By 2020, Syria's protracted civil war had created one of the world's largest humanitarian crises, including the forced displacement of about 50% of Syria’s pre-conflict population, a fiscal crisis and state withdrawal from many of its functions, and periods of hyper-inflation.

The case study looks at two large programmes funded by the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), which aimed to support household and community resilience to a broad range of interdependent risks and stressors: the Building Local Resilience in Syria programme (BLRS) and the Syria Humanitarian Response Programme (SHRP). By the time the case study programmes were under development, a high-intensity armed conflict had given way to an uneasy detente of political fragmentation. This situation gave rise to a complex ‘whole-of-Syria’ approach to international cooperation, with differentiated approaches taken in three ‘areas of control’ in north-west Syria, north-east Syria, and government-controlled areas. Each approach responded to different contextual challenges for humanitarian access, coordination, and compliance.

The case study uses these two projects to answer three questions:

1. What was the opportunity space for climate action within / alongside the crisis?
2. Where did climate conditions fit into the overall landscape of risk and among competing priorities?
3. What does Syria tell us as a ‘limiting case’ for the breakdown of social sustainability?

It contributes to the World Bank report Maximizing the Peace and Social Dividends of Climate Action, which examines how climate interventions in fragile and conflict-affected settings (FCAS) can generate broader peace and social benefits alongside enhanced resilience. ODI Global contributed this case study as well as a case study on the social and peace dividends of climate action in the Sahel.

Report by the Overseas Development Institute