Photograph by Katherine Wolkoff / Trunk Archive
When Mustafa Haid visited his family on the outskirts of Aleppo in February 2025, he discovered his mother had developed a persistent cough. “She cannot even breathe because of how polluted the air is,” he said.
The founder of the nonprofit Dawlaty and an expert on transitional justice and accountability was exiled from Syria in 2011 amid mass protests against the long-ruling Assad regime and a crackdown on dissent. He hadn’t returned for more than a decade until after the regime fell last December. “Even I felt like I really aged in two weeks,” Haid continued. “The water, the air, even the noise, everything [is] deteriorating in so many ways, you could feel it. It’s as if you are on a different planet.”
Conflict-related pollution and the chronic neglect and mismanagement of natural resources during Syria’s 14-year-long civil war ravaged the nation’s environment. Landmines dot agricultural lands. Entire nature reserves were razed, amounting to the loss of almost 40% of the nation’s trees. Contaminants from damaged buildings, fuel and chemical spills, and spent munitions have seeped into Syria’s soil and water. Syrians have relied for more than a decade on air-polluting private generators to compensate for damaged infrastructure and a lack of public power. The nation also faces rising temperatures, worsening water stress, and increasing desertification due to climate change.
Having toppled the regime that kept Syrians under its boot for half a century, the nation’s people now find themselves in a long-awaited revolutionary moment. As a new government takes office in Syria, climate advocates urge that a just transition in the nation must be sustainable and inclusive. This would be a stark shift from life under the Assad regime, which kneecapped state capacity for environmental oversight and repressed civil society organizations that might have picked up the slack.
“Environmental recovery or environmental awareness should go hand in hand with any process now in Syria,” said Syrian environmental engineer Sally Alresly. “Whether it’s building houses, whether it’s agricultural recovery, whether it’s any project, environmental awareness should be part of it.”
Early decisions from the Syrian government suggest that it could take a forward-looking approach to the environment. The Syria Civil Defense, the volunteer group better known as the White Helmets, will be integrated into the nation’s new Ministry of Emergency and Disaster Management. Under Minister Raed al-Saleh, former White Helmets president, the ministry will leverage the organization’s existing climate change adaptation and landmine removal programs, environmental monitoring infrastructure, and waste management expertise toward environmental cleanup and infrastructure rehabilitation efforts.
Meanwhile, the Ministry of Electricity announced plans to invest significantly in renewables as part of a three-stage plan to address the nation’s energy crisis. The Ministry of Emergency and Disaster Management and the Ministry of Local Administration and Environment are also expected to implement Syria’s 2012 Environmental Law, which was never put into force under the Assad regime. The law mandates environmental impact studies, standards to protect biodiversity, and public awareness campaigns to align environmental and human health.
“Environmental recovery or environmental awareness should go hand in hand with any process now in Syria. Whether it’s building houses, whether it’s agricultural recovery, whether it’s any project, environmental awareness should be part of it.”
Sally Alresly
Syrian environmental engineer
Citizen groups are also mobilizing across Syria and in the diaspora, eager to contribute to a just and sustainable transition. “My generation is really interested in addressing climate change and environmental problems in Syria,” said 28-year-old Alresly, who is eager to lend her engineering expertise to the nation’s reconstruction after fleeing as a refugee during high school. “Seeing the number of individuals so interested in making Syria better environmentally, cleaner, and more green is really giving me hope.”
Meanwhile, the Suwayda-based Karameh Social Development Foundation has committed to planting 1 million saplings on public lands in areas that were logged during the war. Syriac-Assyrian communities in Qamishli have begun planting trees as an act of remembrance for those killed in conflict and a demonstration of their enduring connection to the land. Waste pick-up efforts have also sprung up nationwide, with participating groups, such as the Ahimsa Center for Nonviolence and Peacebuilding, framing environmental cleanup and preservation as inherent to the culture of peace they aim to foster in the nation.
Syrians also developed community-based research networks in the absence of governmental infrastructure. Researchers in a Facebook group for Syrian wildlife hobbyists recently rediscovered the presence of the Syrian spadefoot toad and published their findings in a peer-reviewed journal. Social media networking “emerged as a really powerful tool to gather a lot of information about species distribution and local knowledge of their environment,” said study co-author Johnny Baakliny, an environmental scientist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Government support for such grassroots efforts is critical in the coming years. “Centering the local communities in the rebuilding process is very key,” said Sarine Karajerjian, program director of the Environmental Politics program at the Arab Reform Initiative. “There are solidarity mechanisms across the country, where people support each other, help each other. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have been able to survive all these crises.”
