A two-year drought – its worst in decades – was followed last November by devastating floods. The double crisis is estimated to have killed tens of thousands of people, displaced millions more, destroyed livelihoods, and exacerbated severe hunger and water scarcity.

For the East African nation, this was not just a one-off, freak event. Cycles of drought and flooding are becoming more frequent, intense and unpredictable as civilians also come under attack by militants waging an ongoing civil war.

Channeling donor cash to help fragile countries cope with the growing impacts of climate change should be the core mission of the Green Climate Fund (GCF). But, since its creation nearly 14 years ago, barely a single dollar from the UN’s flagship fund has reached Somalia.

Its new head wants to change that. Mafalda Duarte marked her first semester as the fund’s executive director with a visit to Somalia where she promised a different approach to get more money to the world’s poorest.

“We have to be deliberate, be more proactive,” she told Climate Home in an exclusive interview. “We cannot operate like in other countries where we might just sit and wait for them to bring proposals to us. Because of low capacity [in vulnerable countries], we have to work hand in hand with government to put forward a plan.”

Current mandate “not enough”

The Green Climate Fund, which has received pledges of $12.8 billion for the next four years, finances 253 projects in 129 developing countries. It has a mandate to split its resources equally between emissions-cutting and adaptation activities – and to allocate at least half of the latter to the most vulnerable countries.

But Duarte told Climate Home that “those parameters are not enough” anymore. “Even though we are compliant, it is still not enough to get this to support countries like Somalia,” she said.

A Somali herder tries to keep his cows alive amid a devastating drought. Photo: UNICEF Ethiopia/2022/Mulugeta Ayene

Having listened to the priorities of ministers, business leaders and civil society in Mogadishu, the Green Climate Fund is now preparing to invest more than $100 million in Somalia over the next 12 months.

A first project – already in the pipeline before this month’s visit – should give isolated communities access to off-grid solar energy, as part of a broader pan-African effort covering 70 million people. Funding proposals to boost the climate resilience of Somalia’s agricultural sector and improve food security could be put in front of the fund’s board for approval as early as July.

Building resilience

The Portuguese executive director, who took the fund’s helm last August, said this new targeted approach would not be limited to Somalia. “You will see us do more,” she said. “We will look at the list of the most vulnerable countries, where we are doing almost nothing at the moment, and we will endeavour to do something similar.”

Welcoming the direction charted by Duarte, Liane Schalatek, associate director of the Heinrich Böll Foundation, said “pushing” the fund’s biggest partners, like the World Bank and UN agencies, to use its money for more work in vulnerable countries will be key to its success.

“A country like Somalia will depend on international access entities that often want to do the easier rather than the harder stuff, so it’s important to overcome their reluctance,” added the experienced GCF watcher.

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Duarte believes that UN agencies and multilateral development banks need to coordinate their efforts to limit the damage from future climate disasters. “We cannot keep being reactive and provide humanitarian assistance when the next mega-drought or flood hits,” she said. “We have to work collectively and build the resilience of the communities.”

The GCF’s head wants to shake up how the fund operates more widely. Setting out simpler rules and processes is the next item on her reform agenda, with the goal of moving away from “a one-size-fits-all approach”.

Poorer countries with less administrative capacity have long complained about the difficulty and time it takes to access the fund’s resources, despite a dedicated programme to help them do that.

“Whether it is a country like Somalia, or one like Brazil or India, it doesn’t matter – it is all the same [now],” Duarte said. “That, of course, does not work. We are not operating in the same environment, with the same capacity. We cannot be this onerous and demanding.”

Overcoming local challenges

Translating ambition into real dollars on the ground will not necessarily be easy, given the barriers that have traditionally kept investors away from the most fragile nations.

Conflict, weak institutions and poor governance raise the possibility of projects not achieving their objectives or, worse, seeing their precious resources squandered. For many, the risk is too much to stomach.

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The Green Climate Fund finds itself walking a tightrope. On the one hand, it has faced criticism over the years for being too cautious. But, on the other, it recently pulled out of a forest protection project in Nicaragua over human rights concerns after a three-year complaints process.

