In Yemen, climate change is essential for effective humanitarian action
If no one pays attention to climate change adaptation, then nothing happens, and people become more vulnerable.
Since 2015, the conflict in Yemen has negatively impacted over 24 million people—over a third of the population—with over 14 million in need of lifesaving assistance.[1] The conflict is having a devastating effect, including on food insecurity and access to water. The cost of essential food items has increased over 150% as rural livelihoods and agricultural yields have been destroyed.[2] While conflict is the central factor in this humanitarian crisis, the lack of coherent climate change adaptation strategies will exacerbate conflict and increase people’s vulnerabilities for years to come.
Climate change is best understood as an aggravating factor or trigger in places where conflicts already exist, putting additional strain on already stressed governments and vulnerable populations. Many of the countries predicted to be affected by climate change face pre-existing challenges of poor governance and social and political instability.[3] Climate change aggravates problems associated with growing populations, inadequate supplies of fresh water, strained agricultural resources, weak land tenure security, poor health services, economic decline, and weak political institutions. There is also a growing body of evidence that this, in turn, leads to conflict and may exacerbate ongoing humanitarian crises.[4] Of course, few things have such direct causality.
Figure 1: Ignoring climate change in Yemen could prolong the conflict and decrease potential for adaptation strategies.
Yemen is a case in point. It was suffering the effects of climate change before the conflict and had forged a strategy and plan to address this[5] that was gaining increasing international support.[6] This has been largely abandoned during the conflict.
Not only were plans and resources for climate change adaptation abandoned but the humanitarian response architecture that has come to the aid of Yemenis is not designed well enough to integrate practical approaches for the immediate (risks of conflict and violence) long term consequences (increased vulnerabilities especially the rural poor and women) of climate change. It certainly does not make links with the previous efforts of the Government and actors like the World Bank that were pursuing practical solutions to climate change adaptation in Yemen. The humanitarian response and architecture are also not considering climate change despite continued international calls to do so and a growing body of policies, guidelines, and frameworks that could guide humanitarian action, from Disaster Risk Reduction to the World Humanitarian Summit to the work of specific donors.
As in other humanitarian responses, the Yemen response is designed to address immediate lifesaving needs, which are enormous and growing. Given these immense needs, the response has not effectively considered the humanitarian-development nexus, how communities develop resilience during crisis, or how political actors maneuverer to use scarce resources, like food and water, to their advantage during a conflict. This is compounded by some general confusion amongst actors regarding the differences between mitigation and adaptation strategies and regarding how climate change aggravates conflict and can increase both immediate and longer term vulnerabilities, especially amongst the rural poor and women in Yemen. While the proverbial chicken and egg come to mind here, it may be no wonder then that climate change, adaptation strategies, or even resilience, are not addressed in the Humanitarian Response Plan (HRP) and the actions of the Humanitarian Country Team (HCT). Rather than damming, this simply raises the unfortunately common spectre of immediate lifesaving activities as having singular importance in how the response is conceived and delivered.
When actors are asked about potential and realised linkages between the conflict, increasing vulnerabilities, especially amongst women and the rural poor, their activities, the accelerated depletion and waste of resources, and the potential for growing conflict over these resources, they cite anecdotal and sometimes misguided examples and/or they claim that for them to do anything more substantive would require additional funding. This might be true, but it smacks of how humanitarians, either overtly or unconsciously, can ignore complex issues that contribute to the immediate and longer-term effectiveness of their programmes, like gender equality and women’s empowerment,[7] despite broader commitments to do so, like those from the World Humanitarian Summit.
Yemen was moving to address the effects of climate change prior to the conflict.
Efforts to address climate change in Yemen predate the war. Yemen developed a National Adaptation Programme of Action (NAPA) in 2009.[8] This was followed-up by support from the international community, culminating in the World Bank’s “Strategic Program for Climate Resilience in Yemen” that set out key areas for investment. These included:
Increased water scarcity and reduced water quality leading to increased hardships on rural livelihoods;
Increased drought frequency, increased temperatures, and changes in precipitation patterns, as well as increased number of flash floods leading to degradation of agricultural lands, soils, and terraces;
Deterioration of habitats and biodiversity leading to the expansion of desertification;
Reduced agricultural productivity leading to food insecurity and reduced income generating activities;
Increased sea levels leading to wetlands, coastal mangrove migration, erosion, infrastructure damage, and seawater groundwater intrusion;
Increased climatic variability leading to the spread and growth of vector borne/water borne diseases;
Impacts on coastal zones leading to loss of tourism activity; and
Absence of long-term climatic data rendering planning and prediction problematic.[9]
These remain the pressing consequences of climate change issues in Yemen, as this review demonstrates, and some have been exacerbated by the conflict.
