Secretary of State John Kerry acknowledged Saturday that climate change didn’t cause the Syrian conflict, but he said it did play a large role in making the situation worse.
In a speech at the Milan Expo in Italy, Kerry said that climate change and the resulting food shortages play a large role in national security and urged the international community to come together to find a solution.
“Make no mistake: The implications here extend well beyond hunger,” Kerry said, according to an Associated Press report. “This isn’t only about global food security; it’s about global security — period.”
Violence in Syria under the regime of President Bashar Assad has resulted in the mass migration of millions of immigrants into Europe, straining resources there. Kerry said that the already-bad situation under the regime was worsened by climate change and the resulting drought and food shortage.
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“I’m not suggesting the crisis in Syria was caused by climate change — obviously, it wasn’t,” Kerry said in the speech. “It was caused by a brutal dictator who barrel-bombed, starved, tortured and gassed his own people. But the devastating drought clearly made a bad situation a lot worse.”
Kerry urged countries around the world to work together to solve climate change, saying that if it is not a global effort, the current refugee crisis will look good compared to future mass migrations.
“Unless the world meets the urgency of this moment, the horrific refugee situation we’re facing today will pale in comparison to the mass migrations that intense droughts, sea-level rise, and other impacts of climate change are likely to bring about,” he said.
In last week’s Democratic presidential debate, two candidates — Martin O’Malley and Sen. Bernie Sanders — named climate change as the top national security threat facing the United States.