But, Baakliny said, he fears that the extent to which community-led initiatives will influence the nation’s transition will depend on the Syrian government’s willingness to engage with them.
Others have concerns, too. Ibrahim al-Halaby, an exiled Syrian wildlife conservationist, who is using a pseudonym for fear of reprisals against their family still in the country, fears government assurances could lack follow-through. “I’m pessimistic,” he said. “It’s just ink on paper in the end.”
Wim Zwijnenburg, who leads the Climate, Environment and Conflict program at Dutch NGO PAX, warns that too great a focus on improving Syria’s economy could lead to environmental considerations being sidelined. “There’s a tendency in this kind of post-conflict situation to reboot the economy, and that all kinds of other regulations will be relaxed to make sure that the economy is running again… with the risk that you start creating more environmental issues because of overuse or over extraction of water and other natural resources or massively investing in fossil fuel production,” he explained.
While the government has promised to collaborate with civil society and ensure inclusive governance, advocates caution that many Syrians are still being left out. Such concerns were not assuaged by the rushed announcement of a national dialogue conference in February 2025 that didn’t allow time for certain stakeholders to join the talks; nor by Syria’s new constitutional declaration, which was written by an unelected committee.
“Centering the local communities in the rebuilding process is very key. There are solidarity mechanisms across the country, where people support each other, help each other. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have been able to survive all these crises.”
Sarine Karajerjian
program director, Environmental Politics program (Arab Reform Initiative)
“There are so many different groups in Syria, from those in rural areas to people with disabilities and women, and so far those voices have been absent,” Haid said, adding that these groups are most impacted by war and environmental harm. “When it comes to the concept of environmental justice, those voices need to be at the table.”
Ahmed Ekzayez, the White Helmets’ chief of programs and a soon-to-be employee of the new government, pointed to a series of forums al-Saleh chaired with representatives of about 70 community organizations to develop a draft emergency response plan as an example of the government’s engagement with civil society on environmental issues. “Something that the government is really paying more attention to is the social fabric between all the communities because Syria exists from different groups, from different entities, from different religions, and this is what we as Syrians want Syria to be,” Ekzayez said. “This is the Syria we hope to build, and we need everyone to contribute.”
Meaningful collaboration between Syrian communities and the new government on environmental issues will require deepening trust, something advocates say can only happen during peacetime. Instead, reports that armed groups aligned with the new government participated in massacres of Alawite communities in March and April stretching from Syria’s western coast as far as Damascus have sown distrust among minority groups. The government maintains that supporters of the ousted regime perpetrated those attacks.
“The country is witnessing recurring violence that has not stopped, and there will be no attention to the environment as long as people fear for their lives and livelihoods,” said Ahmed Agha, an environmental researcher based in Syria’s still-embattled western coastal region, who used a pseudonym to protect their identity. “To have a good environment policy in Syria, we need diversity and we need peace.”
To succeed, Syrian efforts will also require significant international support, including assistance conducting a post-conflict environmental assessment to provide recommendations for how conflict-related pollution and environmental degradation should be addressed. International organizations, such as the United Nations Environment Programme, typically perform those assessments, and Ekzayez expects the Syrian government to request one soon.
Western governments and non-governmental organizations will also need to fund Syrian-led initiatives and shift their political weight to address Israel’s ongoing illegal occupation in southwestern Syria and its shelling of Syrian cities. “Critically, the damage is ongoing, for example, through the consequences of ongoing Israeli airstrikes,” said Doug Weir, director of the Conflict and Environment Observatory.
International support is not only a matter of Syria’s need, but an acknowledgement of the intersecting problems it faces, Karajerjian said: “The continuous conflict and wars in Syria affect the whole region, and you see how countries are interconnected, how resources are interconnected, beyond borders.”
While the challenges Syria faces are staggering, a sustainable and inclusive future is possible with proper support and engagement, Haid said, adding: “The situation is so bad now; it is a threat, but it is also an opportunity. Climate-resilient agriculture, renewable energy infrastructure, reforestation programs, water management—we can fix these issues in reconstruction.”
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