The data we collected and shared in Chapter Two shows that degradation is extensive in Somalia – especially in the areas where we are working – and that restoring nature’s life-giving services is critical. Luckily, others' restoration work in similar environments has demonstrated that it is possible to restore these ecosystems and the communities that depend on them! We have already begun work here in Somalia and the early results are encouraging!
This section outlines activities and approaches that can effectively restore degraded ecosystems and showcases some of the work we have already started. Because ecosystem restoration is ultimately the responsibility of—and will benefit—Somali communities, they must be at the centre of every restoration effort.
The mentors who inspire our confidence that restoration is possible
Over the course of our journey towards understanding and addressing the lifesaving potential of ecosystem services, we have been fortunate to learn from a range of mentors who have offered practical, grounded guidance from similarly degraded corners of the globe, giving us the confidence and inspiration that we are on the right path forward.
Scroll through and hover over each image in the carousel below to meet some of the incredible mentors – ranging from global experts to inspiring local, women-led organizations – who have helped us reimagine what’s possible. Click the images to visit the organizations' websites.
We are also closely following the work of peers like the World Food Programme and drawing inspiration from their successes.
This video, for example, shows how local communities and WFP brought life back to the desert in northern Senegal.
So, what – specifically – can be done to restore degraded landscapes and rebuild communities' resilience?
Despite high levels of aridity and degradation, our mentors have taught us that there are many practical actions that can be taken to restore Somalia’s ecosystems and improve the earth’s ability to naturally support the lives, livelihoods and resilience of Somali communities once again.
A common misconception about restoration is that it takes a long time to see results and is therefore not a priority for humanitarian and fragile contexts.
This is not true.
BRCiS’ approach – inspired by global best practice, the Resilience Design methodology, and direct consultation with communities – integrates rapid food security solutions into all restoration activities through context-adapted agro-ecology. This means that we mainstream food and fodder production into restoration site planning and community training through approaches like berm planting, permagardening, and community-level seed banking to ensure that restoration is a tool for sustainable food security.
Take a moment to watch this video introducing the Resilience Design approach that BRCiS uses and showcasing restoration in action!
The following sub-sections highlight several life-saving restoration approaches that we have begun applying based on our deep analysis of each community’s unique degradation profile. You can adopt them too! Each approach includes a case study or video from our work so far that we hope will show you what each approach looks like in Somalia, support your learning, and – we hope – serve as inspiration as we collectively re-think humanitarian, development, government, and other human service provision from a nature-based perspective.
While it is too early to see concrete results from all of our efforts so far, you will see that early signs are encouraging and the conclusion is clear: we need to be trying this together.
Seize every opportunity to produce food and fodder
In Somalia, where food insecurity is the challenge communities face, it is essential that we place responsible and regenerative food and fodder production at the center of all our activities. While indeed some restoration efforts require medium-term relief from human and animal exploitation to – literally – take root, communities are more likely to engage in restoration when they can also see and literally consume short-term benefits.
Wherever we restore, we also permagarden. Permagardens – small, intensively managed gardens that combine multiple regenerative practices like double-digging, water harvesting, and composting following the Resilience Design methodology – are a fantastic way to showcase how individual households, no matter how much land they have available, can grow a diverse and nutritious diet for themselves and their families.
In Bulo-adey village of Bardere district, Concern and Lifeline Gedo trained small-scale female farmers like Shukri, a widow with six children, on how to establish their own permagardens in May 2024. Shukri took the training to heart and transformed a small plot into a productive, diverse garden within just two months.
Look how bountiful Shukri’s permagarden was after just two months! Photo: Lifeline Gedo.
Look how bountiful Shukri’s permagarden was after just two months! Photo: Lifeline Gedo.
Shukri’s permagarden has yielded so much that in addition to providing nutritious food for her family, she can sell excess vegetables to earn income. Her success inspired others in the community to follow her lead, and she now serves as a permagarden facilitator.
Use the green slider below to see our demonstration permagarden in Bonkay IDP Camp, outside of Baidoa Town, during preparation and once the garden began to grow barely a few weeks later. The first few rows of this shared garden use bioswales, double-dug planting beds, and planted berms following the Resilience Design. Everything behind it uses conventional "climate smart" techniques – can you spot the difference the Resilience Design makes!?
Photos: Abdulkadir Mohamed/NRC.
Check out this video which shows other permagarden champions like Shukri and why they think everyone in Somalia should start their own permagarden.
