Annals of the University of Bucharest: Geography Series (Jan 2012)
The Role of the Environment in Triggering the Syrian Crisis
Abstract
The Syrian Arab Republic, located in Southwest Asia, is bordered by Irak, Jordan, Israel, Lebanon and Turkey; displaying to the west it has a 180 km long coastline on the Mediterranean Sea. From 1963 to 1970 Syria was governed by the so cialist Baath Party, and since 1970 it has been ruled by the Al Assad family (Hafez al-Assad a nd Bashar al-Assad, the latter since the year 2000), who had the same political orientation. The d elay in political and democratic reforms, in a country placed since 1963 under a state of emergenc y, the government inefficiency in dealing with the socio-economic problems, as well as the even ts that occurred in Tunisia, Egypt or Lybia, have led to the outbreak of violent protests, first in the city of Deraa, in March 2011, then in Baniy as, Latakia, Horms, Hama, Aleppo or Damascus, which res ulted in more than 9000 casualties. Moreover, in Syria the natural environment is a restrictive f actor for the social-economic development as more than half of the country is semi-arid or arid, enjo ying less than 200 mm of precipitation per year. As far as the soil cover is concerned, in the areas where precipitation is less than 250 mm per year aridisols are common. Syria has a population o f about 22 million people, while the annual growth rate is 2%. In the last decades the populatio n has increased more than four times in comparison to the figure registered in 1960, when i t numbered only 4.5 million inhabitants. This proves the state’s inefficiency in adopting family planning measures, aimed at regulating the growth in accordance with the natural resources. The present political crisis, generated by people’s complaints, has been triggered by the seri ous drawbacks of the democracy, the inefficient management of the population growth and the slow socio-economic development, which can be explained by the restrictive geographic al environment, so vulnerable to degradation and possessing limited resources.
