History sometimes repeats itself in the worst possible way. Somalia was ravaged by a devastating famine in 2011, and it is again on the brink of a catastrophic hunger crisis unseen in decades. The Horn of Africa region, which includes Somalia, Ethiopia, and Kenya, is struggling with extreme food insecurity as it fails to see the rainy season for the fifth consecutive time. The droughts supercharged by climate change have been transforming the farmlands of Somalia into dust land.
The Horn of Africa region usually sees two rainy seasons a year: one from March to May and one from October to December. However, the rainy seasons from late 2020 have been substantially drier than usual, especially as climate change has been prolonging La Niña conditions in the Pacific. It has been more than a year since Somalia declared drought emergencies, but the crisis is worsening by the minute with plummeting crop harvests, depleted water supplies, and weakened livestock growth. The rising prices of food commodities globally has been aggravating the urgency of the situation. According to the World Food Programme (WFP), 7.1 million people cannot meet basic daily food requirements, and a total of 1.5 million children under the age of 5 are suffering from acute malnutrition. While climate change is the root cause of this crisis, Somalia has practically contributed nothing to it. According to the World Bank, Somalia only produced 1/7,000 of the carbon emissions by the US, revealing the climate injustice that deeply plagues the country.
To tackle the crisis, the WFP aims to scale up its emergency response to reach 4.5 million people per month. Also, aid agencies have been urging the Somali government to declare a “famine” since it could gather global attention and stimulate more international aid to flow into the country, as seen during the 2011 famine. A famine declaration is made jointly by the government and the United Nations (UN) after an evaluation, but the decision can quickly become political. In September, President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud of Somalia rejected a UN call to declare a famine, mainly citing that it would damage public support and play into the hands of Al Shabaab insurgents. The presence of Al Shabaab is also more directly complicating the process of international aid: the WFP is mainly delivering aid to areas not occupied by the extremist group such as Baidoa, but around 900,000 people have no access to aid in the unreachable areas that are occupied. Internal displacement in the conflict-ridden country has long been a pronounced problem, but the severe drought is now quickly pushing up the number of refugees flocking into the already-crammed refugee camps.
President Mohamud also noted that a declaration of famine “halts development and changes perspectives” by diverting foreign aid to famine response instead of other development projects. Somalia’s crisis highlights the need for more long-term recovery investments along with immediate food and nutritional aid. This November, the 27th UN Climate Change Conference (COP27) closed with a new agreement for establishing a “loss and damage” fund. The fund will help developing countries ruined by climate change recover and adapt quickly. This signals that the world has moved forward, with richer nations once reluctant to take direct responsibility for climate change now addressing the deep inequalities of climate change. UN Secretary-General António Guterres emphasized that “clearly this will not be enough, but it is a much-needed political signal to rebuild broken trust.”
However, making an agreement and ensuring that it is actually efficient, fair, and transparent are two different stories. The unmet promises of the 2009 COP15 leaves questions about the efficacy of such climate funds: wealthy nations vowed to mobilize 100 billion USD to support climate action in developing countries, but the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) reports that only 83.3 billion USD was procured, and other reports claim even that is an inflated evaluation. Other concerns revolve around overcomplicated or unclear criteria in selecting projects to fund and giving out a significant amount of climate finance as a form of debt. Hopefully, the new “loss and damage fund” will not repeat the same mistakes and channel financing to areas like Somalia that are in desperate need of long-term investments to adapt to the warming planet, such as reinforcing irrigation systems and water infrastructure. Climate change is a long-term challenge whose effects will snowball if communities are not prepared enough.
UNICEF spokesman James Elder warned of a “pending nightmare we have not seen in this century” striking Somalia by mid-2023. The UN warns that more than 20 million are at risk, and that number can quickly escalate. In this miserably unfair world, the Horn of Africa is just one of the many regions being punished for a crime they did not commit. The victims are paying with their lives for what they contributed nothing to. This injustice can only stop repeating when those who are responsible start to actually pay for the repairs.