Prince Charles links climate change to civil war in Syria

The Prince of Wales has said that climate change may have been one of the causes of the civil war in Syria.

The heir to the British throne has long been a passionate campaigner on environmental issues and linked the conflict which has left hundreds of thousands dead, created millions of refugees and seen the rise of IS, with drought in the Middle Eastern nation.

In the interview with Sky News, filmed before last week’s deadly Islamist terrorist attack in Paris that left 130 people dead, Charles talks about his belief that there are links between climate change and terrorism.

He also urged governments to adopt green measures despite austerity, saying there was “a real possibility of nature’s bank going bust”.

Charles told the broadcaster: “We’re seeing a classic case of not dealing with the problem.

“Some of us were saying 20 something years ago that if we didn’t tackle these issues you would see ever greater conflict over scarce resources and ever greater difficulties over drought, and the accumulating effect of climate change, which means that people have to move.

“And, in fact, there’s very good evidence indeed that one of the major reasons for this horror in Syria, funnily enough was a drought that lasted for about five or six years, which meant that huge numbers of people in the end had to leave the land.”

Asked if there was a direct link between climate change, conflict and terrorism, he added: “It’s only in the last few years that the Pentagon have actually started to pay attention to this. I mean it has a huge impact on what is happening.

“The difficulty is sometimes to get this point across — that if we just leave it and say, well there are obviously lots of, there are endless problems arising all over the place therefore we deal with them in a short-term way, we never deal with the underlying root cause which regrettably is what we’re doing to our natural environment.”

The interview came ahead of Charles travelling to Paris to deliver a keynote speech at the November 30 opening ceremony for Cop21, the UN conference on climate change which will attempt to reach a new international agreement to help limit global warming to no more than two degrees.

Charles has been a strong advocate of taking action to protect the environment for many years.

In 2007 he set up the Prince’s Rainforest Group to find a solution to save the world’s threatened forests.

He addressed a UN international climate summit in Copenhagen in 2009 and the following year he gave a keynote speech to the Oslo Climate and Forest Conference.