Climate Change

The Gilo Rangeland Council was unequivocal on whether recent rainfall anomalies in the Somali region were in fact anomalies or whether they presage permanent shifts in weather patterns: "Drought used to occur every eight to 10 years. Now it is every two or four, or even in consecutive years. This is climate change," one of the officials on the council commented. The populations in places such as Gilo tend to accept a temporarily harsh local climate, with a range of resource management and societal arrangements, but they cannot necessarily endure intense, sustained ecosystem stress. "The old want to stay and continue and struggle," one member of the Gilo Rangeland Council told us, but "young people are demoralized and moving to towns." At the same time, everyone on the council had a cell phone and was well informed of the risks of migration. One man mentioned concerns about seeing television footage of refugees drowning in the Mediterranean while trying to reach Europe.

As we interviewed people in the region about water, weather, and conflict, the issue of climate change loomed over our discussions. The choices people make today are heavily influenced by their expectations for tomorrow. The question of whether to keep the family together in the village or send the children into town hinges on future prospects: will there be sufficient vegetation in the coming years to raise enough livestock to require shepherds–and to feed the family?

Actors such as government bodies, development agencies, and nongovernmental organizations are working to alleviate some of the problems surrounding water in Somali region. Yet they face the same fundamental challenge of making choices today in the shadow of tomorrow. Newly built infrastructure, for example, affects and is affected by conditions today, next year, and 30 years from now. Future expectations are intrinsic to fixed investments with such a long life cycle.

Traditionally, individuals and organizations could look to the historical track record for guidance about conditions in the years and decades to come: average precipitation; onset dates and lengths of rainy seasons; frequency of drought or flooding. But as the Gilo Rangeland Council averred, disruption has displaced continuity in the expectations of locals. And when the past is no longer seen as a reliable predictor of the future, quality long-term decision-making is sorely handicapped.

Climate change projections could fill this gap, by providing a sound, scientific foundation of credible expectations and coherent possible scenarios. Unfortunately, the high-quality, fine-grained climate data that would be of the most use for decision-making is precisely the type of information that is unavailable in Somali region, despite a clear appetite for it at all levels of government. (Indeed, it’s not common for municipalities in more industrialized nations to use this sort of actionable climate data, either.) Climate research and forecasting has advanced dramatically in recent decades, but a large gap remains between what scientists know and what information decision makers have on hand. In Somali region at least, government officials reported having no long-term projections whatsoever. But the value is clear: Locally specific forecasts for temperature, rainfall, or other physical factors could mean the difference between building the right dam or the wrong one—or deciding to build no dam at all.

There are ways that our model could incorporate such climate forecasts. Although projecting future conditions falls well outside the scope of our work, estimating conflict risk under certain scenarios is entirely within the capabilities of the model. Scenario-based estimation of conflict risk is a straightforward matter of inputting hypothetical indicator values into the model. If those hypothetical values for precipitation or evapotranspiration or soil moisture are derived from rigorous climate change projections, our model can produce credible, if speculative, forecasts of the risk of conflict under those conditions.