A GCF spokesperson said the fund is now “working to better understand what the real risk is and mitigate that”. In Somalia, for example, that means learning from the World Bank which has worked extensively with local financial institutions, they added.

For Schalatek, the GCF should not be afraid of providing money to what she describes as “climate finance orphans” that have historically been ignored, working more closely in such countries with informal networks of NGOs centred on community interests.

“[The GCF] is a dedicated UN fund and not a bank,” she said, “so it needs to have the appetite to go where no one else is going.”

* This article was amended after publication to attribute the comments in paragraph 21 to a GCF spokesperson.

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The UN warned against a “catastrophe” in Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia, which it described as the epicentre of the world’s worst climate emergencies.

Donor countries have pledged a total of $2.4 billion for 2023, but only $0.8 billion in new financial support was announced at this week’s event. The US will provide nearly two-thirds of the money, followed at some distance by the European Commission, Germany and the UK.

The money raised at a pledging conference this week will help humanitarian agencies provide food, water, healthcare and protection services to over 30 million people across the three countries.

Tinebeb Berhane, country director for ActionAid in Ethiopia, told Climate Home News she was “extremely disappointed” and “saddened” with the outcome. “The pledges do not even touch the surface of the level of support needed on the ground”, she added.

Oxfam has called the commitments “dismally inadequate”.

The shortcomings of UN pledging events like this one will put the spotlight on the implementation of the landmark loss and damage deal struck at Cop27. Governments agreed to create a fund for vulnerable communities hit by climate impacts.

Climate-induced drought

The Horn of Africa has been suffering its worst drought in 40 years since October 2020. Five consecutive seasons of rainfall below normal levels have led to crops failing and farm animals dying.

A group of scientists estimated that human-driven climate change has made these events “much stronger” and “about 100 times more likely”.

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The World Weather Attribution group said the drought was made much more severe because of the low rainfall and increased evaporation caused by higher temperatures in the world.

Kenya, Somalia and Ethiopia combined now contribute less than 0.5% of the greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change despite having 2.5% of the world’s population.

“People in the Horn of Africa are paying an unconscionable price for a climate crisis they did nothing to cause,” UN chief Antonio Guterres told the pledging event in New York.

The crisis has been made worse by conflicts and rising global commodity prices as a result of the war in Ukraine. More than 32 million people are facing acute food insecurity and 2.7 million people have been displaced.

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The United States made the top pledge – an additional $524 million on previous announcements, taking its total for 2023 to some $1.4 billion. The European Commission committed $185 million, Germany $163 million, Britain $120 million and the Netherlands $92 million.

“This is a global problem that requires all of us,” U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield told the event.

‘Moral failure’

Andrew Mitchell, the UK minister for development, said “the clear and present threat remains, and we must act now to prevent further suffering”. But aid groups have criticised the pledge made by the UK, branding it a “moral failure”.

A group of organisations led by the International Rescue Committee has called on donors “to take immediate steps to break the cycle of short-term, inadequate funding” in the Horn of Africa.

ActionAid’s Berhane hopes the limited funding promised will be delivered swiftly. “Time is a big factor for these life-saving humanitarian interventions,” she said.

The Eastern African drought is only one of the many climate-induced crises in which financial aid has been slow-moving.

Echoes of Pakistan

Devastating floods struck Pakistan last year, causing $10 billion in estimated damage. After a UN appeal, wealthy countries pledged a sum roughly sixty times smaller in support. But even those funds were slow to arrive.

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Subsequently, at a pledging event last January, a group of 40 countries, multilateral banks and private donors committed more than $8.5 billion towards Pakistan’s recovery.

But Pakistan’s climate minister Sherry Rehman said yesterday that “pledges made at international conferences solely for Pakistan have still not been realised”.

“UN flash appeals are no longer capitalised as they used to be,” she said, as “at least half of the UN flash appeals go unfunded”. She called for the loss and damage fund to be set up as soon as possible.

