Enhancing Adaptation and Resilience through Nature-based Solutions in Somalia (EARNSS)
This article was written by Niclas Baur following discussions with Project Lead Tristan Pitcher and reflects lessons from C4’s work in Somalia.
The countries most exposed to climate change are often the ones investors are least willing to fund. Climate adaptation investment in politically fragile, conflict-affected least developed countries carries a distinct set of risks that shape how projects must be designed. Conflict and criminal activity can make project areas dangerous and difficult to reach, disrupting both the implementation of interventions and their ongoing operation and maintenance. The same conditions expose adaptation interventions to theft, vandalism and damage during active conflicts. In addition to the security situation, remoteness and limited economic development mean that the trained personnel, replacement parts and materials, and functioning supply chains needed for infrastructure repair are often scarce to begin with. Taken together, these factors weaken investor confidence in precisely the countries that are most exposed to climate change and most urgently in need of adaptation finance.
This is the challenge we set out to address through Enhancing Adaptation and Resilience through Nature-based Solutions in Somalia (EARNSS), an Adaptation Fund project developed by C4 in collaboration with UNEP and the SADAR Resilience Institute. Communities in the Shabelle River Basin face compounding climate risks: flash flooding in the upper catchment and fluvial flooding in the downstream floodplains. Drought sharpens that exposure: it displaces communities in water-scarce areas, incentivising them to settle along the Shabelle — one of Somalia’s two perennial rivers, and precisely where flood risk is concentrated. EARNSS will build resilience to both flooding and drought. In line with the Adaptation Fund’s mandate to support innovative approaches, it will also generate practical evidence of what nature-based solutions (NbS) and hybrid solutions can achieve in the Somali context — evidence others can use to replicate and scale the approach independently.
At the centre of the project design is a hybrid approach, which pairs traditional ‘grey’ or concrete infrastructure with NbS. For example, in the upper catchment’s non-perennial drainage channels (wadis), the project will construct sand dams — low reinforced weirs that allow floodwater to be absorbed into stored gravel and sand, reducing evaporation losses. In the lower catchment, where riverbank erosion is the dominant concern, wire-and-rock gabions work in combination with riverbank revegetation to prevent bank failure. In each case the grey infrastructure addresses the physical problem directly, while the NbS components reinforce and extend that protection at comparatively low cost. Together they are expected to deliver more durable outcomes than either would achieve alone — and to do so without the scale of investment that grey infrastructure on its own would demand.
It is the operating environment in the Shabelle River Basin, though, that makes this pairing necessary rather than merely preferable. Although grey infrastructure typically delivers the greatest impact per beneficiary, its operation and maintenance require regular on-site inspection by trained technical personnel and the availability of replacement parts — both of which are scarce in conflict-affected and logistically constrained contexts such as Somalia. The NbS components carry a lower and less technically demanding maintenance burden: revegetated riverbanks partially self-regenerate, reducing both the frequency and the cost of upkeep compared with built infrastructure. Trained by the project, communities can maintain these interventions themselves, removing the need for specialist engineering visits for most routine upkeep. Periodic professional oversight will still be needed for components that cannot be handed over in full, but dependency on external technical capacity — and the cost that comes with it — falls substantially.
This emphasis on locally led, technically simple interventions also underpins the project’s long-term financial sustainability. Embedding interventions within existing local governance and social structures enables communities and district authorities to take on ownership — and the operating cost — of some project activities. Demonstration plots show community members first-hand how restoration activities are carried out and what they yield, creating an incentive to adopt and maintain these practices without direct funding. Where the benefits are visible and sustained, the knowledge tends to persist — and be spread to neighbouring areas.
Some NbS also generate income directly, which further incentivises their upkeep. For example, nurseries will be established to supply seedlings for riverbank and rangeland restoration, with a transition plan in place to transfer legal ownership to community committees — established and trained under the project — as income-generating enterprises. Adaptation Management Plans will set out which interventions sit under community stewardship and which require government stewardship, with formal agreements transferring ownership and maintenance responsibility for the grey infrastructure components to district and state government.
Hybrid solutions offer a practical way to deliver adaptation benefits in contexts such as the Shabelle River Basin, where conflict, remoteness and limited technical capacity would otherwise make investment in grey infrastructure difficult to justify. Pairing grey infrastructure with lower-cost, locally maintained NbS allows EARNSS to maximise impact and value for money while de-risking the investment itself, by improving the financial and operational sustainability of the interventions it delivers.
Designing hybrid solutions is one thing; delivering them is another. It requires the ability to operate credibly in insecure, low-capacity and logistically difficult environments — conditions in which many organisations struggle to work at all. C4 and the wider TAG International Group have delivered projects across Africa and the Middle East, giving us direct, practical experience of designing and executing climate adaptation programmes in conflict-affected settings. That combination of technical and operational capability is what donors, governments and private sector clients can draw on to deliver adaptation where it is hardest to deliver — and where it is needed most.