent share of the national budget at its peak in 2018. The Ministry of Water Resources, another essential body, fluctuated much more dramatically, most likely in response to the severity of dry seasons. The Ministry of Petroleum and Mineral Resources consistently demands little financing yet yields significant revenues and surpluses, presumably because of the body’s collaboration with private entities in extractive projects. Compared with the scale of the industry’s carbon emissions and the centrality of the energy sector to the Syrian economy, this imbalance is to be expected but casts doubt on the state’s commitment to transitioning to renewable energy.
Database Analysis
Our database contains a selection of ministerial resolutions, laws, legislative decrees, and executive instructions that illustrate the fundamentally fragmented execution of Syrian climate strategy. Policies were evaluated based on their fulfillment of three criteria: political processes (transparency, accountability, and representation), capacity of actors (human capacity, financial capacity, and oversight), and institutional mandate (management of goals). Above all, it is clear that conflict severely limited the state’s urgency in addressing climate vulnerabilities: forty-two of the policies we evaluated were adopted prior to the beginning of the civil war, and most were concentrated in only a few ministries. The result is a system in which institutional ambition is characteristically decoupled from pragmatic implementation.
We found that nearly all of Syria’s climate policies explicitly articulated their purpose and relied upon or created institutional mechanisms to pursue their goals. In fourteen cases, new governing bodies and research centers were established for the express purpose of addressing or studying a particular climate-related vulnerability. Some of these bodies address accelerants of conflict and environmental decay, such as the Agrarian Research Centre (Resolution No. 20/W of 2007), which is tasked with assessing the viability of plant and animal cultivation while supporting external research into obstacles to food production. More recent foundational measures have created and expanded funds to support the adoption of renewable energy, as in Law No. 23 of 2021, or to mitigate the effects of drought on agriculture, as in Legislative Decree No. 21 of 2013. Given the unique severity of Syria’s climatic threats, these developments appear promising on paper. However, when evaluated against political processes criteria, we found that mandates rarely contained features that ensured their provisions would be put into force.
Our transparency criterion is defined as the explicit designation of an implementing authority for a given action, though it should be noted that satisfaction of this standard does not always translate into transparency for state apparatuses in general. Some regulations, despite being plainly situated within the bureaucracy, have drawn criticism for their entrenchment of corrupt public-private partnerships that were a staple of Assad-era Syria. Law No. 41 of 2022, for instance, has been described by some analysts as a “gateway to corruption” for its revision of prior electricity distribution statutes that required private producers sell their product to the Ministry of Electricity rather than consumers directly. Charitably, this could represent the state adapting to an economically disadvantageous position by outsourcing some of its energy distribution duties to market actors, or, more critically, it could be an exploitative maneuver that allows regime-aligned firms to drive up consumer prices directly. In any event, the lack of coherent oversight for these partnerships underscores the necessity of discrete accountability mechanisms for true state transparency on climate governance. Twenty-one of the measures that satisfied the transparency criterion—as defined in our methodology—failed to satisfy the accountability criterion, typically because there were no channels for compliance verification in the policy text.
As noted above, each of these measures occupies a different point on a spectrum of granularity. Agricultural production regulation, energy distribution policy, and irrigation development plans are characteristically wide-ranging in their mandates, occasionally at the cost of specific implementation schemes. Policy in broad strokes is certainly necessary at times given the intersectional effects of climate change, but the strongest measures in this database made express commitments to cross-sectoral and multi-level collaboration where those issues most affected specific localities. We found that roughly four in five climate policies satisfied our representation criterion; some because their scope was inherently localized, and others because local representatives and subnational bodies were actively incorporated into management schemes. In Legislative Decree No. 28 of 2014, concerning agricultural production and relationships, both the Ministry of State for Environmental Affairs and representatives from local farming communities were incorporated into deliberative positions where they had originally been absent. It is difficult to assess how meaningfully these provisions were put into force, but if pursued consistently, such collaboration should be considered a strength of Syrian climate governance, especially in the early years of protracted conflict.
Of the bodies tasked with implementing Syria’s climate policy, MAAR and the Ministry of Irrigation were (unsurprisingly) responsible for implementing the vast majority of the policies and regulations contained in this database. Thirty-eight of the forty-eight institutional tools we evaluated were nested within these two ministries. Given the attrition of human capital that can be expected from a war and the sheer economic crisis that Syria faced from 2011 on, we found pragmatic implementation by even these well-developed ministries to be unlikely at best, especially on granular issues.
As argued in state reports and substantiated by our analysis, the lack of human, technological, and financial capacity is the most persistent barrier toward progress on mitigation, adaptation, and risk-vulnerability management in Syria. We determined that approximately 22 percent of the policies in this database explicitly accounted for the financial capacity required for execution. Those that identified funding sources typically did so in a foundational capacity, when establishing dedicated funds for climate issues or new ministerial organs. Other laws spare these details even when necessary for implementation; funding is simply implied to come from somewhere within the ministry tasked with taking action. Certainly, not all policies require discrete funding mechanisms to fulfill their purpose. But these instruments are essential to delivering on the ambitions outlined in the national climate strategy, especially given Syria’s fiscal difficulties. Moreover, virtually none of the policies we reviewed contained clear timelines for achieving emission reduction targets—or even more limited goals—in either the short term (by 2030) or the long term (by 2060). Considering the urgency of Syria’s present situation, clearly articulated timelines will be indispensable in building long-term climate resilience.
Consistent with our contextual findings and the timbre of the Syrian climate strategy in the NDC, this database shows a state coping with the financial and physical demands of war, limited in either the capacity or the willingness to invest in its climate strategy to the scale of the threats facing the most vulnerable of its citizens. The new Syrian government faces the monumental challenge of establishing its legitimacy, managing regional conflict, initiating a process for transitional justice, and stewarding a physical environment that has been critically damaged by a generation of war. Climate change, though historically treated as secondary to security threats, will in fact play an essential role in the state’s success or failure. The civil war itself exacerbated successive multi-year droughts that severely damaged and destroyed vulnerable natural areas. Water and food scarcity contributed to internal strife and drove thousands of internally displaced Syrians to urban centers, further straining already burdened infrastructure in the country’s most conflict-affected regions. Even if conflict has lowered in intensity since Assad’s ouster, opportunities for a renewal of hostilities are likely to become more frequent if the state does not incorporate a coherent climate strategy into its mandate. Despite the strength of this pattern, the Constitutional Declaration of March 2025 makes no mention of the state’s role in mitigating climate-related threats. Success in the future will require taking advantage of Syria’s emergence from wartime isolation and building on the legitimate ambitions of the old regime by focusing the country’s near-term development on sustainable industry, economic diversification, and international efforts to safeguard its resilience for the long term.
Climate change, though historically treated as secondary to security threats, will in fact play an essential role in the state’s success or failure.
It is important to note that since the fall of Assad in December 2024, the new government has yet to introduce meaningful policies on climate change mitigation and adaptation. With billions of dollars in potential reconstruction investments, the new leadership has a critical opportunity to integrate climate and environmental priorities into its development agenda. By reallocating resources toward projects that emphasize sustainability, particularly in the regions most devastated by the war, the government could not only rebuild essential infrastructure but also use comprehensive policy to lay the foundation for a more resilient, inclusive, and future-oriented recovery.
