It is often said that climate change will hurt the world’s poorest people first. Nowhere is that potentially truer than in Somaliland , an unrecognised state in the Horn of Africa sandwiched between an expanding desert and the Red Sea. A prolonged drought has killed 70 per cent of the area’s livestock in the past three years, devastating the region’s pastoralist economy and forcing tens of thousands of families to flee their grazing land for urban camps, according to authorities. “We used to have droughts before, we used to name the droughts, but they would be 10 or 15 years apart,” says Shukri Ismail Bandare, minister for environment and rural development. “Now it is so frequent that people cannot cope with it.” Somaliland has endured regular cycles of drought for the past 20 years that have intensified since 2015 as consecutive rains have failed. The impact has been catastrophic […]