Somalia: How Climate Change Impacts Security

AFRICA Somalia: How Climate Change Impacts Security OE Watch Commentary: As the accompanying excerpted article from the Somali website Radio Dalsan explains, climate change is exacerbating the conflicts already underway in Somalia and threatens to create new ones. Much of the article is based on a report from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), which examined how conflicts as well as peacekeeping efforts are affected by climate change. The findings essentially show that the security landscape changes as climate change occurs. For example, with the change in the seasons and weather over the past few decades, herding nomads have had to adjust their routes. Conflict sometimes ensues as rural farmers want to protect their crops from the grazing animals. While weather is a short-term phenomenon and climate “Pictured here is the devastating 2011 East Africa drought. Ongoing droughts in Somalia have made the already fragile state-building even more precarious,” a long-term one, over time as the climate gets warmer, Source: OXFAM East Africa/Wikipedia, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Oxfam_East_Africa_-_A_family_gathers_sticks_and_branches_for_firewood.jpg, CC BY 2.0 the weather, despite some fluctuations, also tends to get warmer. Thus, drought and floods, already significant problems in Somalia that tend to displace large numbers of people, are expected to become even worse in the years to come. These displaced people sometimes end up in camps where radical groups such as al-Shabaab can recruit them. The droughts in particular have made the already fragile state-building process even more difficult. Scarce resources have to be diverted to emergency responses instead of more long-term programs such as education, health, and better governance. Additionally, power sharing agreements falter as the displacement of people results in changes to the “demographic composition on the ground.” The article emphasizes that evidence of the adverse effects of climate change is not something that people have to wait to see years from now. There are already significant impacts in Somalia, and they are quite devastating.End OE Watch Commentary (Feldman) “Climate change poses serious challenges to current and future peacebuilding efforts and can amplify conflicts...” Source: “Climate change poses serious challenges to current and future peace-building efforts in Somalia –Report,”Radio Dalsan (Somalia), 23 October 2019. https://www.radiodalsan.com/en/2019/10/23/climate-change-poses-serious-challenges-to-current-and-future-peacebuilding-efforts-in-somalia-report/ Climate change poses serious challenges to current and future peacebuilding efforts and can amplify conflicts, according to a report on years of devastating violence and drought in Somalia released Wednesday. On a positive note, the growing impact of climate change has meant that UNSOM has had to adapt its peacebuilding efforts by thinking outside the box and adopting new approaches, which may prove useful in future peacebuilding operations. These include the establishment of coordination centres for drought operations and the appointment of an environmental security advisor. The report however stressed that some of these novel approaches are difficult to implement under the current funding structure, since much of the money is siloed and earmarked for specific and isolated approaches, “thereby inhibiting integrated responses”. OE Watch | December 2019 57.

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