Comment on ‘Cropland abandonment in the context of drought, economic restructuring, and migration in Northeast Syria’

Abstract An article recently published in Environmental Research Letters made available data on land abandonment in Syria before the onset of the Syrian civil war. The article claims that land abandonment was driven by mismanagement of irrigation through neoliberal economic policies before the 2006–10 Syrian drought and that agriculture quickly recovered after the drought. We use inferential statistics to test the authors’ claims. We find that before the drought, land abandonment occurred in areas with more rain-fed agriculture and was associated with population growth in sub-districts with more urban land cover. This finding suggests that pre-drought land abandonment was driven by increased urban development, rather than water mismanagement and irrigation policy reform. After drought onset, we find climatic stress caused first-year land abandonment, consistent with the authors’ claims. We also find third-year land abandonment is associated with population decline through 2010, going against the claim of a quick recovery. Our evidence suggests that the drought interrupted a long-term trend of decreasing agricultural use related to local urban expansion, bringing about a new trend of agricultural abandonment as a result of climate-induced out-migration. We find no evidence that land abandonment is associated with neoliberal policy reforms, or that there was a recovery when the drought ended.