Vast tracts of countryside transformed into barren wasteland, decimated crops and animal herds and children dying of starvation.
The grim reality confronting drought-stricken east Africa is a frightening portent of what could come elsewhere as the effects of climate change become increasingly pronounced. Across the world’s poorest continent, more than a fifth of its 1.3 billion people don’t have enough to eat, with water shortages and extreme weather events the main culprits.
Nowhere is this phenomenon more stark than in Somalia, one of the world’s most climate-vulnerable countries, which is in the grip if its worst drought in more than four decades while simultaneously struggling to contain an Islamist insurgency. Almost half of its 17 million people are in urgent need of aid and more than 1 million have abandoned their homes in search of food and grazing. Rains have failed for five consecutive seasons and water shortages are even worse that in the early 1990s when a famine claimed about 260,000 lives.