ERITREA: Climate-proofing for the future

ASMARA, 8 May 2009 (IRIN) - "Remember 'We Are the World'?" asked Mahmoud Abdalla, a leader of the Hidareb ethnic community in Eritrea's arid Anseba region along the northwestern border with Sudan, referring to the 1985 hit song by more than 40 top artists. "Remember the 1984 famine in Ethiopia? This region was right in the middle of it."

In 1984 Eritrea was part of Ethiopia, where some of the son's proceeds were spent.

Since then, droughts have grown longer and more brutal in this semi-arid part of Africa, populated mainly by pastoralist communities.

According to climate change projections by the government, temperatures could soar by more than 4 degrees Celsius by 2050, shrinking precious sources of water such as boreholes and run-off - excess water from rain or other sources flowing over the land - while droughts are expected to
become longer and more intense.

In its National Adaptation Programme of Action (NAPA), a plan to deal with the effects of climate change, Eritrea has identified the livestock production system and related livelihood opportunities for pastoralists in the northwest as most vulnerable to climate change.

"When we had no food, we knew our children could survive on milk for days, but over the years it has become difficult to find rangeland for our animals, which has affected the livestock population - we don't even have milk" said Abdalla.

Abdalla coordinates a pilot project to adapt livestock management to climate change in the northwest.

The pilot project aims to bring water to three villages by harvesting rainwater, and building a spate irrigation project to grow fodder for livestock.

In spate irrigation, a system often used in semi-arid regions, flood water is diverted from usually dry river beds and spread over large areas, according to a project document by the Eritrean government and the UN Development Programme (UNDP). This would prevent the flow from causing damaging and wasteful "flash floods".

"The flood water - typically lasting a few hours or a few days - is channelled through a network of primary, secondary and sometimes tertiary flood channels. Command areas may range from a few hectares to over 25,000 hectares," said Mogos Weldeyohannes, Director General of the Department of Environment.

The project will be one of the first in Africa funded by the Least Developed Countries Fund (LDCF), set up under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change to finance projects identified by countries in their NAPA. Only a handful of NAPA projects have been approved for
implementation since the inception of the LDCF in 2001, according to experts.

Bigger interests
But there are bigger interests riding on this project. Two-thirds of Eritrea's 3.9 million people live in rural and semi-rural areas and the government would like to keep it that way. "We do not have enough water in the urban areas to support people who will move [if there is a severe
drought]," said Weldeyohannes.

Eritrea, one of the world's poorest countries, does not have the resources to cope with the pressure on essential services, such as health care, that the migration of large groups of people would bring.

The frequency and intensity of droughts is already forcing many pastoralist families to move more often in search of pasture. Traditional seasonal migration patterns and routes are being disrupted.

Pastoralists from the Anseba region trek long distances to the neighbouring fertile Gash Barka area, where there are tradtional dry-season grazing reserves, according to the project document.

"The routes that pastoralists, including their livestock, use to travel between seasons are well defined and based on known water points, feed and tree shade. The movement involves mainly the larger animal species, but in areas where heat stress is acute, all livestock species are
forced to migrate."

But, according to the government and UNDP, over time this traditional coping practice has been disturbed by a number of factors, including rising pressure from conflict over land use, land degradation, and new government policies such as those on settling mobile people.

Another factor in government thinking is finding opportunities for demobilised members of the Eritrean national services programme, said Weldeyohannes. All Eritreans between the ages of 18 and 40 are part of
the national service programme, either as soldiers in the army, or on infrastructure construction projects, or in the civil service. The government is the biggest source of employment.

"Let's face it, we are at war with our neighbours and all these young people will return one day," said Woldeyohannes. "What will happen then?
We cannot accommodate them in the urban centres such as Asmara, which cannot cope with the half a million people already living there."

Theme(s): (IRIN) Environment, (IRIN) Natural Disasters

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