Climate change adds to Syria'a problems as Damask rose harvests fade

Irish Times

3 days ago

Sitting in his front sittingroom, surrounded by embroidery, painted plates and ceramics decorated with pink Damask roses, Amin Hamza al-Bettar reflects on the harvest season, which has just finished: 'extremely, extremely bad'; 'extraordinary ... like a desert'.
The Damask rose harvester, who turns 90 this year, says the season was both 'short and late'. In 2024, his family business harvested 4,000kg of roses on their 180 acres of land, while this year it was 300kg, he says. While the season should begin on May 5th, and last between 25 days and a month, this year it lasted 10 days, and began on May 15th.
Bettar's village, Qaldoun Al Marah in
Syria
, is famous for its rose industry. In 2019, the village's 'practices and craftsmanship associated with the Damascene rose' were inscribed on
Unesco's
Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. The accompanying notes suggested it could be seen as 'a tool for sustainable development and ... contribute to building a harmonious relationship between human beings and nature'.
Bettar's four sons work for the family company, along with one other employee. From a distillery in his home, they create rose water and extract essence that they sell for $60 (€53) per gram – it takes 8,000kg of roses to extract 1kg. The essence is used in cosmetics and perfume. Bettar is proud of the fact that they use no chemicals in their processes.He says their machines are 'primitive, old style': the 'process is all natural'.
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But now their business is a victim of the drought and
climate change
affecting much of Syria. While Bettar says he has seen individual years as dry as this before, the prolonged nature of the drought, combined with the dryness of surrounding years, is unheard of and the overall situation has been noticeably deteriorating since 2000.
Amin Hamza al Bettar (89) says rose season this year was "extremely" bad. Photograph: Sally Hayden
The usual snow and rainwater that reaches the village meant the 'plants used to grow themselves', says Bettar. But 'this year it only rained a few times, 5ml, then 10 days without rain'. The water that falls 'evaporates immediately, it doesn't penetrate the soil'.
A 2023
study
by the World Weather Attribution academic collaboration found that the probability of droughts in Syria and neighbouring Iraq has increased from a one-in-250-year event to a one-in-10-year event, with the current estimated human-induced warming of 1.2 degrees. This could move to a one-in-five-year event if global warming increases by another 0.8 degrees, the study said.
The combination of climate change and badly damaged infrastructure is calamitous.
By 2022, Unicef
said
the nearly 14-year-long war and economic crisis in Syria had led to the large-scale destruction of water and sanitation infrastructure across the country, with an estimated one third of treatment plants and water towers, one sixth of wells, and half of pumping stations in Syria damaged.
Just over 70km by car from Qaldoun Al Marah is the Ein el Fijeh spring. It feeds the Barada river and is supposed to provide more than a million homes in Damascus and its suburbs with water, but it is almost dry. Ahmad Darwish, head of the Damascus City Water Supply Authority, told the
Associated Press
that this year had the lowest rainfall since 1956. When The Irish Times visited the spring in late May, employees said the lack of rain and snow were hugely concerning, but also that bombing of the spring's surroundings during the war and the devastating 2023 earthquake had badly damaged the area, compounding the situation.
Syrians prepare to irrigate roses in Qaldoun Al Marah. Photograph: Sally Hayden
The shifting climate means Damask rose farmers are taking measures they never needed before.
On his land on the outskirts of Qaldoun Al Marah, Mohammed Abdo Abbas (64) wears a keffiyeh on his head to protect himself from the baking sun. He watches as another man pulls a tank on a tractor, watering each rose bush in turn with a hose. Abbas says he pays 250,000 Syrian pounds (€25) a day for fuel and workers to transport the water from wells to irrigate his land. 'We are only irrigating because of the lack of rain, normally we don't do it,' he says. If Abbas didn't own the tractor himself, the cost would not be worth the return.
Locals used to make big purchases during harvest season because they had an influx of cash, Abbas recalls. Rose growing 'was my ancestors', and my parents', and my job, but this year we have less than 25 per cent of the normal season', he says.
'We don't blame anyone, not the government, it's climate change. The issue is these roses, they need snow. If it doesn't snow the season is not good.' He says snow used to reach three metres high in winter but 'we haven't seen snow in five years, despite this being a mountain area'. Snow and lower temperatures keep insects under control, but now they are proliferating.
Hundreds of years ago, Lebanese traders used to arrive to buy the roses on mules, exporting them through France. 'All the village used to do this because it was very beneficial business,' says Abbas.
Graffiti on the wall of a distillery in Qaldoun Al Marah. Photograph: Sally Hayden
With international sanctions on Syria largely lifting following
the fall of Bashar al-Assad's regime last December
, Syrian businesspeople are enthused at the prospect of trading internationally. Damask rose growers say their industry could help Syria recover and develop. 'For us this is our goal, our purpose to export our products to Europe and all over the world,' says al Bettar.
When Bettar was young, he was told that Sufi clerics used to go to the mountains to pray for rain. Now, with no obvious remedy for the climate, he worries people 'will become poor and look for something else. We don't want the farmers to look for something else because they will abandon this profession.'
Villagers have started to leave Qaldoun Al Marah for Syria's big cities, or launch other businesses, because it has become so much harder to farm roses, says al Bettar, who serves visitors pink rose water in glasses to drink.
He says it would help farmers if the state 'helped us dig more wells and made it easier for us to access water, started to irrigate regularly in a very scientific way'. He believes many tourists would be interested in visiting, as they did before the revolution in 2011 and subsequent war.
Amin Hamza al Bettar in the distillery inside his home in Qaldoun Al Marah, Syria. Photograph: Sally Hayden
The village received support under the former Syrian regime, with al Bettar saying Asma al-Assad, Bashar's wife, had been appreciative of their efforts. The new authorities have shown interest too, al Bettar says. Recently, the new director of the agricultural sector for their area came to fix a pump in the village, though farmers still struggle getting the water from it to the rose bushes.
And Abbas says the future is unpredictable, because drought is changing the natural environment completely. 'Rose plants should live 60 years but now [they last] 25 years because of the harsh weather,' he says.
'Our country, our region has been famous for these plants for thousands of years ... This is the source of our life here ... It's survival for us.'
– Hani Alagbar assisted with this reporting.
The Damask rose harvest has shrunk as a result of drought-related climate change. Photograph: Sally Hayden