The acute drought in the Horn of Africa is expected to worsen this year, threatening the region with a famine worse than the one that killed hundreds of thousands of people a decade ago, a regional climate monitoring centre warned on Wednesday.
Forecasts for the rainy season scheduled from March to May next year “show decreases in rainfall and high temperatures,” the IGAD Climate Prediction and Applications Centre (ICPAC), said in a statement.
This rainy season normally contributes significantly (up to 60%) to the total annual rainfall in the member countries of the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD), a regional body in the Horn of Africa comprising Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan and Uganda.
Fears of a looming humanitarian disaster
The forecasts confirm the fears of meteorologists and aid agencies that this drought of unprecedented duration and severity will quickly lead to a humanitarian disaster.
“In parts of Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia and Uganda that have recently been severely affected by drought, this could be a sixth aborted rainy season in a row,” says ICPAC, a designated regional climate centre of the UN World Meteorological Organization.
The Horn of Africa is one of the world's most vulnerable regions to climate change, with crises becoming more frequent and intense.
Five consecutive aborted rainy seasons so far have led to the death of millions of livestock and the destruction of crops, pushing millions of people to leave their home areas to find water and food elsewhere.
Some 23 million people 'acutely food insecure'
According to ICPAC, conditions are now worse than they were before the 2011 drought. Based on information from IGAD and the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), 23 million people are already “acutely food insecure” in Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia, the centre noted.
The last famine was declared in Somalia in 2011, when some 260,000 people, half of them children under the age of six, starved to death in the absence of a sufficiently rapid 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.
