Community-Based Sand Encroachment Resilience Initiative in Somalia

Somalia’s drylands face more frequent drought, land degradation, deforestation, and severe sand encroachment. Many farming and pastoral communities are losing productive land as shifting sand dunes bury farms, grazing areas, roads, and settlements. Increasing climate change has placed these environmental pressures on vulnerable communities, resulting in declines in food production, water availability, and livestock productivity, and an increase in poverty.

Our initiative, led by the Centre for Dryland Development & Resilience Systems (CDDRS), is a community-based project focused on restoring and enhancing dryland resilience for people in Somalia, working directly with local communities to restore degraded land and minimize the local threat of sand encroachment. Therefore, we believe that sustainable environmental restoration needs to be locally driven and practical, and must be inclusive of the people most affected by climate change. The project aims to provide the community, particularly youth and women, with the means to play an active role in restoring ecosystems and protecting livelihoods.

Our efforts involve planting drought-tolerant trees, planting native vegetation, establishing community-oriented windbreaks and sand barriers, rehabilitating disturbed grazing and farming lands, and enhancing sustainable land use. It is also with our focus on environmental education and resilience training that we build local capacity for long-term restoration in this community. In the long term, we aim to rebuild degraded drylands, enhance food security, improve resilience to climate change, and guide communities to mitigate their land and livelihoods from worsening desertification.

Investment will support funding to purchase tree seedlings, restoration equipment, restoration tools, water storage materials, and community restoration tools. It will also invest in local training, youth and women-led campaigns, sand control structures, and monitoring on the site of restoration and in promoting sustainability and sustainable use for the restoration community. However, although we have high local commitment, many challenges, such as limited monetary resources, recurrent drought, lack of quality water, low environmental infrastructure, and low technical support, communities continue to struggle fiercely to preserve their land and future. Supporting this project, donors and partners will directly benefit from regenerating degraded land, reducing environmental vulnerability, and supporting local resilience, while also helping communities experiencing growing impacts of climate change in Somalia to develop sustainable solutions.