Somalia’s Climate Fight Is Also a Battle for Peace — and for Fair Finance
On a recent morning along Somalia’s Shabelle River, neighbors climbed onto rooftops clutching documents and schoolbooks as floodwaters surged through villages already battered by years of conflict. It was a scene that has become uncomfortably familiar across the country: people surviving one disaster only to be driven into another. The number of internally displaced people in Somalia has now surpassed 3.8 million — a figure that captures not just the scale of human movement, but the pressures pushing it along: drought, deluge, insecurity and the relentless pull of cities that are themselves overstretched.
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Climate change here does not arrive as a single shock. It compounds older wounds, sharpens existing tensions and opens new fronts. Where water and pasture grow scarce, disputes follow. In that vacuum, al-Shabab — one of al-Qaida’s most violent affiliates — has turned climate stress into a tool of control: taxing wells, exploiting clan grievances, and luring idle, frustrated youth with dangerous false promises when livelihoods collapse. Terrorism is not caused by climate change, but it thrives in its wake.
A cycle of extremes, and the extremists who exploit it
Somalia has just come through a historic, multi-year drought that killed millions of livestock. Then the skies opened. El Niño-driven floods washed over the same districts that had been blanched by desiccation, submerging farms along the Shabelle and Jubba and forcing families to move yet again. Urban centers, from Baidoa to Mogadishu, are choking on the pace of arrivals.
These climate swings are not a uniquely Somali story; they echo across the Sahel, the Lake Chad basin, parts of South Asia and the Pacific. But Somalia’s long conflict and fragile institutions make the country a bellwether for what happens when the climate crisis and insecurity collide. The result is a lethal feedback loop: as communities lose crops, grazing land and savings, they become more vulnerable to coercion; as militants entrench, they degrade the environment — burning fields, sabotaging water points — making recovery slower and more expensive.
Somali forces and community fighters have retaken more than 80 towns and villages in the past three years. Victory has laid bare a landscape of environmental violence: scorched earth, degraded rangelands, ruined irrigation canals. Reclaiming territory is one task. Restoring the land that sustains it is another, and it is just as urgent.
Women and youth carry the heaviest load
In rural and peri-urban areas, women keep families together, ration water, manage market sales and frequently negotiate across clan lines to avert bloodshed. Their leadership is real, daily and often unrecognized. Meanwhile, young people — the majority of the population — are coming of age amid drought and joblessness, with hope in short supply. It is in this brittle space that promises of fast money and power can be most seductive. The longer the climate crisis erodes livelihoods, the harder the choices facing families become.
Rebuilding better requires more than emergency aid
Somalia’s leaders are trying to knit climate action into a broader plan for stability and growth. Vision 2060 and the new National Transformation Plan (2025–2029) aim to link classrooms, skills and jobs to a greener economy. Officials talk about “climate-smart agriculture” and modern water management, revitalizing fisheries and pastoral supply chains, reconnecting rural markets to cities and protecting biodiversity as national security priorities.
There is institutional retooling underway. The government is building a climate finance architecture anchored in a National Climate Fund within the Ministry of Finance to better access and track resources. “This is not just about surviving the next drought,” says Liban Obsiye, who leads the ministry’s Strategic Economic Unit. “It’s about rebuilding systems so communities can thrive.” The logic is straightforward: if smallholder farmers have drought-tolerant seeds and functioning irrigation, if herders can move along rehabilitated corridors to healthy rangelands, if traders have roads and solar cold chains to reach markets, then shocks hit less hard and recoveries are faster.
But vision meets a familiar bottleneck: money.
The finance gap: fastest-rising needs, slowest-flowing funding
Globally, climate finance is growing, but it is not reaching those at the front lines. The data are stark. In 2021–22, only 5.3% of climate-related development finance from OECD donors went to countries with extreme fragility. A quarter reached those with high fragility. The more fragile a state, the less climate funding it tends to secure — exactly the opposite of what risk management would prescribe. And once money does arrive, it can come as loans that add to already heavy debt burdens, diverting scarce national budgets away from schools, health and infrastructure needed for an inclusive transition.
Somalia is hardly alone here. From Mozambique’s cyclone-battered coast to Pakistan’s inundated provinces, frontline countries struggle to navigate a complex, slow and heavily intermediated system. Between “climate” and “finance,” it is the latter that holds the key — and too often, that key is out of reach.
In Somalia, more than half of Official Development Assistance in 2023 went to humanitarian relief. Those funds save lives. But in a world of overlapping emergencies, are we investing enough in preventing the next shock? U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres warned last year that “the era of global boiling” has arrived. The test for the international system is whether it can deliver financing that is faster, fairer and fit for purpose — supporting both immediate recovery and long-term resilience.
What a fairer deal could look like
- Shift more climate funds toward fragile settings and make access simpler, with local institutions eligible to implement. Locally led adaptation is not a slogan; it is the shortest route to impact.
- Use debt swaps for climate and nature, freeing fiscal space for investments in rangeland restoration, watershed management and climate-smart agriculture.
- Scale up anticipatory action: cash transfers, livestock feed and water trucking triggered by drought forecasts, not famine declarations.
- Invest in green livelihoods: solar-powered irrigation, cold storage for fisheries, drought-resilient seeds, and pastoral corridors that reduce conflict over pasture.
- Back reconciliation with opportunity. Peace committees led by elders and women can tamp down violence; pairing dialogue with jobs and services keeps it that way.
Peace through resilience
Somalia’s experience shows that climate resilience is not a niche environmental project. It is central to peacebuilding and economic recovery. Every rehabilitated well, every revived rangeland, every market reconnected to small producers reduces the space for violent actors and expands the space for hope. The question facing donors and investors is not whether to act, but whether to act at the scale and speed these times demand.
As floods recede and the next dry season edges closer, families across Somalia are once again calculating impossible choices: stay or move, sell the last goats or hold on, send a child to school or to work. A smarter flow of climate finance — predictable, equitable, anchored in local priorities — will not solve every problem in a country still confronting insurgency. But it can change the odds.
In the end, this is about more than weather. It is about dignity. It is about ensuring that a generation raised on shocks is not condemned to live by them. Somalia is sketching out a plan to build back greener and safer. Whether the world meets it halfway could determine not just who survives the next flood or drought, but who gets to build a life beyond them.
By Ali Musa
Axadle Times international–Monitoring.
