From drought to floods: Somalia in the trenches of the climate crisis

Unai Mohamed had before seen the land of Somalia cracked by drought and devastated by floodsbut never has the lack of water and its excess hit their country so badly, whose territory is one of the main trenches of the climate crisis in the world.

“The weather was much worse than Al Shabab. You had the feeling all the time that anyone could die”says this 36-year-old woman, under the sparse and lonely shade of a thorny acacia, referring to the jihadist group that controls much of southern and central Somalia.

Under the scorching heat from which Mohamed tries to protect himself, signs of the incipient recovery of crops can be seen in a huge corn orchard, from which golden ears are beginning to appear, on the outskirts of Dollow, a border city between Somalia and Ethiopia, in the Somali state of Jubaland (southern).

Insecurity forced this farmer and mother of nine children in 2007 to leave her hometown, Huddur, capital of the neighboring region of Bakool.

After the devastating drought that hit the Horn of Africa between 2020 and 2023 – the worst in four decades – Mohamed and his family were eagerly waiting for the seeds planted to begin to germinate at the end of last year, but in October “The heavy rains came and devastated everything”the Mint.

On the front line of human-caused global warming – which, according to a study published last April by the global network of scientists World Weather Attribution (WWA), multiplied by a hundred the chances of drought occurring -, Somalis are have been overwhelmed in recent years by one climate catastrophe after another, with no time to recover.

Historical disasters

“In historical records, we have no record of such a severe drought or such devastating floods,” andexplains Paolo Paron, land and water expert at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in Somalia.

“This is the first time that the riverside cities (of the Juba and Shabelle, the country’s main rivers) were flooded for more than twenty days in a row”Add.

According to the UN and the Somali Disaster Management Agency (SODMA), at least 120 people died and more than a million were displaced by the torrential rains, aggravated by the meteorological phenomenon of The boy.

Thus, in the rainy season known as deyr, between October and December, rainfall in southern and central Somalia reached more than 300% of the usual average for that period.

All that water fell on a land incapable of absorbing it, having seen “hardened” due to the five previously failed rainy seasons, notes Paron.

Although Somalia managed to avoid declaring famine thanks to international aid, the drought left some 6.6 million people acutely food insecure, while up to 43,000 could have died from the disaster, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

hunger persists

“When we arrived, he was so weak, I didn’t know how to hold him. Now, she is gaining weight and doesn’t stop playing,” relates
Athar Osman, lying on one of the beds at Dollow Central Hospital. Next to her, big-eyed and with a curious look, her ten-month-old baby Mohamed.

Like this 39-year-old woman, with thin hands and marked cheekbones, around twenty mothers cradle their little ones in neighboring beds and in other rooms of the center.

Some smile and try to get away, loud and healthy. In others, malnutrition is painfully evident.

They have all gone through the scale, which consists of a blue plastic cube hanging from a simple wooden structure.

“In Somalia, it is a combination: households suddenly ran out of food, but also the lack of access to clean water, which translates into cases of diarrhea and, very easily, malnutrition,” details Pamela Wasonga, nutritional coordinator in the country of the Irish NGO Trocaire, which manages the hospital.

Although the rains left a trail of vegetation and crops are beginning to recover, many Somalis are accumulating debts incurred to buy water and food during the drought and have lost the livelihoods on which more than 80% of the population in the country depends. : livestock or agriculture.