In Somalia’s remarkably arid climate, communities have long lived in intimate relationship with the land.
This human ecosystem is present when pastoralists move their herds to fresh grazing land and waters. It is there when rainfall and regular seasonal flooding enables farming in the country’s breadbasket and replenishes water for drinking, livestock and crop production throughout the year. Walking around a Somali village, it is visible in the homes and fires made from tree branches, fibre mats, and animal skins.
In addition to supporting communities in normal years, healthy ecosystems are resilient – feeding communities and saving lives in difficult years. Healthy rangelands and forests reduce the land’s vulnerability to desertification and soil degradation. Healthy vegetation enables the land, livestock and people to withstand dry years. Healthy soils absorb more water and store it in the ground, reducing erosion and the risk of flooding.
The many ways nature sustains and supports human life – in good times and in bad – are known as ‘ecosystem services.’
We often think of service delivery – such as food, health, water, housing, medicine and protection from extreme weather – as being organized by government, private sector or other providers. In emergencies, we think about them being delivered by humanitarian agencies and first line responders. However, these same services are naturally – and sustainably – provided by healthy ecosystems.
When we asked the communities we work with about how they engage with and benefit from nature, they mentioned many 'provisioning' – or as we call them, tangible – ecosystem services that we would expect. These included water, grazing land, farming, food, honey, medicine, timber and other forest-related products linked to their specific livelihoods, construction materials, or unique resources nearby. Access to most of these resources ebbs and flows based on seasonal patterns and is at its lowest during severe climatic shocks.
'Regulating' ecosystem services naturally manage and reduce disaster risk by maintaining balance and stability in the face of environmental variation and more extreme hazards. They include flood control, soil moisture retention, pest control, temperature regulation, and climate regulation, and water purification.
Nature provides generously, but these vital services are not guaranteed. They depend on how communities steward the land, water, and natural systems on which they rely.
Historically, farming, pastoralism, grazing, migration, bush burning and tree cutting, and water use have been managed through hyper-local traditional/ indigenous legal systems known as xeer, which are established and enforced by community elders. Xeer consists of community by-laws for sustainable, context-specific rangeland, herd, and other environmental management practices, enforces punishments for noncompliance, and is used to resolve conflict between individuals and communities.
Unfortunately, since the 1990s, many factors have combined to severely reduce the health of the land and soil in Somalia, limiting nature's ability to provide community-sustaining ecosystem services.
While climate change and increasingly severe global climate phenomena like El Niño, La Niña, and the Indian Ocean Dipole are often blamed for this decline, poor environmental management practices often have a more immediate impact on nature's and communities' wellbeing. For example, Somali communities are increasingly engaging in overgrazing, deforestation, construction of settlements and unsustainable farming practices that prevent the ecosystem from renewing itself.
When nature's ecosystem services are disrupted – whether due to shocks or mismanagement and degradation – communities begin to use coping strategies that can be even more harmful to the environment (such as intensified illegal timbering for charcoal) and to themselves (like armed conflict over remaining resources). When enough time passes, communities become food insecure or are even physically displaced from their land to IDP camps.
“It is not drought that causes bare ground, but bare ground that causes drought.”
– Allan Savory, Zimbabwean ecologist.
This may be the first time you have thought about the relationship between environmental degradation and humanitarian needs, but it’s more intuitive than you think. Take a minute to play with these flash cards. Can you guess which under-performing ecosystem services underly these emergency needs?
How even positive intentions can lead to harm
It is often only when conflict, malnutrition, displacement and other humanitarian concerns materialize that governments, humanitarians, and other actors rush in to fill the gap by developing and deploying emergency services to meet the resulting needs. However, these emergency services often treat only the symptoms of broader ecosystem dysregulation.
Without addressing the root causes, communal coping strategies and emergency ‘solutions’ may inadvertently make things even worse by degrading nature faster than before.
Examples of this include clearing trees in camps for displaced people, implementing chemically-dependent agricultural activities for short-term yields, over-exploiting aquifer water for crop irrigation, and more. Well-intentioned but poorly coordinated interventions lead to over-use and depletion of resources.
