Abstract
Communities in the dryland systems of East Africa regularly suffer from the devastating impacts of climate variability and change, commonly manifested through torrential floods and recurrent droughts. More than 50% of the natural disasters recorded in East African region have occurred during the past decade affecting nearly 30 million people. For instance, in Ethiopia as recently as 2017, more than 5.6 million people were categorized as being in either crisis or emergency situations and requiring urgent humanitarian assistance (WFP, 2017). Such communities, already struggling to cope with the impacts of unpredictable weather, will face a daunting task in adapting to future climate change unless they adapt improved landscape management practices.
Highlights
Climate change is likely to intensify the current challenges of water scarcity in dryland areas and aggravate competition for water within and between communities, affecting communities linked by hydrological flows across watersheds and basins
The major consequences were expressed in terms of increasing water scarcity, drought, torrential flooding and land degradation, catalyzed by deforestation, demographic growth, poor governance, increasing demand for energy and food and other externalities (Amede and Tsegaye, 2016)
Livestock-based systems are sparely populated, the rangeland degradation is so substantial that converting it to a climate resilient system would require significant physical and institutional investment
Summary
Climate change is likely to intensify the current challenges of water scarcity in dryland areas and aggravate competition for water within and between communities, affecting communities linked by hydrological flows across watersheds and basins. One of the potential watershed management innovations this special issue treated was flood water management (Amede et al, 2020a), which is a strategy to convert the torrential floods emerging in upstream highlands into productive use through characterizing and capturing flood flows across seasons in highland–lowland settings (Gumma et al, 2020; Amede et al, 2020a).
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