Yemen continued to develop frameworks for addressing climate change. In the preparation for the 2015 UNFCCC Conference of the Parties COP 21 in Paris, Yemen prepared its Intended Nationally Determined Contribution[10] (INDC) focusing on adaptation to climate change (ACC) across major vulnerable sectors including water, agriculture and coastal areas. The country’s Third National Communication to the UNFCCC[11] (2018) addresses adaptation to climate change in sectors such as public health and ecotourism, besides water resources, agriculture and other key areas. Taken together, these provide a framework for ACC. While the possibilities for ecotourism remain dim given the conflict, it is one area for which they must report given the National Communications to the UNFCCC, going back to 2001.
Actors in the war use natural resources as weapons.
This and other efforts were curtailed by the Yemen civil war. The war has not only exacerbated climate change mitigation strategies[13] but have also seen Houthi and Saudi forces blocking deliveries of humanitarian aid consisting of food and water, the bombing of water reservoirs, and the confiscation of water from civilians at checkpoints. This is on top of the severe malnutrition rates across Yemen which have a direct link to broader water scarcity and the degradation of agriculture, amongst the other issues noted above.
All of this throws in doubt efforts to address climate change in Yemen for the longer term. Plans to develop desalination plants along the coast, an already costly and complicated investment, are stalled. Reforming petroleum subsidies—also exceptionally political—that could lead to additional public investments in infrastructure to address food insecurity and sustainable economic growth are also unlikely. While there may be an opportunity to address this through reforms even during the conflict, this review did not identify any actor that is pursuing this. Even the reduction of Qat production and consumption, which consumes nearly 40 percent of Yemen’s water supply, requires not only a communication strategy, as charged by the UNFCC, but a credible alternative to the livelihoods that depend on Qat production along with significant awareness, sensitisation, and behavioural change campaigns. The Government is hardly in a position to adopt risk mitigation strategies related to global food price shocks during the conflict.[14]
Yemen faces a potentially damaging cycle where prolonged conflict increases vulnerabilities (nutrition/food insecurity/livelihoods) and destroys infrastructure (agriculture/water). This leads to a reduction of the capacity of government and other actors to address the growing issues of climate change, let alone gain the confidence of the international community to support such efforts. This also leads to the destruction on household livelihood assets and thus their coping strategies, raising the likelihood of people’s reliance in negative coping strategies.[15]
What can be done in a place like Yemen? Are there policies and frameworks that can guide humanitarian actors?
For humanitarian actors, they may draw on global policy and normative frameworks for climate change that have emerged from Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR). This would provide a framework that goes beyond those of the Government and their actions with UNFCCC that lack appropriate remedies for Yemen during the war.
DRR addresses how households and communities prepare for, withstand, and then recover from human-made or climate related crises and has a history of normative development. In 2005, and coinciding with the 2004 Indian Ocean Earthquake, the United Nation’s held the first World Conference on Disaster Reduction[16] in Kobe, Japan to set global standards (Hyogo Framework for Action 2005 -2015[17]) combined with a Biennial Global Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction to track progress. The Hyogo Framework was succeeded by the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015 – 2030. This framework includes four priorities: understanding disaster risk, strengthening disaster risk governance to manage disaster risk, investing in disaster risk reduction for resilience, and enhancing disaster preparedness for effective response, and to ‘Build Back Better’ in recovery, rehabilitation and reconstruction.” [18] Sendai also stresses the need for countries to advance from DRR to a comprehensive Disaster Risk Management approaches, including ecosystem management and climate change resilience. This thus stands as the main global reference framework of action for humanitarian action while enhancing climate change adaptation capacities.