Ready to try permagardening yourself or through your programme? We’ve created this short how-to video in Somali (also available in English) to help our farmers, Members – and YOU – get started!
Learn how to read... the landscape
No matter the restoration approach you want to apply, you need learn how to read your landscape. While there are many things that you can – and will, with time – learn to read in your landscape, the most basic and most critical is which way the water flows.
To keep water in your landscape longer, you need to understand where it wants to go and how to slow, spread, sink, and save it.
We can all agree that due to gravity, water wants to move downslope. It runs quickly off steep slopes and a slower along lower grade slopes, but it always runs – all the way to the ocean, unless it is stopped. As we learned in Chapter Two, water runs very quickly out of degraded landscapes.
To stop this water from escaping, we must find what we call contour lines—imaginary lines that follow points of equal elevation and are often perpendicular to the flow of water. Even the flattest-looking landscapes (and Somalia has plenty of those!) have small, gentle slopes that contain both superhighways for erosion and these invisible contour lines waiting to stop it.
While this sounds technical, a very simple tool called an A-frame can help identify these contour lines, even in remote or resource-limited areas. Made from just three sticks, a piece of string, and a small weight like a stone, the A-frame is easy to build using whatever you have on hand. By moving the A-frame across the land and marking points where the string hangs straight down, communities can map out the natural level of the land. Connecting these points can then guide where to use restoration techniques.
Plant the rain:
Control erosion and retain water
When we think of water in an ecosystem, we often think of lakes, rivers, and deep underground aquifers. But the soil itself holds a significant amount of water and is just as important as major catchments and aquifers. As a result, when soil is eroded, an ecosystem also loses much of its moisture.
Even in the most highly degraded, low-rainfall areas, gully plugging – a method of building small dams across drainage channels – and water-spreading weirs – low walls built across dry riverbeds – can reduce runoff and erosion, replenish groundwater, and encourage the deposit of sediment. This keeps more water and soil within the ecosystem rather than allowing it to flow away downstream.
In other words, it “plants the rain.”
BRCiS staff learn how to dig soil and water conservation structures during a Resilience Design training in Guricel, Somalia in March 2024. Photo: Abdulkadir Mohamed/NRC.
BRCiS staff learn how to dig soil and water conservation structures during a Resilience Design training in Guricel, Somalia in March 2024. Photo: Abdulkadir Mohamed/NRC.
In moderately degraded areas that suffer from high erosion but receive some rainfall, swales and soil bunds – special embankments built along cont, also known as half-moons or “earth smiles” – can also help reduce erosion, control and slow water flow, and improve groundwater levels. With erosion being a major concern in nearly all of the areas we work, undertaking erosion control measures is essential.
Watch this video to learn more about half moons.
See how we're planting the rain in Rabdhure District in the following interactive case study. If the text is too small on your device, you can adjust the size of your browser window or expand the case study to full screen using the button on the lower right.
Restore vegetation,
especially in grasslands
Restoring tree, shrub, and grass cover is essential for providing fodder for the livestock on which most Somalis depend for their food, nutrition, and livelihoods.
As evidenced in our research, grasslands tend to experience less erosion than other ecosystems, as a healthy herbaceous layer keeps the soil together, prevents runoff, and increases water infiltration. As a result, restoring grasslands is particularly critical.
In locations that exhibit high erosion but receive some rainfall and have maintained moderately healthy soil, active reseeding of indigenous, drought-tolerant grasses, shrubs, and trees can help improve vegetative cover, decrease erosion, improve the health of the soil by increasing SOC over time, and enable water harvesting. The success of revegetation efforts is constrained by the pH of the soil, as acidic soils can be neutralised much more easily than alkaline soils, which are very difficult to restore.
When reseeding efforts are combined with contour earth works like half-moons and bioswales, the process can be quite transformational. While yes, it does ultimately require rain for vegetation to germinate, these approaches can demonstrate the true meaning of “set it and forget it” – dig and seed in the dry season and simply wait for the rains.
While you might think it would take a long time to regenerate rangelands, that simply is not the case. Check out the time stamps in the bottom right corners of these photos from Elbarde district! From here, communities simply need to maintain physical or social fencing for long enough that the grass establishes itself and implement managed grazing (see below example). Photos: Jamal Tagal/ACF.
While you might think it would take a long time to regenerate rangelands, that simply is not the case. Check out the time stamps in the bottom right corners of these photos from Elbarde district! From here, communities simply need to maintain physical or social fencing for long enough that the grass establishes itself and implement managed grazing (see below example). Photos: Jamal Tagal/ACF.