Combined, these factors create a downward spiral of maladaptation, ecosystem degradation, and severe humanitarian needs.
Scroll down for an example of how this works.
Overgrazing; over-use of chemical fertilizers provided by humanitarian, development, or government programs; and deforestation reduce the soil’s ability to retain moisture, nutrients and sequester carbon and lead to sheet erosion.
Over time, grasses, shrubs, and trees die off or fail to quickly regenerate, reducing fodder for animals and exposing bare ground. This further reduces the health of the soil and leads to the formation of rills and gullies. Tensions between people and communities begin to form as they compete for remaining ecosystem services.
The next growing season, rainfall is somewhat more sporadic and intense as a result of climate change.
But because of the community and aid system’s maladaptive practices, the soil is less able to absorb the water, resulting in more rapid runoff that gushes through the gullies and destroys businesses, road infrastructure, cropland, and even homes.
Livestock and even people are killed.
Because the rainfall was not sufficiently absorbed into the soil, the ecosystem does not have enough water to support crop growth or restore the grazing land.
During the subsequent dry season, food stocks from crops are low, livestock are thin and not producing enough milk, and children become malnourished.
Existing wells are depleted and can no longer provide drinking water for communities and their livestock.
Nearby pastures are barren, causing local communities to travel long distances for grazing.
Local resource disputes break out, and insurgent actors seize control of the available limited resources, creating access corridors that deprive certain populations—typically those who are already marginalized.
As communities face increasing pressure to meet their basic needs, they engage in further unsustainable practices and extractive behaviors. By now, some families have even become displaced, journeying long distances to urban centers with little more than the clothes on their backs.
In pursuit of speed and scale, humanitarian actors deploy response activities.
Some NGOs drill wells to access deeper water reserves to meet short-term water needs.
Major aid programs are implemented in nearby cities, pulling more community members away from their traditional livelihoods and ancestral homes and toward poorly planned urban settlements that degrade critical peri-urban ecosystems.
Others monetize natural resource poaching through quick-win livelihood programs such as firewood and charcoal burning for local use and export to Arab gulf states.
The following year(s), nature and rural communities have not recovered because the underlying causes of degradation have not been addressed.
New wells stop producing as the water table dries up. The cycle of degradation, over-use, and conflict worsens.
People who left to go to the urban IDP settlements weigh the tradeoffs between returning to their families in barren and insecure areas – where young people may be forcibly conscripted – and remaining in their new urban environs. These include better access to education for their children and health facilities, cash transfers or other humanitarian assistance concentrated in urban locations, the risk of eviction, poor sanitation and overcrowding, marginalization, isolation and loneliness, and limited livelihood opportunities.
At this point, whichever option they choose will likely further degrade the landscape.
Having observed – and yes, at times contributed to – this downward spiral over 10 years of humanitarian response, we at BRCiS knew we had to do something differently. We needed to understand clearly and urgently just how far communities had fallen into this spiral, where the pressure points were, and what it would take to begin reversing course.
That effort began with our recent Ecosystem Health Baseline assessment, a research-driven collaboration between BRCiS, ICRAF, and Somali communities. This study – which we present in greater detail in Chapter Two – confirmed what we had begun to suspect.
The Somali landscape is very, very unhealthy.
With a clear diagnosis finally in hand, the solution presented itself quickly: we need to partner with nature – not against, in parallel to, or in duplication of it.
While recognizing the role that communities, peace, development and humanitarian actors have played in creating the current state of degradation may seem disheartening, it is also empowering!
It gives us the chance to take responsibility for our relationship with the environment and offers us the opportunity to building resilience back through nature-based solutions.
“If you really want to increase resilience for and with Somali communities, you have to get the ecosystems right. And for this – paradoxically – you have to invest in and put people first.”
– Michael Hauser, Senior Associate, CIFOR-ICRAF
Hear the perspectives of champion farmers Abdullahi Barre and Hawo Isak, Abdikani Ahmed from the Community Resilience Committee in Gobsho, and NRC's Abdikani Osman and Abdi Mohamed in this short video, produced with support from FCDO's Resilience and Adaptation Fund:
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