Efforts are underway to try to help rural people remain on their land and adapt to worsening droughts and other climate pressures, through measures from building irrigation systems and water storage to introducing drought-resistant seeds.

Drought early warning systems are being put in place to help pastoral communities sell livestock before conditions turn threatening, avoiding economic losses. Officials also are trying to find ways to stabilise food prices across the region.

In Biyoguure Village, about 30 km down a sand track from Berbera, 40-year-old farmer Ahmed Ali is determined to stay in his village with his wife Zaynab Abdi and four young sons.

"Every year it is getting worse and worse and the droughts are getting longer and longer," Ali told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in an interview in a school building sheltered from the scorching 40 degrees Celsius (104°F) heat outside.
Climate change has exacerbated a long-running humanitarian crisis in Somalia and in Somaliland, which makes up about 30% of Somalia's territory, in the northwest of the country.

The unusual circumstances make it one of the world's most complex emergencies.

After 20 years of civil war in Somalia, famine swept it and much of East Africa in 2011, claiming 260,000 lives. Photos of emaciated children shocked the world as 13 million went hungry and many fled their homes during a brutal drought.