Thursday April 28, 2022
Somalis call the dangerous journey towards Europe “going on
tahriib” a word mostly associated with illegal activities such as trafficking
or smuggling. Those who attempt it travel by road through Ethiopia, Sudan and
Libya, then by boat across the Mediterranean to Europe – if they’re lucky
enough to make it that far.
Their families often pay thousands of pounds to unscrupulous
smugglers, who may break their initial promises, upping the prices or
abandoning victims too early. Yet people still try. And increasingly, climate
change is one of the reasons.
Sitting under 40C sun in south-west Somalia, Abdirahman Nur
Hassan, a local elder and member of the town of Dollow’s drought committee,
told me illegal journeys to Europe used to be rare in this region, and were
related to youth unemployment, “but now it is becoming common”. Drought is
destroying people’s livelihoods and causing them to look for other options, he
said. “If this drought continues, things will get worse, the remaining animals
will die, and the majority of people living in this area will end up
displaced.”
The situation in Somalia is catastrophic. Six million people
are experiencing crisis levels of food insecurity following three failed rainy
seasons, and 81,000 are believed to be in famine. The United Nations has warned
that hundreds of thousands of children could die if adequate assistance fails
to materialise. 1.4 million children are expected to face acute malnutrition
this year.
According to the Norwegian Refugee Council, 745,000 people
have been displaced by the latest drought, the majority of them since January.
Accurate figures on deaths are hard to gather, given that the Islamic militant
group al-Shabaab controls large swaths of territory, making it dangerous for
government officials or aid agencies to enter them.
The climate crisis has played a significant role, making
droughts more intense and rain less predictable. The Earth’s temperature has
already risen by 1.1C, and Somalia – listed as one of the most vulnerable
countries in the world to climate change – is a place where you can see the
immediate impacts.
In 2011, a famine there killed 250,000 people. Droughts are
recurring, meaning victims don’t have a chance to recover in time to face the
next one. By the end of this century, the temperature across Somalia is
expected to rise by 3C.
The climate crisis is largely the result of western
emissions, but that has rarely resulted in increased help for developing
countries grappling with its effects. The UK has a population just over four
times the size of Somalia’s, but produced 520 times its emissions in 2018 – the
last year that World Bank figures are available – down from 933 times Somalia’s
emissions in 2006.
According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,
an average of more than 20 million people a year have been displaced by extreme
weather events since 2008. Most stay within their own countries, and in Somalia
I’ve seen them: tens of thousands of people in a makeshift camp, with no
toilets, no water, children crying from hunger, now fearful of the rain, which
will turn the area into an open sewer that spreads disease.
Speaking to me on the phone this week, Dr Sukri Hussein
Abdi, who works in a Somali stabilisation ward for malnourished children, where
they have treated more than 400 children over the past few months, said the
effects of the drought are “indescribable”. “People are dying from starvation,
we need humanitarian assistance, food, shelter, water to help these people, to
save lives, especially.”
Last year, the UK cut its foreign aid budget by billions of
pounds. In Somalia, a humanitarian response plan put together by the UN has
been drastically underfunded.
But allowing migration can be a more efficient form of
foreign aid. Allowing people in developing countries to more easily travel by
safe and legal routes to richer countries gives them a stable place to go, and
means they can also get a job and send money back home. In 2020, the World Bank
said Somalia received more than $1.7bn in remittances, equating to nearly 25%
of its GDP.
In a shop in Dollow, I met businessman Abdiweli Dirie Osman.
Every five days he collects up to $300 from Somalis who have made it abroad,
and uses it to buy bags of rice, sorghum, cooking oil and other essentials,
which he distributes to families in need. “The diaspora collect what they can,”
he said. This kind of charity is being repeated across the country.
Osman’s sister has been in Germany for the past 10 years.
“Every family has someone [in Europe],” he said. “Life is very difficult here,
there are the cycles of drought. They want a change from the standard of
living.”
Osman had no idea how many people from this region have left
for Europe. “They’ve been going for so long, it’s impossible to count them. It
happens all the time,” he said. During the drought, he too hears that the
numbers are increasing.
When I asked him if he knew about the dangers involved, he
laughed. “People are good at taking risks. That is the route. We’re hoping one
day that there will be safer routes they can take. It helps society; in times
of drought they can help the society.”
With every degree that the temperature across Earth rises,
experts say, roughly one billion people will either be displaced or forced to
live in insufferable heat. We urgently need to ask how to improve the
situation, for both those who leave and those who stay.
Sally Hayden is a
journalist and the author of My Fourth Time, We Drowned: Seeking Refuge on the
World’s Deadliest Migration Route