The post Governments fall short in UN’s East Africa drought appeal appeared first on Climate Home News.

Humanitarian assistance has helped and will be needed well into 2018. But in war-affected Somalia and South Sudan famine has emerged; in Ethiopia aid money is running short after repeated droughts; and in Kenya the shortage of resources is giving rise to land conflicts.

For these countries, the ability to plan ahead is undermined by a mystery that has climate scientists puzzled. Most models suggest that global warming should be making the Horn of Africa wetter than in pre-industrial times. But as local weather data and dry streams on the ground testify, year after year the region is getting drier.

What has become known as the ‘East African climate paradox’ is a quirk that has been exercising scientists for the best part of a decade, but is still far from being explained. Why do models project more rain while data on the ground show less and less by the year?

“It could be that the paradox is not even a paradox,” says Alessandra Giannini of the International Research Institute for Climate and Society in the US, who specialises in climate trends in monsoon regions.

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Just as one particularly cold winter doesn’t disprove the existence of long-term climate change, events such as the strong El Niño experienced in the region in 2015 could cloud the picture, she says. While in the long run the region’s climate might get wetter, in the short-term other phenomena could bring a few years of drought.

“Maybe the underlying wet trend has not emerged yet,” says Giannini. “We can’t really say that the models are wrong. What we are looking for is an explanation that includes elements of all these processes, that can explain everything, drought now and possibly long-term wetter conditions.”

“In any kind of projection it’s very important to look at the uncertainty” says John Marsham, climate scientist with the University of Leeds in the UK. Reflecting the chaotic nature of the climate system, models do not always return the same result, even when they run on the same inputs. 

“Within the wide range of models available, some will not say [the weather] is going to get wetter. In addition, the apparent mis-match between the recent drying trend and the wetting in many model projections could be due to the current trends being generated by climate drivers that our models are not capturing,” says Marsham.

Models imagine the landscapes of future climates by plotting the influence of a variety of factors affecting the Earth, known as forcings. Some are natural, such as volcanic eruptions or the energy output of the sun. Others are generated by humans, such as the increasing concentration of greenhouse gases due to our fossil fuel-based industry.

Depending on the forcings included in the blueprint and the computing power of each model, which determines it’s complexity, the results might vary. Models also deal slightly differently with factors such as clouds or climate sensitivity, namely the amount of warming for any given amount of greenhouse gas.

Report: Africa flying blind as continent tips into climate crisis

Scientists have come up with an array of different explanations for the paradox, ranging from natural variability of the climate that models struggle to capture, to patchy observational data due to poor infrastructure and records in the region.

“The current models show a trend that we project through increasing greenhouse gases, but the recent [dry] past trend could be caused by something else” says Marsham. “For example, they could be driven by a change in aerosol emissions – the tiny particles that come with burning fossil fuels that have very different behaviour from greenhouse gases.”

Dave Rowell, a scientist with the UK’s Met office whose work focuses on African climate change and models, explains that if we accept the hypothesis that the recent decline in rainfall is caused by aerosol emissions, as we start to clean up pollution and remove these tiny particles, for example with better filters, the picture may change.

“If we keep burning fossil fuels releasing more carbon into the atmosphere, greenhouse gases would become the dominant forcing, with models then suggesting increased rainfall over East Africa,” he says.

Precipitation adds a further layer of complexity, because rain is the end point of a long chain of climatic and weather processes. In planetary terms, clouds are tiny, elusive objects that move and evolve on an extremely small scale. “The available models still struggle to capture them” says Marsham, “but equally science is rapidly advancing and I am confident that in coming years we will have better information.”

Although many questions remain open, the paradox doesn’t dent the scientific community’s trust in their research methods.

“There is always the risk that someone will use the uncertainty as an excuse for not acting, and that to my mind is the opposite of what we should do,” says Marsham.

“On the contrary, we are well aware of the challenge of predicting rainfall in the tropics and this mismatch doesn’t mean that the models are wrong. This is an interesting mystery to solve, and in doing so we will understand a lot more about the climate system in East Africa.”

