Drought early action for resilient drylands

In Africa, many of the most pressing climate adaptation challenges are concentrated in the drylands. They cover two-thirds of Africa’s land area, are home to half a billion people (40% of the population) and, critically, are warming up to twice the global average.

In the Horn of Africa and elsewhere, drought and other shocks, as well as conflict and climate variability significantly impact the food security and livelihoods of pastoral and agro-pastoral communities, potentially overwhelming their long-standing resilience strategies and undermining food, land and water systems vital to the region’s sustainable development.

Early – and anticipatory – actions are emerging as the cornerstones for effective preparation, response and recovery against shocks. Acting in advance of a crisis reduces its impact on the poorest, contributes to community resilience in the longer term and is less costly than emergency assistance.  According to the Global Center on Adaptation, “early warning systems save lives and assets worth at least ten times their cost.”

The session comprised three short presentations, followed by audience interaction and a policy panel with Guyo Malicha Roba, head of the Jameel Observatory at the International Livestock Research Institute; Tess Morris, food and agriculture advisor at the United Kingdom Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office; Nancy Balfour, founding director of the Centre for Humanitarian Change, and Dereje Wakjira, director of the IGAD Center for Pastoral Areas and Livestock Development.

From the Observatory, Tahira Mohamed and Samuel Derbyshire, post-doctoral scientists at ILRI presented on early actions to support pastoralism in recurrent and protracted crises in the Horn of Africa. 

Tahira noted that even though several programs are in place to build pastoral communities’ resilience, disconnects exist between the actual practice and the resilience envisioned in support programs. She pointed out that resilience programs often assume that pastoral systems are stable with calculable risks, while in real life, they are vibrant, meaning they are dynamic and constantly changing. Pastoralists usually have to deal with different complexities, such as gender and livestock ownership, uncertainties, such as disease outbreaks and animal thefts, in addition to drought and other climate-related risks. She emphasized the need for a contextual understanding of pastoral resilience, early warning systems, and a unified approach to providing resilience support. This has to underscore the integral role of the pastoralists, as stakeholders, in the process of enhancing resilience in dryland communities. 

Sam added that they have also been seeking to understand the scope for improving the impact of the existing early warning systems to allow them to be better at supporting pastoralists. He noted that this involves orienting the development world and aid systems in finding new approaches that focus on collective challenges and vulnerabilities. Subsequently, the solutions offered need to be community-focused and adaptable to the existing needs.

In the panel discussion:

Nancy Balfour highlighted a common theme across the presentations – indigenous knowledge – but was struck by how we perhaps still don’t understand how it works in specifically pastoralist systems.

She also argued that we need to be a lot more context specific – not just the current contexts, but how they are changing.

On the water dimensions of the presentations: she emphasized the importance of water storage to climate variability in the drylands, saying that we frequently don’t talk enough, if at all, about water storage. She reflected on narratives around water resilience – especially the idea that more access to water leads to better resilience. Suggesting there is little evidence for this, she argued that the ways water development is done in the drylands is more likely to undermines resilience, because it does not not sufficiently attend to the very diverse ways that people understand and interact with their natural resources and with their social networks, especially in times of crisis. Poorly implmented  water development can often lead to settlement, salinity in the water, health problems, and interrupted social dynamics. We have to be much more careful in these very fragile environments and with these very complex livelihoods.

Instead, she said, the water narrative should be around landscape planning, understanding how natural resources are used as capacities in a resilient system for pastoralism. If we don’t understand how the water and the pasture and the social capital are all used together and how mobility is a strategy and where people move to, you put the water in the wrong place. Without good water governance, you don’t have reliable water.

Guyo Malicha Roba, head of the Jameel Observatory at ILRI noted the short timelines of project-based approaches, arguing that investments will fail to produce the dividends we want if not fully embedded within longer term systems.

He emphasized the importance of strongly embedding such approaches to dryland development within existing community systems. Such projects and applications often focus on parts of the systems in which pastoralists operate and it is important to bear in mind that decisions by  pastoralists have to triangulate a lot of information, so they hardly believe in single source information tools.

In the same vein, he cautioned that we need to be wary of approaches, such as cash transfer used in emergencies, that tend to introduce individualized approaches in communal use systems.

Tess Morris of FCDO emphasized that drought is part of a system of crisis, and actions and investments need to pay proper attention to wider issues and relationships.

She elaborated on the notion that pastoralists that wait to act until the last minute are not complacent; they instead aim to gain as much information as possible to be able to make correct decision and minimize risks. This also applies to people in her situation – we have to utilize all of the information available to us to ensure that we’re investing in the right things that can drive the right impact in the right way

On responses in crises and emergencies, she emphasized the need to recognize the complexities in such situations, the importance of breaking silos, making sure that collaboration and partnerships are building local resilience alongside longer-term development strategies and capacities.  She called for ‘life-saving’ interventions to be designed with long-term perspectives in mind, making sure that anticipatory action schemes and early warning systems are put in place alongside immediate interventions so we can prevent future crises, and not just lift people out of a crisis for a temporary period of time.  Getting the right balance in this humanitarian-development-peace nexus, she suggests we need to start by talking the same language, making sure we’ve got commonality built in our objectives.

Dereje Wakjira from ICPALD reminded participants that the Horn of Africa comprises widespread dry and arid lands that are vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, hence he expects droughts to affect large populations in the region.

Reflecting on IGAD’s work on drought resilience across the region, focusing on natural resource management which is both water and rangelands, functioning markets for livestock and other products, diversifying livelihoods, and drought disaster risk management, he suggested the region is suffering some loss of momentum from the COVID pandemic. The needed investments in drought resilience building are high while government resources are declining.

Looking at future priorities, he argued that we need to be much better at interacting with Ministries of Finance, bringing them facts and figures that will count in their decisions. With drylands comprising 70% of the region’s land area, we need them to work for people and for countries. This is where we need research and evidence that can reach policy makers, showing where scarce resources should go. Otherwise, the money will go somewhere else.

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The session was part of the wider ‘Delivering Resilient Drylands‘ theme day.