Other areas would greatly benefit from clearing of invasive species, such as prosopis juliflora, which encroaches on farmland, grazing land, uses excessive amounts of limited water supplies, reduces biodiversity, and negatively impacts human health.
In the next case study, read about our experience stabilizing the hydrology of Dabare village, taking a seasonal lake to a year-round water solution that simultaneously started restoring surrounding grasslands.
Manage grazing
While establishing enclosures for livestock can also help to reduce stress on the land and allow grassland and reseeded vegetation to grow back, this may not be a realistic option in Somalia, where pastoralists graze their herds on open rangeland.
However, in pastoral areas, implementing grazing and rangeland management practices such as social fencing – a practice that controls grazing behaviour through xeer, community norms, social agreements, and collaborative decision-making can be very effective. Such practices are critical for limiting erosion, reducing the stress on the soil, sequestering carbon, and allowing native vegetation to recover naturally.
In the areas we work in, implementing planned grazing is especially important for land regeneration in the most arid and highly degraded areas in Galmudug, where livelihoods depend on pastoralism and livestock migration is considerable.
In the next case study, read about how low-cost solutions like regenerative rangeland management discussions are being used to bring communities together to establish foundations for healthier rangelands and, thus, healthier communities.
Collaborate with communities
Because communities depend on the ecosystems within which they live, they also hold the primary responsibility for caring for and restoring them.
Community engagement and local ownership have long been at the centre of BRCiS’ approach. Now, we can feed data on biophysical conditions (captured through our dashboard and the ReGreening app, for instance) and ecosystem-related social and community dynamics into the development of the Area Level and Community Action Plans (CAPs), through which our Members and communities collaboratively identify and prioritize needs and projects, to ensure that ecosystem services, needs and restoration are considered and integrated in the planning process.
See how this process is working in Beyra, Galkacyo in this video.
We are currently building off of our longstanding Community Resilience Committee (CRC) model by creating Environmental Management Groups (EMGs) within each community. EMGs consist of CRC members and community representatives such as traditional natural resource custodians, and they serve as the liaisons between BRCiS and local communities when it comes to ecosystem management and restoration.
EMGs will act as local knowledge hubs that can integrate scientific and traditional knowledge and offer their fellow community members information and expertise on environmental topics and sustainable restoration practices such as agroecology, soil and water conservation measures, water and rangeland management, and grazing restoration.
EMG members will also serve as ecosystem restoration champions, helping to translate this knowledge into practical action by spearheading the adoption of on-the-ground agroecological practices in their communities.
Let’s check back in with local champion Hawo to hear how she uses greywater to grow a flourishing permagarden while conserving water every day.
At the moment, ecosystem restoration is largely perceived by communities and many field staff as a collection of field-specific activities, such as restoration work, digging wells, and rehabilitating boreholes, as reflected in the CAPs. It is not yet viewed through the broader framework of self-organization, environmental governance, or community leadership.
A major goal of the EMGs is to shift the restoration narrative from standalone interventions to a holistic model that empowers communities to lead and govern their own environmental restoration efforts.
We need everyone: farmers, community-based Environmental Management Groups, local and international humanitarian agencies and development partners, line ministries, researchers, and the private sector to contribute their unique knowledge and skills in pursuit of our shared objective: thriving, resilient ecosystems and communities.
Implementing the activities described above: planting the rain, restoring vegetation, managing grazing, producing food whenever possible are important pathways toward restoration, especially when implemented by or with the active participation of communities.
In addition to new actions and behaviours, true restoration and resilience requires a mindset shift:
- Re-thinking programming through an ecosystem services lens: Understanding root causes, replacing quick-fixes with nature-based solutions that follow ecological boundaries, and viewing restoration as a viable exit strategy;
- Prioritizing quality and flexibility over speed and spend: Working with – and at the speed of – nature and communities, possibly in new ways that de-risk engagement in fragile contexts;
- Aligning funding criteria, indicators, and learning processes with global standards and context-specific tools and integrating ecosystem health data;
- Recognizing ecosystem services as an opportunity for multi-actor convergence across the humanitarian-development-climate (HDC) nexus.
We share a detailed guide for donors and funders, humanitarian and development implementers, government service providers, and others in the next and final chapter of our story. Explore this and access the previous chapters using the navigation below.
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