Concurrent with the development and implementation of a global framework for DRR, the humanitarian community has strengthened its approaches to resilience. Resilience is one of the most challenging programming approaches in humanitarian action. With roots in the sciences of physics and mathematics, ‘resilience’ describes the capacity of a material or system to return to equilibrium after a displacement.[19] Resilience in humanitarian action is a way to ensure that people’s longer-term needs are incorporated into immediate humanitarian action. It provides both a framework for how people anticipate, withstand, and recover from shocks as well as a way to make programmatic links between recovery, development, and sustainability. While the subject still tends to swirl in academic debates,[20] its principles are critical for ensuring that humanitarian actors can spot opportunities for resilience as part of their programming.[21]
By the time of the World Humanitarian Summit held in Istanbul in May 2016, there was a recognition that conflict, natural disasters, and climate change require a longer-term approach to enable the most vulnerable to overcome debilitating shocks and to decrease their vulnerabilities over time. The World Humanitarian Summit’s Core Commitments include a commitment “to accelerate the reduction of disaster and climate-related risks through the coherent implementation of the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Paris Agreement on Climate Change.”[22]
The World Humanitarian Summit also provided a specific commitment to women and girls, recognising them “as change agents and leaders, including by increasing support for local women’s groups to participate meaningfully in humanitarian action.” These commitments, combined with multi-year humanitarian funding[23] and increasing levels of investment in humanitarian action,[24] have thus pushed the issues of DRR to the doors of the most vulnerable.
Figure 2: Numbers and type of natural disaster, 1950 – 2012
Looming large across the intersection of national policies and planning for DRR and resilience programming for affected populations is climate change. There were three times as many natural disasters from 2000 through 2009 as there were from 1980 through 1989--all related to climate change. As Figure 2 shows, the number of disasters globally is increasing at a furious pace.
With all of this, climate change is very much a humanitarian issue in Yemen
In relation to Yemen, all of this, unfortunately, highlights again how there have been global policy and normative policy development related to climate change and humanitarian action, but these are often lost in the fast-paced, highly dynamic, and resource-constrained operating contexts like in Yemen.
This makes climate change very much a humanitarian issue in Yemen:
Climate change exerts an unprecedented pressure over already scarce water resources and agricultural yields in Yemen;
Climate change increases the risks to already vulnerable communities who are exposed to climate hazards such as landslides and floods, inland or storm surges, and typhoons along the coast;
When these climate hazards strike, cholera outbreaks and famine might also jeopardize the survival of vulnerable and isolated communities;
Climate change increases inequitable access to vital natural resource such as water, farming land and food;
Climate change increases conflicts over the control of scarce vital resources such as water and food, including production, access, prices, and the control of distribution networks;
By increasing resource scarcity, climate change increases the overexploitation of already stressed natural resources and traditional sources of energy, increasing the likelihood of famine, disease outbreaks, exclusion, and stress migration amongst the most vulnerable populations;
It thus becomes the responsibility of humanitarian actors to integrate climate change adaptation strategies into their approaches and activities and in ways that can reduce vulnerabilities and the possibilities of further conflict.[25]
ENDNOTES:
[1] “Yemen: Humanitarian Response Plan; June – December 2020.” United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA); June 2020.
[2] HDX estimates of food prices in Yemen, January 2015 – May 2020. Available here.
[3] Smith, D. and Vivekananda, J. Climate Change, Conflict and Fragility. London: International Alert; 2009. Available here.
[4] For a good summary of these issues, see: Katie Peters, et. al. “Climate Change, Conflict and Fragility: An Evidence Review and Recommendations for Research and Action.” ODI, June 2020. Available here.
[5] “National Adaptation Programme of Action.” Environment Protection Authority; Republic of Yemen; April 2009. Available here.
[6] This culminated in a World Blank plan from 2012: “Strategic Program for Climate Resilience for Yemen.” Climate Investment Funds. Meeting of the PPCR Sub-Committee. 17 April 2012. (PPCR/SC.10/8/Rev. 1)
[7] This is presented in an evaluation of UN Women’s contribution to humanitarian action. Please see: Angelica Arbulu, Silvia Hidalgo, Dorian LaGuardia, Alesia O-‘Connor & Ana Rodríguez; “Corporate Thematic Evaluation of UN Women’s Contribution to Humanitarian Action.” UN Women, 2019. Available here.
