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Civil war hinders crop production and threatens food security in Syria

Nature Food volume 3, pages 38–46 (2022)Cite this article

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Abstract

Assessing the impact of violent conflict on Syrian agriculture is challenging given data limitations and attributability issues. Using satellite data at 30 m spatial resolution, we found that the extent of productive cropland showed greater interannual variability and spatial heterogeneity after the start of the civil war in 2011. Using changes in satellite-based night-time light as a proxy for war impact intensity, we also found that cropland close to severely impacted urban settlements faced greater disruption. Fixed-effects models revealed the relationship between productive cropland and precipitation for the pre-war period, whereas a counterfactual scenario constructed for the period 2012–2019 showed substantial variation at the regional level. While the ongoing conflict promoted cropland cultivation in safer zones, cropland reduction took place in the country’s northwest and southeast regions. Our study demonstrated the combined utility of daytime and night-time satellite data to assess food insecurity in extreme environments and can help guide distribution of food and aid in Syria.

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Fig. 1: Productive cropland and NTL dynamics in Syria.
Fig. 2: Annual productive cropland area for each governorate in Syria between 1998 and 2019.
Fig. 3: Relationship between changes in productive cropland area and the distance to the nearest urban settlements with severe NTL reduction.
Fig. 4: Spatial heterogeneity of the impact of war on agricultural cultivation in Syria.

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Data availability

The data used in this study are available at https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1Ldkl_kJ9zsFJbn4diP2-FbQSqbQG2EiE?usp=sharing. Annual productive cropland maps (30 m) and NTL maps (1 km) are also available at Zenodo (https://zenodo.org/record/5706374#.YbOY7dDMIuV). Precipitation data are downloadable at: https://chrsdata.eng.uci.edu/. Source data are provided with this paper.

Code availability

The code needed to reproduce the results, figures and tables is fully available at https://github.com/whulixiya/Civil-war-hinders-crop-production-and-threatens-food-security-in-Syria.git.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge the High Performance Computing Center at Texas Tech University for providing computational resources that have contributed to the research results reported in this paper. We thank the reviewers and the editor for their constructive comments, which have greatly improved the paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Information Engineering in Surveying, Mapping and Remote Sensing, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China

    Xi-Ya Li, Xi Li & Deren Li

  2. Department of Geosciences, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX, USA

    Xi-Ya Li & Xiao-Peng Song

  3. School of Public Economics and Administration, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, Shanghai, China

    Ziying Fan

  4. Environmental Computational Science and Earth Observation Laboratory, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Sion, Switzerland

    Li Mi

  5. Yale Center for Earth Observation, Yale School of the Environment, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA

    Tarek Kandakji

  6. Department of Geographical Sciences, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA

    Zhen Song

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Contributions

X.-P.S. conceived the study and designed cropland mapping and counterfactual analysis. X.L. and D.L. designed the NTL assessment. Z.F. designed the panel regression analysis. X.-Y.L., X.L., Z.F., Z.S. and X.-P.S. conducted the data analysis. All authors contributed to interpretation of the results. X.-Y.L., X.L., M.L. and X.-P.S. wrote the drafts with input from all authors.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Xi Li or Xiao-Peng Song.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Nature Food thanks Florian Schierhorn, Sergii Skakun and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Source data

Source Data Fig. 1

Source data for the scatter plots in panels b, c, e, and f.

Source Data Fig. 2

Source data for the line plots.

Source Data Fig. 3

Source data for the scatter plots.

Source Data Fig. 4

Geo-registered image depicting spatial heterogeneity of war impact on agricultural cultivation in Syria

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Li, XY., Li, X., Fan, Z. et al. Civil war hinders crop production and threatens food security in Syria. Nat Food 3, 38–46 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43016-021-00432-4

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