When the world celebrated World Environment Day on June 5, 2022, in Somalia the celebration was missing. The country has little to celebrate: Somalia is vulnerable to, and highly impacted by, climate change. It has experienced more than 30 climate-related hazards since 1990, including 12...
blogs.worldbank.org
JULY 27, 2022
Between 2001 and 2021, Somalia lost 429,000 hectares of tree cover, the equivalent to a 4.9% decrease in tree cover in almost the same period, and to creating 840,000 tons of carbon dioxide equivalent
emissions.
Somalia’s economy greatly depends on its natural capital: land, rivers, forest, sub-soil assets, and marine resources of fish.
Without degradation, the estimated value of Somalia’s land resources would be US$222.3 billion.
Trees are an essential part of Somalia’s natural capital. Threats come from two main, interconnected directions: recurrent drought and inappropriate land use.
Since there is a close relationship between the performance of the Somali economy and the health of its natural capital, this does not bode well for Somalia’s future. The country’s forests are disappearing. These, although mostly classified as low-density, contain 394 million metric tons of carbon in living biomass. Somalia lost about 686,000 hectares of forest between 2000 and 2017, an annual loss that equals at least 6% of all the trees lost in Africa, often from using land for livelihoods made in, for example, charcoal production.
This meant the loss of 205 million trees, the equivalent of creating five million tons of CO₂ emissions. The main theatre of forest loss is the southwest, where the Islamist al-Shabaab group holds territory.
After livestock, charcoal is now the second-most important export from Somalia with up to 250,000 tons of it produced annually.