Forecasts of the rainy season expected from March to next May “show drops in precipitation and high temperatures”.
Acute drought in the Horn of Africa is set to worsen this year and threatens the region with a famine worse than the one that killed hundreds of thousands a decade ago, a climate monitoring program warned on Wednesday. regional.
Forecasts of the rainy season expected from March to next May “show drops in rainfall and high temperatures”, the Center for Climate Predictions and Applications (ICPAC) of Igad, a group of countries, said in a press release. from East Africa.
Towards a sixth aborted rainy season
However, this rainy season contributes significantly (up to 60%) to the total annual rainfall in the equatorial countries of the Horn of Africa (which includes Djibouti, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia and parts of Kenya, Sudan, South Sudan and Uganda, and is sometimes extended to Burundi, Rwanda and Tanzania, editor’s note).
These forecasts confirm the fears of meteorologists and aid agencies that this drought of unprecedented duration and severity could quickly cause a humanitarian catastrophe.
“In parts of Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia and Uganda which have recently been badly affected by drought, it could be a sixth consecutive rainy season aborted”, underlines ICPAC, considered as the organization regional climate reference by the United Nations World Meteorological Organization.
The Horn of Africa is one of the regions most vulnerable to climate change, with increasingly frequent and intense crises.
23 million people in “acute food insecurity”
The five consecutive failed rainy seasons have so far caused the death of millions of livestock, the destruction of crops, and forced millions of people to leave their areas to find water and food elsewhere.
ICPAC says current conditions are worse than they were before the 2011 drought, with 23 million people already “acutely food insecure” in Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia, according to the report. Igad and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).
The last famine was declared in Somalia in 2011, and some 260,000 people, half of them children under the age of six, died of starvation for lack of a fast enough response from the international community, according to the UN. .
At the time, the region had experienced two consecutive aborted rainy seasons, compared to five today.
Call for international mobilization
On Wednesday, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres pointed out that around 1.3 million Somalis, 80% of them women and children, had to move to another region to escape the drought.
If the stage of famine has not yet been reached, 8.3 million people, or more than half of the Somali population, will need humanitarian aid this year, he added.
Workneh Gebeyehu, Executive Secretary of IGAD, called for urgent international mobilization in the face of this worsening drought.
“National governments, humanitarian and development actors must act to have no regrets before it is too late,” he stressed.
