Somalia’s plea in Addis Ababa: climate justice is not charity, it’s survival
At a summit meant to elevate Africa’s voice on climate, Somali President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud delivered a blunt reminder: the continent is being asked to decarbonize while still paying the price for emissions it did not cause. His appeal — for scaled-up finance, clearer delivery mechanisms and a rapid transition from pledges to payouts — was not a diplomatic flourish. It was a survival plan for a country that has endured back-to-back climate shocks with staggering human consequences.
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From droughts to declarations
Speaking at the Second Africa Climate Summit in Addis Ababa on Sept. 8, Mohamud recounted the lived realities behind the numbers. Somalia’s prolonged drought from 2021 to 2023 affected some 7.8 million people — nearly half the country — he said, echoing humanitarian reporting from the region. Crops failed, livestock died by the millions, and families were displaced into cities and camps already strained by conflict.
“The climate crisis is taking a heavy toll on the Somali people,” he told delegates, insisting the conversation must move from abstract goals to concrete finance. Somalia, Mohamud noted, has taken steps: it submitted an updated Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC 3.0), launched a Green Somalia Initiative to plant 10 million trees, set up a National Climate Fund and sealed a $100 million partnership with the Green Climate Fund in 2024. Yet governments on the frontline, he argued, cannot retrofit resilience on the terms of distant economies.
A familiar global debate, with new urgency
Mohamud’s speech captured a persistent dilemma in climate diplomacy. Developed nations have long pledged support: the $100 billion-a-year goal for climate finance was agreed over a decade ago. But delivery has lagged, and much of the money has flowed as loans rather than grants — increasing debt burdens for already fragile states. Loss and damage, the idea that wealthy polluters should compensate the victims of climate-driven harm, has moved from moral argument to formal negotiation table, yet practical mechanisms remain contested and underfunded.
For Somalia, the consequences are immediate. Without predictable, flexible financing that prioritizes adaptation and loss-and-damage mechanisms, governments must choose between debt-fuelled development, emergency humanitarian relief, or piecemeal community projects that leave the most vulnerable exposed. That choice plays out in pastoralist enclaves where camels and goats, culturally and economically central, are dying in droughts — an image that crystallizes how climate disruption erodes livelihoods and ancient ways of life.
What kind of finance will change the equation?
Mohamud’s demand for “finance at the right scale and on the right terms” speaks to three practical needs:
- Grant-based funding for loss and damage, not loans that amplify sovereign debt;
- Fast-disbursing funds for emergency resilience and livelihood protection, alongside long-term investments in water systems, climate-smart agriculture and nature-based solutions; and
- Country-driven mechanisms that empower national institutions and local communities rather than top-down projects that fail to account for local contexts.
These are not novel prescriptions, but their urgency in Somalia is stark. The $100 million Green Climate Fund partnership the president highlighted is notable; it is a start. But scale matters. For fragile states facing repeated shocks, millions are a down payment, not a lifeline.
Beyond money: trust, capacity and competing priorities
Money alone won’t resolve the deeper structural issues. Capacity constraints inside ministries, fragmented donor coordination, and short funding cycles all blunt the effectiveness of climate dollars. Moreover, Somalia’s political fragility — a mosaic of federal, regional and local authorities operating in a landscape still healing from decades of conflict — complicates absorptive capacity.
There is also a global political question embedded in Mohamud’s words: can the international community accept that climate action must be woven into development, not treated as an add-on? For many African leaders, decarbonization is not an abstract ambition but a set of trade-offs affecting energy access, industrialization and jobs. Asking countries to forego fossil-fuel-based development without reliable finance for low-carbon pathways is preaching austerity to the wrong audience.
Planting trees, protecting livelihoods
The Green Somalia Initiative’s goal to plant 10 million trees is emblematic of a broader shift toward nature-based solutions in Africa. Reforestation can restore watersheds, reduce erosion, and sequester carbon — but it requires long-term stewardship and attention to local ecosystems to avoid monoculture pitfalls. Done well, tree planting can be both climate mitigation and a source of community resilience. Done poorly, it risks becoming another line item on a balance sheet.
Similarly, national climate funds can be transformative if they channel resources to community-level adaptation, protect pastoralist mobility corridors, and strengthen early warning systems. The challenge is translating high-level commitments into practical programs that anticipate the next drought cycle rather than responding to the last one.
Questions that linger
As delegates packed Addis Ababa halls, a few questions hung in the air. Will donor countries finally accept that loss and damage needs a permanent, predictable financing solution? Can climate finance be restructured to prioritize grants over loans for the most vulnerable? And crucially, can international mechanisms be flexible enough to support countries with low administrative capacity without imposing burdensome conditions?
Mohamud framed Somalia’s demands not as a plea for charity but as an insistence on fairness. “Africa’s case is compelling and just,” he said. If the continent is to avoid becoming a perpetual testing ground for adaptation while shouldering the risks of a warming world, the response must be more than words on a summit communique. It must be money that moves, systems that work, and policies that reconcile climate action with dignified development.
That is the hard calculus for the next phase of global climate diplomacy: turning moral clarity into contracts, and promises into payments that keep communities alive and economies moving. The question for the international community is whether it will treat Somalia’s plea as an urgent directive or just another speech at a conference.
By Ali Musa
Axadle Times international–Monitoring.
