Somalia's natural and human geography is shaped by its harsh climate. Lying at the eastern extremity of the Sahel, Somalia has an arid to semi-arid climate. The country is in the midst of a prolonged and complex climate disaster, which shows little sign of abating. It has recently endured its longest drought in four decades, now punctuated with renewed flooding. This Climate Risk Review aims to systematically summarize existing knowledge on Somalia's climate risks in an accessible and standardized form. It has developed a set of semiquantitative metrics to summarize and compare risks. It contains four chapters:
- Chapter 1: Climate Overview outlines Somalia's climate context and how it shapes natural and human geography and rural production systems, as well as briefly summarizes current climate policies.
- Chapter 2: Climate Change, Conflict, and Social Risks examines the interaction between climate, armed conflict, and social risks, both to better understand the wider context of vulnerability and to identify particularly harmful interactions.
- Chapter 3: Risk Summaries inventories the major biophysical climate risks across five areas: climate disasters, agriculture and livestock, natural resources, health, and infrastructure and services. For each risk, it collates current information and indicates how ongoing climate change will likely affect the intensity of that risk in future.
- Chapter 4: Prioritizing Adaptation Action recaps the overall findings across different risks and links these to the broader development agenda within Somalia. It identifies broad priorities and approaches for climate action in relation to policies and institutions, physical investments, and knowledge. This information is complemented by a more systematic review of adaptation options across different sectors in the report's appendix. The report is intended as a reference resource and basis for informing further analytical work. The investments and actions it highlights need to be supported by new and detailed analytical work to identify the most efficient interventions and the institutional steps needed to support them.