Improving Early Warning Systems in Somalia

Introduction.

The Horn of Africa nation has struggled with state and institutional building for over two decades and has succeeded in the establishment of federal member states and public institutions, which show a gradual recovery of country’s governance and state building.

Somalia has been subjected to conflicts for about 30 years, accompanied by climatic disasters that included prolonged droughts, recurrent floods, epidemics, and seasonal locust invasions. Those combined weather and climate-related disasters have impacted the lives of millions of people in the country, resulting in mass displacement, loss of livelihoods, food insecurity, and a higher unemployment rate.

Somalia has experienced more than 30 climate-related hazards since 1990, including 12 droughts and 19 floods. This exposed the country’s limited capacity for disaster risk management and the vulnerability of the people to these recurrent crises. With poor and fragmented early warning systems in the country, climatic disasters, particularly floods, droughts, and locust invasions, continue to affect the people every year and result in the loss of livelihoods and the destruction of infrastructure.

An early warning system is a vital tool for proper disaster risk reduction and management in the country to disseminate and better communicate with affected communities in the disaster-prone areas to create resilience pathways and help them cope with and withstand climatic shocks.

Early warning systems in the country aren’t enough to disseminate the most needed information to the right people, which poses a greater gap in the early warning mechanism. The country’s early warning system is faced by fragmented and uncoordinated platforms provided by different agencies, accompanied by poor dissemination and communication channels.

Millions of people in Somalia are at risk for not receiving early warning information about forecasted or anticipated disasters; thus, this cost lives livelihoods, and damages properties, infrastructure, and ultimately create mass displacement and a dire humanitarian catastrophe.

Current service providers

Early warning systems in Somalia are currently provided by several institutions, both government and international partners, through multiple and fragmented platforms, though their effectiveness and outreach can be questionable.

The warnings are provided via online systems to the different concerned partners and organizations, with a focus on weather, rainfall, floods, droughts, cyclones, and locust outbreaks. The current EW providers are described below:

ICPAC-IGAD Climate Prediction and Application Center is a regional climate and information center accredited by the World Meteorological Organization to provide climate information services to 11 East African countries, including Somalia. The center is mandated to deliver several climate services that are intended to enhance the resilience of the people affected by climate change and extreme weather events. Climate forecasting, early warning, and climate information dissemination are some of the services provided by the center.

FEWS NET is a leading provider of early warning and analysis on acute food insecurity around the world. FEWS NET provides timely and evidence-based warning information and analysis of food security. Monitoring and forecasting agroclimatic conditions is also among the products that FEWS NET produces. This information is publicly available through its website and network.

SWALIM: FAO’s Somalia Water and Land Information Management (SWALIM) is a key contributor to Somalia’s land and water information. It is one of the main sources of climate and water data that stakeholders rely on. It produces weekly and monthly updates and early warning products on rainfall, floods, droughts, cyclones, and weather.

SODMA: The National Multi-Hazard Early Warning Center in the Department of Disaster Risk Management under the Somalia Disaster Management Agency (SoDMA), is the country’s mandated entity in disaster warning activities. Its main tasks are the coordination of disaster risk management activities in the country. One of the center’s primary responsibilities is to regularly create climate information products, such as forecasts for temperature and rainfall, early warnings for cyclones, floods, and droughts, and projections on desert locust movement and diseases.

MOEWR: The Department of Hydrometeorology in the Ministry of Energy and Water Resources, Federal Government of Somalia, is responsible for producing forecasts on river water level and rain forecasts with flood and drought monitoring.

Information Management Center, Puntland: This center, officially known as the Information Management Center for Water and Land Resources, was established by the government of Puntland in partnership with FAO-SWALIM through the Integrated Land and Water Resources Management Project (ILWRM). The center’s mission is to provide information about water and land resources to government ministries, international development organizations, and academic institutions. It provides early warning and forecast products on rainfall and droughts as well. y.

Challenges:

• Weak institutional capacity: The country’s capacities, both federal and state institutions, that are involved in early warning activities are weak or insufficient to provide timely and accurate information to the people. Limited monitoring stations and forecasting models, a small number of experts and professionals, and a lack of local strategies and plans for proper early warning systems are key challenges facing Somalia’s early warning and early action landscape.
• Limited resources: One of the main pressing challenges for better early warning system implementation in Somalia is limited resources across the involved institutions. The government is currently funded by external partners for its programming, and the private sector, which is a dominant entity in the country, doesn’t invest in these areas.
• Lack of coordination between different agencies — the current service providers in the early warning sectors are coordinated. Different warnings and alerts are produced each week and month based on the variety of dates they separately receive and disseminate. The forecasts provided are the same because of a lack of coordination among the providers.
• Inadequate data and information: since the 1990s, the country’s data regarding weather and water has been lost due to destroyed stations across the country. Since then, the country has been dealing with fragmented and detached data, which can’t help the decision-making process of providing accurate advisory outlooks and forecasts.
• Poor communication and dissemination of information: most of the early warning alerts and information don’t directly reach the affected people as they are not disseminated via the right media or channels. Information is produced and visualized on websites that are not available to people in disaster-prone areas.
• Fragmented platforms: the current platforms aren’t coordinated but fragmented with loads of different information and data, which may lead anyone seeking the right insights regarding early warning information in the country.

Recommendations.

An effective early warning system saves lives, economies, and infrastructure and mitigates the impacts of disasters or climatic shocks while ultimately developing proactive and early preparedness measures in the community for an incoming threat. In Somalia, improving the country’s early warning system is vital for its capacity to cope with the recurrent and repetitive drought and flooding that affect millions of people in the country and cause lots of economic and property loss.

The following points are the proper inputs to improve Somalia’s early warning systems:

• Coordinated and systematic platforms where service providers are harmonized.
• Establishment of water and weather monitoring stations and forecasting models
• Capacitating or empowering local institutions and individuals with skills and resources
• Improving communication and dissemination channels where remote people are easily reached or targeted.
• Political will from the government and interest from the private sector.

Considering the above-explained points will eventually solve the current challenges that Somalia’s early warning sector is facing.