Borena, the podcast by Valerio Nicolosi produced by LifeGate and Cesvi, about the driest region of Ethiopia, where it has not rained for six years.
The drought that has devastated the Horn of Africa and left tens of millions of people grappling with severe food insecurity is closely linked to the effects of climate change caused by human activity. Since October 2020, this part of eastern Africa, one of the most impoverished regions in the world, has been struck by the worst drought in the past 40 years. Here, the rainy season has failed to arrive for five consecutive seasons.
Ethiopia, Somalia and Kenya are the countries most affected by this emergency. According to World Bank data, more than 36 million people in the area are in a state of severe food insecurity as a result of the drought. According to Unicef, more than 7 million children under the age of 5 are living in a state of acute malnutrition and many have already died as a result of this situation. It is precisely the lack of rain in the southern regions of Ethiopia that is the focus of Valerio Nicolosi's new podcast "Borena, la terra senza pioggia", produced by LifeGate and Cesvi, an organisation that operates worldwide to support the most vulnerable populations in the promotion of human rights, the fulfilment of their aspirations, and sustainable development.
After years of drought, the brief rainy season that occurred between October and December 2023 brought violent flooding, particularly in November, which caused severe floods in southern Ethiopia, eastern Kenya and many regions of southern and central Somalia. The same scenario is unfolding in these very weeks. All of this has led to an increase in the number of people forced to leave their homes.
While Ethiopia has been struck by flooding on one hand, in some of its areas rain has not fallen for more than six years, as is the case in the Borena region, in the south of the country on the border with Kenya. In this region, the rains have been absent for more than eight years and the populations, made up mainly of farmers and herders, have been forced to leave their homes in search of water.
Valerio Nicolosi's journey to Ethiopia is dedicated to this region, and his account begins at the Dubuluk refugee camp — not a classic camp housing refugees fleeing armed conflict, but people who are, in every sense, climate migrants. "There is a war under way, against populations and caused by climate change," Nicolosi comments as he tells us about this journey.
You made this podcast following a trip to Ethiopia with Cesvi — can you tell us what you saw?
What I found in Ethiopia looks like our near future, because the Mediterranean is also a climate hotspot. A future that is increasingly dystopian, yet increasingly real. In the Borena region, the drought has lasted six years — an enormously long time. Paolo Virzì made a film about a hypothetical arid future set in Rome, "Siccità", depicting a society that has imploded, as it did during the pandemic, after just three years without rain.
In Ethiopia, the years without rain number six. Yet I found a population that wants to take action. In the podcast I recount this, including how, thanks to the Cesvi project, these communities are mobilising to face this crisis, because sooner or later — one hopes — the rains will return, and there will need to be an infrastructure in place to retain the water.
In short, what I saw is something extraordinary, unimaginable.
Ethiopia is a particular country: on one hand there are colossal dams, on the other there are regions where rain has been absent for several years in a row. How much is the intersection between climate change and water policies impacting the populations of the regions you visited?
Ethiopia's water policies are, on one hand, pharaonic — take the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (Gerd), with the idea of being able to manage the flow of the Nile. So on one hand this colossal dam serves to manage one of the most important rivers in the world, while on the other, at government level, there is very little intervention locally. The government has in some ways abandoned these communities, which find a degree of support through international cooperation.
The real problem is that one would need to work on the emergency, but above all on the long term with a view to countering climate change — not through colossal installations, but through local interventions. And international practices are needed: on one hand, those who emit the most must reduce their impact; on the other, local interventions are needed that can improve the living conditions of populations, rather than enormous infrastructures like the Gerd, which only create environmental damage and probably future wars as well.
In your view, is it possible today to separate migration from the climate crisis?
Migration today is closely connected to the climate crisis. Here in Italy we keep drawing distinctions in an attempt to rank migrants — between those fleeing wars and those leaving for economic reasons — but more and more often migrants are climate migrants. They are climate refugees whom we recognise as economic migrants or, sometimes, as war refugees, because while on the one hand climate change forces you to move in order to survive, at other times it becomes the cause of actual conflicts.
When I think about Ethiopia, and what I witnessed there, what is left for a person after six years without rain if not to leave or to starve to death? That migration is inevitably an environmental migration. At the same time, the climate crisis is leading to ever more wars, above all local conflicts that we in the Global North would not even recognise as such. In those cases too, those who are displaced are not recognised as war refugees, nor as environmental refugees.
The moment will come when we will need to create the status of climate migrant — that is, for those who have no choice but to find a dignified life elsewhere, as a result of the effects of climate change that we, as Western society, have contributed to creating through our emissions. We cannot keep polluting and closing our borders to those fleeing a crisis that we ourselves have created.