[8] “National Adaptation Programme of Action.” Environment Protection Authority; Republic of Yemen; April 2009. Available here.
[9] “Strategic Program for Climate Resilience for Yemen.” Climate Investment Funds. Meeting of the PPCR Sub-Committee. 17 April 2012. (PPCR/SC.10/8/Rev. 1) This was part of the World Bank’s The Pilot Program on Climate Resilience (PPCR) which is the adaptation program of the Climate Investment Funds (CIFs) meant to “pilot and demonstrate ways to integrate climate risk and resilience into core development planning, while complementing other ongoing activities”
[10] “Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDC) under the UNFCCC.” Republic of Yemen, 2015. Available here.
[11] “Third National Communication to the Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.” Republic of Yemen; 2018. Available here.
[12] The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has stated that “poorly designed adaptation and mitigation strategies can increase the risk of violent conflict.” See: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/syr/.
[13] Climate change mitigation is a term of art that refers to mitigating the impact of climate change on populations, including increasing populations’ resilience to climate change events such as increased levels of drought or flooding, as compared with lowering emissions and other factors that increase climate change overall.
[14] For a report on conflict and climate change in Yemen, see: Hadil Mohamed, Moosa Elayah and Lau Schuplen; “Yemen between the Impact of the Climate Change and the Ongoing Saudi-Yemen War: A Real Tragedy.” Centre for International Development Issues Nijmegen, The Netherlands. November 2017.
[15] These are aligned with emerging frameworks that are being used to assess the relationships between climate change adaptation and growing vulnerabilities. See for instance, Kimberly Anh Thomas and Benjamin P. Warner; “Weaponizing Vulnerability to Climate Change.” Global Environmental Change; Volume 57, July 2019.
[16] The annual conference is now called the UN World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction. Available here.
[17] This is hosted by the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction and focuses on natural hazards. Available here.
[18] “Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015 – 2030.” UNISDR; (UNISDR/GE/2015 - ICLUX EN5000 1st edition) 2015.
[19] This is the basis for complex adaptive systems, a methodology that has expanded from material sciences and systems theory to look at impact and results in complex operating environments. CAS is especially relevant to understanding the impacts of climate change. For a review on how CAS moved from the physical to the social sciences, see: Jason Brown Lee, “Complex Adaptive Systems.” CTS Technical Report, March 2007. For a review of how resilience is used and defined in various scientific disciplines, see: Patrick Martin-Breen and J. Marty Anderies, “Resilience: A Literature Review.” The Rockefeller Foundation, September 2011.
[20] For a treatise on how debates about resilience are influencing humanitarian action and other sectors, see: A. V. Bahadur, Ibrahim, M. & Tanner, T. “The Resilience Renaissance? Unpacking of Resilience for Tackling Climate Change and Disasters.” Strengthening Climate Resilience Discussion; Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex; 10 August 2012.
[21] Simon Levine & Irina Mosel, “Supporting Resilience in Difficult Places.” Overseas Development Institute, April 2014; & Adam Pain & Simon Levine, “A Conceptual Analysis of Livelihoods and Resilience: Addressing the ‘Insecurity of Agency’.” Humanitarian Policy Group Working Paper, November 2012. For a more econometric approach, see: Prabhu Pingali, Luca Alinovi and Jacky Sutton, “Food Security in Complex Emergencies: Enhancing Food System Resilience.” Disasters, Vol. 29, Issue Supplement 1; June 2005.
[22] “Agenda for Humanity: Core Commitments.” Available here.
[23] While various donors had moved to multi-year funding for protracted crises, like Iraq, Syria, Somalia, and DRC, prior to the 2016, the World Humanitarian Summit includes a commitment to multi-year humanitarian financing as apt of the Grand Bargain.
[24] The percentage of Official Development Assistance committed to humanitarian action has moved from around 5% in 2005 to 20% in 2015 (quadrupled) and is expected to consume over 40% of ODA by 2025 given ongoing protracted crises and the impact of climate change. See: the OCHA Financial Tracking Service (https://fts.unocha.org/) and the Donor Tracker (https://donortracker.org), amongst other sources.
[25] For a few briefs on the relation between humanitarian action and climate change from the proposed review lead, please see: http://www.humanitarian-analytics.com/home/2018/12/11/climate-change-is-a-humanitarian-issue.
