Dehai News

ForeignPolicy.com: The Watson Files- The Key to Saving Somalia is Gathering Dust in the British Countryside

Posted by: Berhane Habtemariam

Date: Saturday, 03 June 2017

The Watson Files- The Key to Saving Somalia is Gathering Dust in the British Countryside

https://foreignpolicymag.files.wordpress.com/2017/05/heaton_topimage.jpg

Feature

What if there were a blueprint for climate adaptation that could end a civil war? An English scientist spent his life developing one — then he vanished without a trace.

By Laura Heaton | Photographs by Nichole Sobecki |

June 4, 2017

After sunrise on April 1, 2008, the renowned English ecologist Murray Watson left the Saakow Hotel, a modest concrete guesthouse in rural southern Somalia, heading off for work in a Nissan Patrol. He and a Kenyan colleague, an engineer named Patrick Amukhuma, along with a translator and two guards, were on their way to finish up a survey of flood-prone areas for the United Nations using an aerial and ground survey technique Watson had pioneered decades earlier.

One of the more lush regions in a largely arid country, the area covered by Watson’s survey was also among the most hazardous. It was crawling with al-Shabab extremists, who had taken to extorting the banana and sugarcane farms that unfurled along the banks of the Shabelle and Jubba rivers. Increasingly erratic rainfall, a phenomenon scientists have linked to climate change, was further threatening the farms by causing frequent floods that Watson hoped his survey could help mitigate. Though the 69-year-old Englishman wouldn’t have described it as such, he was leading a groundbreaking climate adaptation effort in a country that is among the most vulnerable to climate change — and to the conflict that often follows in its wake.......................

...............Read it in PDF Attachment below

Berhane


6ይ ክፋል: ማዕበል ስርሒት ፈንቅል - የካቲት 1990 - ሰነዳዊት ፊልም| sirihit fenkil 1990 - part 6 - ERi-TV Documentary

Dehai Events