A new massive exodus of Climate Refugees who are streaming out of the horn of Africa, like so many tumbleweeds blowing in the desert — make us all look like idiots, because we could have prevented this.
And the real tragedy is that it is too late and the odds are stacked against them now.
In our endless navel gazing and our fixation with the state of our economies and our resource comforts we’ve forgotten our humanity, our kin and our priorities. And these refugees truly have little chance of survival unaided – sometimes one in three is lost – and mainly because we are the ones to blame for this. To me and to all sentient earth scientists, this is clearly the effect of climate change and the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere causing a warming greenhouse effect that has shifted the rains and thus destroyed their chances for agriculture and put these people on the move.
Almost one in three climate refugees streaming out of Somalia, simply won’t make it. That is they will never finish the journey out of their territories alive. And they are only going to a place – any place – where there is some water and a little food. And this is because aid doesn’t get to them in their villages and communities.
Why?
Well…
The usual: Politics, religion and ideology, and because of that, they have to go out of their country to risk an uncertain journey sometimes called a death march. They are walking for days and weeks on end hoping not for deliverance, but that they will simply arrive someday in the squalor of a refugee camp in a foreign land. And still many of them won’t make it – because this walking journey is way too long, without water nor food and even when they get to the border — assistance is scarce. It’s not a journey for the faint of heart. Myself, remember some treks we had to do like this and am thankful to have survived…
Still in the humanitarian world, there are the disasters you see coming, and the ones you don’t.
We couldn’t foresee the massive 2010 earthquake in Haiti and the resulting humanitarian catastrophe. We didn’t see the devastating floods in Pakistan, the fires n Russia, the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, or the violent conflicts convulsing the Arab world. But the devastation looming in the Horn of Africa and Somali land we had seen.
And although the Environmental Parliament has founded a new office for climate related disaster prediction and risk analysis we are woefully underprepared to deal with this. We need help… Still we work hard and making all effort at forecasting these disasters, but our tools are still minimal and the science, data inputs, algorithms and all still in their infancy. Still, when the EP cries out for help, who is listening?
But what about the current drought and famine in East Africa?
Couldn’t we have foreseen this ahead of time?
We saw that coming from way off.
The only question was how bad it would be.
The answer is that it’s really very bad and getting even worse.
Still the Environmental Parliament gave an advance warning on this issue a full two years before we got to this sorry state of affairs… It was a heads-up warning the Environmental Parliament gave to the UN, the Food-Aid organizations like USAID and to the great donor nations. We did this when we warned them about this looming humanitarian catastrophe and yet we still couldn’t convincingly handle it. People are averse to acting unless there s a catastrophe… Now we must tell all of you all over again, that we consider this an environmental human disaster of the greatest magnitude and growing worse fast by the day. Because still we haven’t got a handle on how bad it is or what we can do about it before the great fluttering masses all get on the move… It could get a lot worse than what it is now if we don’t get aid to the people where they are.
This crisis has now affected a staggering 20 million people – it has killed tens of thousands, and has put more than half a million children at risk of starvation. Think about those numbers. Roll them around in your head and then look at your kids…
We could have prevented this from happening because we saw this emergency unfolding two years ago and again almost ten months ago when we were observing the climate change decimating the land. After all, the rains never came and the harsh drought settled in permanently. The minimum rains had slowed further down over the last few years and began to fail completely last year. All attempts at agriculture became pointless exercises at sand tilling, and even where there were irrigation channels, the harvests were poor, and food and fuel prices shot way up these last two years. Families already facing scarce food resources suddenly had to make do with much less or nothing. The climate and weather failed these people massively. And if you throw in the human impact of more than 20 years of violent conflict in Somaliland, you get this humanitarian disaster, where you have approximately twenty million Climate Refugees ready to go on the move.
The advance wave of these humans is already gone off Somalia. One to two millions of these refugees are already crossing the borders into Kenya, Ethiopia, Djibouti, or some other neighboring land seeking some sort of escape in a pattern of human migration ages old… Except that now they have to contend with national borders and unfriendly or unable to cope neighboring governments. Humans follow water paths much like all other animals migrating, and the Horn of Africa has always been a land of plenty. But alas no more… The water is becoming the scarcer resource in the Horn of Africa now. And the people are dying off.
Make no mistake, this is the worst humanitarian crisis in the world today.
Take this nameless random refugee finding her way into a camp run by Medecins sans Frontiers. She is a lanky almost regal beautiful nine-month pregnant Somali woman, with her two-year-old son in tow, and her husband, and his brother — who journeyed hundreds of treacherous miles by foot across arid, forbidding desert to the Ethiopian border. There she had to wait in order to be processed and allowed to cross the border. They had to wait outside the closed border to Kenya for many days without refuge, little or no water [to discourage migrants] and no food in 100-degree heat and high winds that whip sand across their faces. Eventually they were allowed in and bused to a refugee camp about 20 miles inside Ethiopia, where they were given a tent and a bit of food.
The refugee camp is built to house 20 thousand people tops, but it’s already struggling with more than sixty to a hundred thousand souls. The mother and child came to the International Medical Corps’ nutrition center in the camp, by which time the mother was so weak from severe malnutrition that she could barely keep her eyes open or speak. She could not hold her own son in her thin arms, and the imminent childbirth would very likely kill her. Her husband had been too ill to come to the center. Her brother-in-law held her child for her, but he too was so weak that when he stood his legs and arms shook from the strain and he was forced to sit down again. The child cradled in his arms was so severely malnourished that he was non-responsive, not uttering a sound.
This child and mother with the unborn kid still in her belly, didn’t survive…
People should not be suffering like this. This is not right.
Sadly, a crisis such as this has struck the region before while we all stood by and watched. The Great famine in Ethiopia in 1984, the famine and civil war in Somalia in 1991 and the cycle of famine elsewhere revisiting every failed food season and every time the crops and commodities are jacked up in price by traders immune to the real vagaries of Life. Life’s cycles are horrific if we aren’t there to mitigate their hurt and blunt their death scythe…
These are horrific cycles that plague East Africa. While the governments and communities have made great strides in mitigating the impact of these cycles, this year has seen a perfect storm of factors that are especially tough to combat.
I was in Ethiopia during the “global food crisis” in 2008, and witnessed a tremendous amount of starvation, pain and suffering. And yet, that crisis was not nearly as severe as what’s happening today. It did not constitute what the humanitarian community defines as “famine” – the malnutrition and mortality rates were not at the levels they are now. When 10 in 1,000 people die of malnutrition, that is considered a humanitarian emergency. It’s like a 1 percent crisis. Yet Right now, in the refugee camps where International Medical Corps and few other NGOs are working, the mortality rates have hovered around 14 percent. Fourteen out of a hundred people perish. Rates of severe malnutrition have been as high as 45 percent.
If one were to count the people who fall on the journey, and never make it to the refugee camps, then mortality rates would be closer to 30 percent.
One in three people lost. These are not good odds for humanity. We are all complicit in this and best we wake up and act.
We are better than that…
Yours,
Pano
PS:
That’s Climate Change for you in action.
How is that working for you reading this?
Because I can tell you it’s not working well for those people on the ground…
More people are getting on the move as we speak…
And the rates of human attrition are getting constantly worse in and out of the camps in the so called Horn of Africa — the horn of plenty….
