Even after the start of Syria’s civil war in 2011, beekeeper Muhammad Salih regularly traveled along the country’s northern border with Turkey in search of the best spots to produce the honey that sustained his family. It wasn’t until four years later, when Islamic State militants took control of his hometown and killed his brother-in-law along with his seven children, that Salih decided it was time to move for good.
“We buried them and crossed into Turkey,” said the 46-year-old, who now lives in Karkamis, a small Turkish town near the Syrian border. “I had to sell all 250 of my beehives for a third of what they would have been worth if I hadn’t been in such a rush.”
But while Salih has left sectarian violence behind, he hasn’t been able to escape extreme weather. Drought has cut his honey production in half over the past five years. This year, the rains returned, but brought intense flooding and hail that destroyed the flowers his business depends on.
Over the past decade, Turkey has hosted one of the largest refugee populations in the world — millions of Syrians for whom an increasingly unpredictable cycle of heat, drought and floods has continuously shaped daily routines as well as long-term prospects. Severe drought compounded the economic and social pressures that ultimately led to Syria’s uprising. But while the civil war ended in late 2024, man-made climate change has supercharged the extreme and erratic weather that is hampering people’s efforts to rebuild their lives on both sides of the border, threatening agricultural production in Turkey and complicating Syria’s economic and social recovery. Flooding along the banks of the Euphrates river in Syria this year displaced over 3,600 people.
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Their experience is a harbinger of a broader threat. Almost 90 million individuals, or three-quarters of the world’s forcibly displaced people, live in countries that are highly exposed to climate hazards, according to the United Nations. What’s happening in Turkey is an emblem of how, even when war ends, global warming can make displacement and destitution all but intractable for vast numbers of people.
As the COP31 climate summit begins in Turkey next week, the impact of global warming on the world’s most vulnerable populations will be in focus. Nearly 4 million displaced people have returned to Syria over the past two years, according to November data from the UN’s refugee agency. Their ability to rebuild depends on replacing infrastructure wrecked during the 14-year war, but also on ensuring efforts account for growing climate pressures, the agency said.
However, funding to help vulnerable communities adapt to increasingly harsher conditions is dwindling, with official development assistance falling more than 23% from 2024 to 2025. Developing countries need an annual $305 billion by 2035, according to the UN. Up to $31.7 billion went into international public adaptation finance flows in 2024, the most recent data from the UN showed.
Diminishing resources add pressure on communities that already host large refugee populations. Tensions over water supply have existed in the Middle East, the world’s most water-stressed region, for decades. Syria and neighboring Iraq have long accused Turkey, which sits further upstream, of restricting flows, which Turkey denies. Turkey stepped up cooperation last year, agreeing to help Syria rebuild water infrastructure and signing a water and irrigation accord with Iraq. Still, no comprehensive three-country water-sharing agreement has been made. As the strongest El Niño on record nears its peak, shrinking water supplies and inadequate management make an already contested water supply even more precious — and potentially more contentious.
“Climate change is an accelerator of conflict and that forcefully leads to departures and creates insecurity,” said Fabrice Balanche, a geographer at Lumière University Lyon 2 in France and an expert on Syria. “Adaptation to climate change can’t happen collectively without a state strategy — individuals can only adapt if they have money, or if they migrate.”
Unpredictable Rains
Syrian refugees in southern Turkey don’t have many employment options. Most have become seasonal agricultural workers, a floating population of several hundred thousand cheap laborers who pick cotton, eggplants, pistachios, peppers and tomatoes, moving from one harvest to another, often living in makeshift tents and shacks and making as little as 2,000 Turkish lira ($40) a day.
But even this work is becoming more precarious as extreme heat and erratic rainfall squeeze the farms that provide seasonal employment. Rainfall in southeastern Turkey was 53% below its long-term average in the 2025 hydrological year, the steepest decline of any region in the country, according to Turkey’s state meteorological service.
On the outskirts of Karkamis, pistachio farmers have been waiting for the government to complete an irrigation project that will carry water from the Euphrates river to their fields, reducing their reliance on rainfall and giving them a more stable water supply. The green nuts are a Middle Eastern staple, which Turkey exports to Italy and Germany as well as countries across the region.
It’s taken more than a decade to complete 20% of the construction amid funding constraints and interruptions to government investment plans, said Idris Bozkurt, head of the town’s agricultural chamber. That’s left farmers more exposed to extreme weather and made seasonal work for Syrian laborers less predictable.
Before the drought, farmers in the area harvested every other year. Now, harvests happen once every three years, Bozkurt said. The return of rain last year was welcomed, but a supercell storm in May unleashed heavy rains and hail on the region’s farms, with some farmers losing anywhere between a third and all of their crops.