The post Scientists say east Africa will get wetter, so why is it drying out? appeared first on Climate Home News.

A woman holds her severely malnourished young child in a camp for Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) in Mogadishu in 2011, during a sever drought that hit the region (Pic: UN photos)

By Alex Kirby

One of Africa’s most volatile regions has become increasingly dry over the last century and faces a future of rising tension if this trend continues, US researchers say.

They say the rate of drying in the Horn of Africa is both unusual in the context of the last 2,000 years and in step with human-influenced warming. And they think the drying will continue as the region warms.

“Right now, aid groups are expecting a wetter, greener future for the Horn of Africa, but our findings show that the exact opposite is occurring,” says one of the study’s co-authors, Peter deMenocal, who heads the Centre for Climate and Life at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.

“The region is drying, and will continue to do so with rising carbon emissions.” The study, published in the journal Science Advances, was based on evidence stretching back for 40,000 years.

Sediment core

The researchers used a sediment core they had extracted from the Gulf of Aden to infer past changes in temperature and aridity. After matching the core’s record with 20th-century observations, they concluded that drying is likely to continue across Somalia, Djibouti and Ethiopia.

That contradicts other models, which have suggested that future warming might bring rainier weather patterns that could benefit East Africa.

“What we see in the paleoclimate record from the last 2,000 years is evidence that the Horn of Africa is drier when there are warm conditions on Earth, and wetter when it is colder,” says lead author Jessica Tierney, associate professor of geosciences at the University of Arizona.

Global-scale models used to predict future changes as the climate warms suggest that the region should become wetter, primarily during the “short rains” season from September to November.

However, the new study suggests that those gains may be offset by declining rainfall during the “long rains” season from March to May, on which the region’s rain-fed agriculture relies.

“If we can simulate rainfall in these arid tropical and subtropical regions better, we can understand the future impact of climate change”

The authors say the region has been racked with political instability and violence as it has dried. The Horn of Africa has suffered droughts every few years in recent decades − creating humanitarian crises as famine and violence spread.

In Somalia, as the political situation deteriorated amid the droughts of the 1980s and 1990s, hundreds of thousands of refugees fled the country, and pirates began raiding ships off the coast.

The 40,000-year old sediment core has already yielded insights into Africa’s climate. In 2013, Tierney and deMenocal showed that the Sahara, which once used to burst into verdant life with regular rainfall, suddenly dried out over a century or two, during a warm period about 5,000 years ago – not more gradually, as many researchers had thought.

Their work provided evidence that climate shifts can happen quite suddenly, even if the forces driving them are gradual.

This latest study uses isotopes from leaf waxes found in the sediment sample to compare rates of drying over the past 2,000 years.

Plants reflect the environment that sustains them. When the climate is drier, leaf waxes are more enriched with deuterium, or heavy hydrogen isotopes, while leaf waxes from wetter climates reflect the more abundant rainfall through the presence of the normal hydrogen isotopes.

The researchers found an increasing shift toward heavy hydrogen in the last century as the climate − which had experienced a wet period during the Little Ice Age (1450-1850 AD) − dried out.

Climate modelling

Their findings suggest that climate modelling, frequently done at a global scale, would benefit from region-specific studies with higher-resolution results in high-impact areas such as the Horn of Africa

Tierney says: “If we can simulate rainfall in these arid tropical and subtropical regions better, we can understand the future impact of climate change.”

The development agency Oxfam says Ethiopia is facing a major emergency, with 4.5 million people needing food aid because of successive poor rains this year.

Oxfam’s representative in Ethiopia describes the situation − attributed to the El Niño periodic climate phenomenon in the Pacific − as “the start of a major emergency, which is expected to be serious and long”.

Meanwhile, parts of West Africa are suffering from the aftermath of severe floods − also attributed to El Niño − that have ruined crops and destroyed homes in Burkina Faso and Niger.

This article was produced by the Climate News Network

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