More absurd propaganda from Justin Rowlatt:
Somalia may be one of the poorest countries in the world and beset by violence, but it is “fixable”, according to its top climate official.
The country has been torn apart by more than 30 years of overlapping conflicts – including an Islamist insurgency, a civil war, and a series of regional and clan confrontations. Yet Abdihakim Ainte, the Somali prime minister’s climate advisor, still regards his country as “as story of potential – of promise”.
What makes his optimism all the more surprising is the fact climate change is amplifying virtually all the challenges his country faces.
One commentator described climate change as a “chaos multiplier”, because it exacerbates existing tensions and entrenches conflict in fragile states like this.
But Somalia, the easternmost country in continental Africa, can’t be held responsible for our changing climate. The figures are staggering. Somalia has emitted roughly as much carbon dioxide from fossil fuels since the 1950s as the US economy does in an average three days, external.
The most obvious effects of climate change here have been in agriculture. Somalia is still overwhelmingly an agricultural economy, with about two thirds of the population depending on farming and animal herding for most of their income.
In 2022 the country experienced its worst drought for 40 years – an event scientists estimate was made 100 times more likely by human-caused climate change.
And drought isn’t the only problem here. Last year Somalia experienced terrible floods as a result of rains scientists say were made twice as intense by human-caused global warming. The floodwater washed away precious soils killing hundreds of people and displacing one million others.
The effects of Somalia’s climate change “double whammy” are all too evident in the hunger clinic the Red Cross runs in a hospital in the port city of Kismayo on the south coast.
Every day a steady stream of mothers bring their malnourished babies here. Many have had to cross from territory controlled by al-Qaeda’s lethal affiliate, Islamist militants al-Shabab, to get here.
The UN estimates more than 1.5m children under the age of five are acutely malnourished in Somalia.
Somalia’s weather has always swung from drought to wet, but as the World Bank’s graph shows, droughts were considerably more severe during the 1970s, when the world was getting cooler. This was of course the time of the great Sahel drought, which lasted from the late 1960s to the early 80s and left millions dead across a vast swathe of sub-Saharan Africa from the west to Somalia in the east:
https://climateknowledgeportal.worldbank.org/country/somalia/climate-data-historical
By contrast, Rowlatt’s drought in 2022 was not unusually severe at all. Thankfully Somalia’s climate is gradually becoming wetter, a boon for the country.
Any proper climate expert would know all of this. But Rowlatt knows nothing about climate. He is merely an activist, who spouts whatever nonsense his chums in Greenpeace tell him.
To produce this propaganda report, Rowlatt, along no doubt with his production team, flew to Somalia, burning goodness knows how many tonnes of oil to get there, not to mention costing licence payers thousands of pounds