World's poorest, conflict-hit countries left to face climate crisis alone

Somali aid worker Hasan Mohammad Sirat has almost no tools at his disposal to tackle the devastating effects of extreme weather in his war-stricken country, where floods this year have followed hard on the heels of a severe drought.

"We are trying our best," he said, pointing to awareness measures such as teaching camp residents forced to flee violence and hunger to move to higher ground to escape flooding, which has killed nearly 100 people and uprooted 700,000 since October.

Sirat, a field officer with the Iniskoy for Peace and Development Organization, works in a village near Baidoa city in southwest Somalia, an area that is home to one of the country's largest populations displaced by insurgency and drought.

Last month, floods swept away his uncle's house and many camp tents and other buildings in the Baidoa area, leaving families exposed to the elements.

"These people, they are vulnerable - these people have no houses, (they) need shelter," Sirat said.

But, he added, the authorities in Somalia do not have the funding needed to build safer homes, drainage canals or other infrastructure that can help resist climate shocks and stresses.

Here, as in other fragile states such as Afghanistan and Libya, weak governance systems are an obstacle to accessing global funding to enable communities to adapt to a harsher climate and repair the "loss and damage" caused by disasters.

At the COP28 UN climate summit, governments are expected to endorse a declaration on "climate, relief, recovery and peace" that will aim to channel more support to bolster climate resilience in war-stricken and unstable countries.

Currently they receive only a tiny fraction of international funding to tackle climate crisis, leaving their people highly vulnerable to disasters made worse by global warming - such as the floods that burst decrepit dams in Libya earlier this year.

David Nicholson, chief climate officer for global aid agency Mercy Corps, said donors should stop thinking it is impossible to do adaptation work in politically unstable countries, as the money can be channelled through local governments or groups.

"We need to be able to take this risk - there are successful ways that we can still build resilience to the climate crisis even in these most challenging environments," he said.

His group has worked with herders and local authorities on northern Kenya's borders, for example, where scarcer grazing due to drought is causing tensions, to better manage land by combining pastoralist knowledge and remote sensing via satellites.

Finance hard to access

In the lead-up to COP28, Cindy McCain, head of the World Food Programme (WFP), and Sultan Al Jaber, COP28 president for the United Arab Emirates (UAE), called for urgent action to increase climate protection in fragile and conflict-afflicted countries.

They noted in a joint statement last month that people living in turbulent places such as Somalia get up to 80 times less climate finance than those in stable countries.

The COP28 declaration, expected to be launched Sunday, notes that conflict fuels people's vulnerability and exposure to climate hazards. In turn, climate crisis harms incomes, homes and wellbeing, exacerbating aid needs and posing "a significant and growing challenge to stability", it says.

To tackle this, the UAE President Sheikh Mohammed Bin Zayed announced on Friday the establishment of a $30 billion climate fund for global climate solutions. The fund is designed to bridge climate finance gap and aims to stimulate $250 billion of investment by 2030, he said.

Jenny Wilson, WFP's climate spokesperson, said by email that governments' commitments at COP28 should "rapidly turn into action plans that provide long-term protection for those in the most fragile and conflict-affected settings."

Hassan Mowlid Yasin, head of the Somali Greenpeace Association, a nonprofit that supports communities to better withstand climate threats, said his country is seeking more international help to cope with the impacts of warming.

"The major problem is that accessing finance is really difficult," he said in a phone interview.

According to Clare Shakya, an adaptation finance expert who has long worked with developing countries, all those with "thin" governments, including those at war and small island nations, are struggling to tap into global climate funds.

The process can take several years due to demanding due diligence requirements, she said. "It's incredibly high in transaction costs and a country that is distracted by many immediate needs and many immediate emergencies just doesn't have the capabilities," she added.

Countries must usually follow the same rigorous rules when applying for funding, favouring larger states with functioning civil service institutions, said Shakya.

Rather than navigating these complex processes directly, Somalia gets its funding through intermediary agencies like the United Nations Development Programme, Yasin noted.