“Ten years ago, we didn’t have these problems,” Bozkurt said.
Some farmers are taking matters into their own hands. Mehmet Delibalta is paying out-of-pocket for an irrigation system to support his pistachio farm, at a cost of about 14,000 Turkish lira per quarter-acre. “It’s worth it, given the increasingly unpredictable weather conditions,” he said, as he watched a group of men digging canals and laying blue plastic pipes on his land.
That sort of expense is beyond Ali Yilmaz, a 76-year-old pistachio farmer. The past year’s climate woes mean he now owes banks 3 million Turkish lira. About a third of that is interest-free credit given to farmers under a state-sponsored program, but he pays 40% to 50% interest on the rest.
“I was only able to get insurance for half of my nearly 7.5 acres of pistachio orchard,” Yilmaz said. “I simply couldn’t afford to insure all of it.”
Odd Jobs
For Syrian refugees seeking transient agricultural work, the weather has made life even tougher.
In Turkey, they are granted free education and healthcare, as well as economic support following a €6 billion ($6.7 billion) deal with the European Union in 2016. But unlike Turkish-born seasonal agricultural workers, who travel from one harvest to another, Syrians’ movement between regions is restricted. If extreme weather ruins harvests, they have to scrape by doing odd jobs.
“Syrians that became seasonal agricultural workers were at the very bottom of the hierarchical order, they were even more vulnerable, more open to exploitation than Turkish workers,” said Pinar Dinc, a Turkish researcher at Lund University in Sweden and the lead author of a report on Syrian agricultural workers in Turkey. “They’re going through another nightmare.”
On the Harran plain east of Karkamis, Zahra Jasib lives in a shack with her husband, who works on local farms, and their two children. In summer, the cement walls of their shack become unbearably hot. When it rains, water leaks into the only room, which is scattered with Turkish language textbooks that bear testimony of the family’s efforts to adapt to their new life.
More unpredictable weather means Jasib’s husband doesn’t always get hired and is often forced to look for construction work.
“My husband isn’t always paid with money, but we don’t go hungry because they pay him in flour, bread, sugar or tea,” she said. “We have been here for 11 years and at least here our children can go to school.”
While their situation is dire, the prospect of going back to Syria is unthinkable.
“There are no doctors, there are no offices and no schools in Syria,” Jasib said. “My family is still in Syria and all they tell us is ‘don’t come, don’t come.’”
Social Tensions
Just before the 2011 uprising, Muhammed Ameen graduated as an agriculture engineer from the University of Aleppo. Now, at 39, he works in a fertilizer shop in the Syrian border town of Jarablus and farms what land he can find to survive.
“Many Syrians are coming back, but they only last two or three months before leaving again, especially if they came from Europe,” he said.
“I think about leaving, but I can’t do it, because traveling requires financial resources,” Ameen said. “I also think that if agricultural technologies develop, if there is support available, then the country will prosper.”
Before the war, about a quarter of Syria’s population worked in agriculture and many more had some link to farming, according to Balanche, the geographer. The country exported wheat and was practically self-sufficient when it came to food, he said.
But years of mismanagement and drought intensified by man-made global warming have damaged the land. Syria’s groundwater tables are declining by an estimated 1.75 meters per year, according to the UN refugee agency, and average maximum temperatures are expected to rise by up to 2C over the next two decades.
In the country’s north, “the level of water is depleting at a rate that’s quite dramatic,” said Sebastien Roland, country head for Turkey and Syria at French non-profit Acted, which has been monitoring water levels in dozens of boreholes since the end of 2019.
Last year’s rains improved agricultural yields, Ameen said, but brought fungal diseases and insects. Power cuts, high energy prices and a shortage of parts for fixing broken machinery make farming even harder. For many, the only viable option is to move to informal settlements on what once was agricultural land.
“Now you have a population that can’t grow their tomatoes and aubergines [eggplants]not even in the countryside, and that need to buy them at extremely high prices,” Balanche said. “That is creating enormous social tensions.”
In recent months, armed bedouin tribes backed by the new government have moved with their herds of sheep and goat into abandoned agricultural lands, he added, rendering them barren.
“The state relies on bedouins, so they let them be and meanwhile, Syria’s food security is at stake,” he said. “Thousands of agricultural hectares in Syria are becoming lost and being destroyed.”
Turkey and Syria face similar challenges over water, said Dinc, the Turkish researcher. The difference lies in government resources, which in Syria are especially limited.
But even Turkey is seeing new tensions arise. Lower water levels in reservoirs means having to choose between producing electricity or releasing it to farmers. The more water Turkey retains for its own use, the scarcer it becomes downstream in Syria and Iraq.
“Water becomes an issue no matter what,” Dinc said. “It’s a catch-22 situation.”
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
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