Somalia contributes less than 0.02% of global carbon emissions. Let that number sit for a moment. And then consider this: right now, in early 2026, more than 6.5 million Somalis, roughly a third of the entire country’s population, are facing crisis levels of hunger. Nearly 1.85 million children under the age of five are expected to suffer acute malnutrition this year. Entire harvests have failed. Livestock are dying. Families are drinking from unclean water sources just to survive. And the rainy season that might bring some relief isn’t expected until April. This is not a natural disaster in the way we usually mean that phrase. It is a climate disaster. And the people suffering most from it are the people least responsible for causing it.
What’s actually happening
Somalia has always been a country that lives close to the edge. Decades of conflict, political instability, and poverty have left its infrastructure fragile and its people with very little buffer when things go wrong. But the climate has been going wrong with increasing frequency and ferocity. Drought events in Somalia have nearly tripled over the last thirty years, according to the Somali government, directly linked to climate change disrupting La Niña weather patterns. La Niña cycles are critical to Somalia because agriculture makes up 80% of the country’s employment. When the rains fail, the entire economy fails with them.
The current crisis has been driven by below-average rainfall during the Deyr season between October and December 2025, compounded by the ongoing dry Jilaal season running from January to March. The consequences have been catastrophic. The Deyr season cereal harvest in southern Somalia came in 83% lower than the long-term average, while livestock conception and birth rates across the country fell far below normal. For farming families who depend on both crops and cattle to feed themselves and earn income, those numbers are not statistics, they are the difference between survival and starvation.
Displacement rose sharply across 2025, with 680,000 people newly displaced, bringing the total number of internally displaced persons in Somalia to nearly 4 million. These are people who have abandoned land their families have farmed for generations, walking to overcrowded displacement camps where cholera, measles, and acute malnutrition are already spreading.
The climate justice problem
Here is where the story becomes something that should concern all of us, including those of us sitting in university lecture theatres thousands of miles away. As Amnesty International put it plainly in a report published late last year: “Somalia’s contribution to global warming is negligible, yet its people are bearing the brunt of the climate crisis.”
This is what climate justice actually means in practice. The countries most responsible for the carbon emissions that have warmed the planet, industrialised nations in Europe, North America, and parts of Asia, have the wealth, the infrastructure, and the geographic luck to largely insulate themselves from the worst effects. Somalia has none of those buffers. It has mountains of vulnerability and almost no resources to adapt.
There is a term for this in the international climate negotiations: “loss and damage.” It refers to the harm caused by climate change that goes beyond what communities can adapt to, crops that simply cannot grow anymore, land that is no longer livable, lives that are simply lost. For years, wealthy nations resisted paying into any formal loss and damage fund. A fund was eventually established at COP27 in 2022, but contributions have been slow, insufficient, and largely non-binding. Somalia is living what happens when global commitments stay on paper.
The aid crisis within the crisis
What makes this situation even harder to stomach is that the tools to prevent the worst of it exist. We know how to deliver food aid. We know how to treat acute malnutrition in children. We know how to dig wells and purify water. The problem is not knowledge, it is money and the willingness to provide it.
The World Food Programme has been forced to reduce the number of people receiving emergency food assistance in Somalia from 2.2 million in early 2025 to just over 600,000, meaning it is currently supporting only one in every seven people who need food assistance to survive. Nutrition programs have been cut from nearly 400,000 pregnant and breastfeeding women and young children to just 90,000. WFP urgently requires $95 million to continue supporting the most food insecure people in Somalia between March and August 2026, and warns that without immediate funding it will be forced to halt humanitarian assistance entirely by April.
Somalia’s 2025 Humanitarian Needs and Response Plan called for $1.42 billion and was only 12.4% funded. For context: that is the entire annual task, for a country of over 17 million people facing imminent famine, receiving barely a tenth of what was requested.
Why this matters to us
It would be easy to read a story like this and feel overwhelmed, the scale is enormous, the geography is distant, and the forces driving it feel impossibly large. But this is precisely the kind of crisis that universities, students, and young people should be paying attention to. We are the generation that has grown up understanding climate change not as a future threat but as a present reality. We are also the generation that will spend our careers navigating a world increasingly defined by climate-driven instability, displacement, food insecurity, and resource conflict that do not stay contained within borders. What is happening in Somalia is a preview of what climate inaction looks like when it arrives.
There are things that can be done. Donating to organisations like the World Food Programme, Action Against Hunger, or Save the Children directly funds food assistance that is already proven to save lives. Advocating for stronger loss and damage commitments from governments matters. And simply refusing to let stories like this disappear from our attention, refusing to scroll past, matters more than it might seem. Somalia is not a distant tragedy. It is a consequence. And right now, with famine on the doorstep, it is also a test of what we actually believe when we say we care about climate justice.
References
https://www.wfp.org/emergencies/somalia-emergency