By Bisola Adeyemo
About 4.6 million Somalians will need food aid by May 2022, amid three seasons of poor rainfall.
The United Nations warned on Monday in a statement.
In recent years, drought, dry spells, and other natural disasters have ravaged the country, Africanews reports.
Somalia has been ranked as one of the most vulnerable to climate change.
Effects of climate change in the country have resulted in food acute, water, and pasture having already forced 169,000 people from their homes, a number that could rise to 1.4 million within six months.
“It is an unprecedented disaster that is coming,” Adam Abdelmoula, the UN humanitarian coordinator for Somalia, told AFP.
Abdelmoula estimated that 300,000 children under the age of five were at risk of severe malnutrition in the coming months.
“They will die if we don’t help them soon,” he added, as the UN appealed for $1.5 billion to fund the crisis response.
Some 7.7 million people, nearly half of Somalia’s population of 15.9 million, will need humanitarian assistance and protection in 2022, a 30% increase in one year, according to the UN.
At least seven out of ten Somalis live below the poverty line and the drought has destroyed already precarious sources of income, delay farm produce, and reduced crops quantity, resulting in high inflation.
“The risk is so great that without immediate humanitarian assistance, children, women and men will start to starve in Somalia,” said Somalia’s Minister of Humanitarian Affairs and Crisis Management, Khadija Diriye.
The Somali government declared the drought a humanitarian emergency in November.
Drought and floods have also recently hit Kenya and South Sudan, killing livestock, destroying pastures and devastating crops.