MENA SCIENCE

Did a mega drought topple empires 4,200 years ago?

'nature'
People abandoned thriving cities in Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley and farther afield at about the same time as a decades-long drought gripped parts of the planet. '

The drought hit in roughly 2200 bc, when the Akkadian Empire dominated what is now Syria and Iraq. By 2150 bc, the empire was no more. The central authority had disintegrated, and many people had voted with their feet, leaving the region.

The overlap between an epic drought and the collapse of the Akkadian Empire was no mere coincidence, according to Weiss, an archaeologist at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. When he and his colleagues discovered the evidence of drought in the early 1990s, they proposed that the abrupt climate disruption had brought the ancient empire down.

This example has become a grim warning of how vulnerable complex societies can be to climate change.
Seed banks: the last line of defense against a threatening global food crisis
'Guardian'
As climate breakdown and worldwide conflict continue to place the food system at risk, seed banks from the Arctic to Lebanon try to safeguard biodiversity.

As the risks from the climate crisis and global conflict increase, seed banks are increasingly considered a priceless resource that could one day prevent a worldwide food crisis. Two in five of the world’s plant species are at risk of extinction, and though researchers estimate there are at least 200,000 edible plant species on our planet, we depend on just three – maize, rice and wheat– for more than half of humanity’s caloric intake.

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, dubbed the “doomsday vault” or the “Noah’s ark of seeds”, aims to contain a duplicate of every seed housed in other banks across the globe. Its location is deliberately remote, sited in the Svalbard archipelago, halfway between mainland Norway and the north pole.




'The seed bank that escaped Syria’s war'
ICARDA, Beirut, Lebanon
Originally headquartered in Aleppo, the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA) gene bank became a casualty of the Syrian war and was forced to close in 2012. It is the only institution to ever make a withdrawal from Svalbard which it used to rebuild its collection, now split between Lebanon and Morocco. “For us it was invaluable,” said Hassan Machlab, country manager for Lebanon, Jordan & Palestine at ICARDA. “You cannot put a price on this collection.”
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ICARDA https://www.icarda.org/
Climate Changing in the MENA
Climate models predict, with good agreement for the MENA region, extreme weather events, reduced precipitation, increased drought occurrence, rising temperatures and in some regions more seasonal floods. The immediate consequences of weather extremes are collapse of major crop yields and consequential rise in food prices, increased health risks as experienced in the gulf region for summer 2015 and high energy demands.

The Regional Impacts of Climate Change
Report focused on 21 countries of the predominantly arid and semi-arid region of the Middle East and central Asia. The region covers approximately 9% of the world's land area. It is dominated by arid (50%) and semi-arid (11%) lands.

The region is vulnerable to climate change because it is dry and water availability is thus limited. In some countries, the ability to adapt to the impacts of climate change will be reduced by a lack of infrastructure.