Drought in the Horn of Africa is 100 times more likely due to climate change, scientists report

The devastating drought in the Horn of Africa “would not have happened without climate change,” as global warming has made such exceptionally dry conditions in the region about 100 times more likely, the scientists concluded.

The severe agricultural drought which has gripped swathes of East Africa since 2021, the worst in four decades, led to widespread crop failures, animal deaths and left more than 4 million people in need of humanitarian assistance and 20 million at risk of food insecurity.

In the absence of man-made climate change, agricultural droughts in southern Ethiopia, southern Somalia and eastern Kenya would not have occurred, the World Weather Attribution group concluded on Thursday.

The independent international collaboration uses academics and scientists from around the world to assess whether the effects of climate change can be linked to extreme weather events.

The intensity and likelihood of the African drought was “mainly” due to evaporation of water from soil and plants, which had “significantly” increased due to hotter-than-normal temperatures, they said.

“Frequent multi-year droughts . . . will severely impact food security and human health in the Horn of Africa as the climate continues to warm,” said Joyce Kimutai, a climate scientist at the Kenyan Department of Meteorology and an author of the study.

While people living in the region “were no strangers to droughts,” the duration of droughts “stretched people beyond their ability to cope,” said Cheikh Kane, climate resilience policy advisor at the Cross Climate Center. Red Crescent Movement and author of the report.

Extreme weather events will become more likely and intense with every fraction of a degree of warming, scientists have warned.

Researchers in the latest study analyzed weather data and computer model simulations to compare today’s climate with what would have happened in the pre-industrial era, before the world warmed by about 1.1°C.

Despite recent heavy rains and flash floods in the Horn of Africa, NASA’s Earth Observatory has warned in March that drought conditions were “likely to continue,” and that this year’s rainy weather “doesn’t just undo three years of drought.”

In the longer term, the March-May wet season in the region, when most of the annual rainfall occurs, was becoming drier due to climate change, although rainfall between October and December was increasing, the report said.

However, both seasons were marked by below-average rainfall in 2021 and 2022, due in part to the La Nina weather phenomenon, which has unusually lasted in the past three years and is associated with less rainfall in the region towards the end of last year.

Without climate change’s effect on temperatures, conditions would have been “abnormally dry,” meaning human-caused warming “was a necessary factor in making the current drought occur,” the 19 authors of the study found. study.

Climate change has “played an important role,” but the food insecurity conflict has been “to a large extent driven by vulnerability and exposure, and not just by weather events,” noted study author and lecturer Friederike Otto. senior in climate science at Imperial College London.

“There are many other factors that determine how a drought can turn into a disaster like this,” he added.