“At the moment we are talking, 1.4 million children under the age of 5 are severely malnourished and if we do not intensify our intervention, it is predicted that 350,000 of them will be lost by the summer of this year. “The situation cannot be worse than this,” said Adam Abdelmoula, of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. “I therefore call on all those who are able to contribute, including the Somali diaspora, the business community, traditional and non-traditional donors, to act and act now.” A Somali woman holds her malnourished child in a hospital. (Feisal Omar / Reuters) Three years of successive droughts have left Somalia’s largest river, the Juba, almost completely dry. Water scarcity has affected about 4.5 million people, many of whom live as farmers. “Of all the droughts I have experienced in my 70s, I have not seen anything as serious as this,” Ahmad Hassan Yarrow, a Somali man who was forced to flee his home in search of food and water, told the UN. In the recently published sixth Global Climate Assessment, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that climate change and the ongoing La Niña – a climate pattern leading to dry weather in the Horn of Africa – are responsible for the drought. and the high temperatures that bake the area. An animal that has succumbed to drought in Somaliland, a semi-autonomous region of Somalia. (Daniel Jukes / ActionAid via AP) In a nation that has endured decades of political violence and extreme poverty, the effects of climate change are being felt strongly by children. “Already in this country, 70% of school-age children do not go to school. “In a single state in the land of Jumba, the drought has led to the closure of 40 schools and this will be the trend in many areas affected by the drought,” Abdelmoula said. More than 700,000 people have already been displaced by successive droughts, forced to walk on barren streets littered with animal carcasses, the BBC reported, to try to reach populated areas in search of food, water and shelter. The story goes on To make matters worse, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, where many African countries supply their wheat and cooking oil, has pushed up food prices. “The Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that up to 13 million more people worldwide will be pushed into food insecurity as a result of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The truth of the matter is that Putin’s war forces us to take from the hungry to feed the hungry. “As long as Russia continues its brutal campaign, innocent people will pay the price,” said Cindy McCain, the US representative to the UN in Rome last week. The combination of water scarcity and water scarcity and high prices for imported wheat means Somalia is “at risk of starvation,” Abdelmoula said. With the Humanitarian Response Plan in Somalia, the UN seeks to raise nearly $ 1.5 billion in humanitarian aid to 5.5 million of Somalia’s most vulnerable people. To date, however, it has received just $ 56.1 million, or 4% of that total. A withered corn field in Kilifi County, Kenya. (Dong Jianghui / Xinhua via Getty Images) The problems are not limited to Somalia. According to the International Committee of the Red Cross, at least a quarter of Africa’s population now suffers from food insecurity due to factors such as drought and higher prices. Climate change is fast becoming a constant threat to the continent. At the United Nations Conference on Climate Change in Glasgow, Scotland, in November, the industrialized nations continued to struggle with the fact that Africa, in particular, was ready to bear the brunt of a problem that was not its own. While nations at the conference reaffirmed their commitment that developed nations will provide $ 100 billion a year to developing nations to help transform their economies and meet their greenhouse gas emission targets, the delivery of that money has fallen. Even more problematic is an agreement for rich nations to provide “loss and damage” funding to the poorer ones to address the costs of climate change-related catastrophes, such as the continuing drought in East Africa. Of course, the dire situation in Somalia is not isolated. As global temperatures continue to rise, the IPCC warns, “by 2030, half of Africa’s continent could be displaced as a result of climate change.”
