Repeated drought in east Africa may prompt aid rethink

RAINFALL patterns over east Africa have changed in a way that makes severe droughts more likely - and this means aid agencies need to rethink the way they operate.

Change is already on the cards for the aid response to drought and famine in east Africa. The region, which is racked by poverty, experienced its worst drought for 60 years in 2010 and 2011. A report released last week by Oxfam and Save the Children argued that the international relief effort was far too slow to get going, leading to thousands of avoidable deaths. Despite warnings that a drought was likely, many donors refused to act until the crisis received widespread media attention.

Not only would gradual stockpiling of supplies have saved more lives, it would have made economic sense too. "If we don't get the resources until people are starving it costs [relief agencies] more," says Challiss McDonough, the UN World Food Programme's senior spokeswoman for the region.

Even stockpiling may not be enough to prevent future famines if ongoing research concludes that severe droughts in the region are becoming more likely.

Last year's drought occurred because both of the region's rainy seasons failed. We already know that the trigger for the failure of the "short rains", between October and December 2010, was La Ni?a - a cyclical meteorological event caused by a pulse of cool water rising to the surface of the eastern Pacific Ocean. But efforts to work out why the "long rains" that occur between March and May fail have drawn a blank - until now.

Bradfield Lyon and David DeWitt of Columbia University in New York examined records of the long rains and found that they have been much more likely to fail since 1999. That year also marked a sharp rise in sea-surface temperatures in the western tropical Pacific Ocean, while further east the ocean cooled.

Lyon thinks this change in temperatures has altered atmospheric circulation patterns, cutting off the supply of moisture to east Africa (Geophysical Research Letters, DOI: 10.1029/2011GL050337). A 2010 report by the United States Geological Survey suggested a similar mechanism.

"This does not bode well for the long rains," Lyon says. "While other factors can influence the outcome during any given rainy season, this slowly varying 'background' favours lacklustre long rains."

The crucial question now is whether the temperature changes in the Pacific reflect a natural variability in the climate that might reset itself in a few years or whether the shift to weaker long rains is a permanent result of human-induced climate change.

The answer may come later this year when researchers at the UK Met Office complete an attribution study on the 2011 drought. They are running two sets of climate models, one with and one without the effects of humanity's greenhouse gas emissions, to see whether drought in east Africa becomes more likely in a warming world.

If it turns out climate change is making extreme weather events more likely, it is important to help locals build resilience, for instance by building irrigation systems to cope with drought, says Grainne Moloney, a chief technical adviser with FAO Somalia, a division of the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization.

At the moment such efforts are hampered by the way aid money is managed, says Moloney. There are separate funds for short-term and long-term aid, often run by different organisations. "There has always been a distinction between emergency people and development people," she says. That means the response to immediate crises, while it saves lives, never addresses the underlying problems. "That's why we're in this mess."

The two sorts of aid need to be integrated, Moloney says, if tragedy is to be avoided.

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