Agricultural drought in the Horn of Africa was due to climate change: Scientists

World Weather Attribution (WWA), a grouping of international scientists has concluded that the devastating drought in the Horn of Africa, where tens of millions of people and animals have been pushed into starvation, was as a result of human-caused climate change.

WWA is collaboration between climate scientists at Imperial College London in the United Kingdom, KNMI in the Netherlands, IPSL/LSCE in France, Princeton University and NCAR in the US, ETH Zurich in Switzerland, IIT Delhi in India and climate impact specialists at the Red Cross / Red Crescent Climate Centre.

In the report released recently, WWA said climate change has made drought 100 times more likely.

“Climate change has made this drought exceptional,” said Joyce Kimutai, a Kenya-based climate scientist and attribution expert who co-authored the report.

The Horn of Africa includes Kenya, Somalia and Ethiopia and has suffered from drought conditions since the fall of 2020.

Parts of these countries, which typically have two rainy seasons a year, have seen little to no rain for five consecutive seasons. Climate change has caused the “long rains,” which run between March to May, to become drier, while the “short rains,” which typically run between October and December, have become wetter.

However, the weather phenomenon La Niña has masked these wetter conditions, making the short rains fail, too.

Millions of animals have died and at least 20 million people have become acutely food insecure, the researchers said, noting that some estimates put the number of acutely food insecure people closer to 100 million. Tens of thousands have migrated from Somalia and Ethiopia into Kenyan refugee camps to flee famine and famine-like conditions.

The researchers stressed, however, that famine is a complex phenomenon, often stoked by conflict, political instability or poor government safety nets, and would not call the situation in the region a “climate-induced famine.”

“While climate change played a big role… what drives food insecurity and famine is to a very large degree driven by vulnerability and exposure and not just a weather event,” Friederike E. L Otto, a climate scientist with Imperial College London, said.

“There are a lot of other factors that drive how drought can turn into a disaster,” he added.

To understand the impacts of climate change on the drought, the researchers studied weather data and computer models to compare today’s warmed climate to the climate before the late 1800s, using peer-reviewed methods.

Otto noted that the report itself was not peer-reviewed but likely will be.

In 2021 and 2022, a network of early warning systems, along with the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and World Food Programme (WFP), issued a joint alert, warning that climate change was a primary driver of the drought in the region.

The researchers said that early warning systems—which account for a complex mix of variables that could lead to a famine– have improved considerably. The problem, they said, is that these vulnerable countries don’t have the resources to respond to food crises.

“We’re still lacking a kind of link between these early warning systems and the response side,” said Cheikh Kane, of the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Center.

Since October 2020 large parts of Eastern Africa have been experiencing extended dry conditions punctuated by short intense rainfall events that often led to flash floods.

The below-average rainfall in the October-December (OND) 2022 season “short rains” was the fifth consecutive failed season since OND 2020, including the below-average March-May (MAM) “long rains” in 2021 and 2022. The resulting drought was reported to be the worst in 40 years.

The drought has led to substantial harvest failure, poor pasture conditions, livestock losses, decreased surface water availability and human conflicts, leaving 4.35 million people in need of humanitarian assistance. At least 180,000 refugees from Somalia and South Sudan crossed into the drought-stricken areas of Kenya and Ethiopia.

By January 2023, close to 9 210 metric tonnes of food commodities had been distributed and USD 7.29 million cash-based transfers had been made. Despite some reported rains in parts of Kenya by the end of March 2023, the drought conditions are not likely to recover quickly enough to see improvements in food security before mid-2023.

Scientists from Kenya, Mozambique, South Africa, the United States of America, the Netherlands, Germany and the United Kingdom collaborated to assess to what extent human-induced climate change altered the likelihood and intensity of the low rainfall that led to drought, as well as the increase in evaporation due to climate change, exacerbating drought severity.

The results of the study, coupled with climate projections indicating high confidence of increased heavy precipitation and pluvial floods in the north eastern Africa region, is illustrative of the myriad of climate impacts that people and governments in this region are confronted with.

“Taken together, regional climate variability and the projections indicate the need to invest in adaptation strategies that are robust to both wet and dry extremes, and which can be iterated upon as climate signals emerge and future projections become more certain,” the scientists added.