After losing his job as a police trainer after the Taliban took over last August, Hussain Ali moved back to his village in Afghanistan’s central highlands with the intention of farming again to support his family.
However, Ali’s despair increased when he returned home to find a village so affected by drought that not only his relatives but the entire community were contemplating migrating elsewhere.
During the five years the 37-year-old had been away, a well and a stream had dried up, ruining crops and ultimately the father-of-three’s hopes of farming again.
“For the last year, I’ve been watching our trees here slowly die,” said Ali, standing next to the area’s last remaining water source, a natural stream near the village of 40 houses .
He asked to withhold the name of the village in Bamyan province for fear of a Taliban resurgence.
“We used to be able to harvest at least twice a year, but this year, we are going to harvest earlier,” Ali added.
“There is not enough water for the crops to grow fully.”
And the plight of Ali’s community is not unique across the country. Afghanistan is one of the most vulnerable nations in the world to climate changeand among the least equipped to deal with it, according to the United Nations and aid agencies.
This exacerbates a catastrophic humanitarian crisis as Western nations have frozen billions in Afghan bank reserves stored abroad and suspended development aid that once accounted for about 75 percent of the country’s public spending.
No water, no home
The previous US-backed government worked with the United Nations to mobilize resources to build resilience to climate change, for example by monitoring rainfall or providing aid to farmers.
Providing direct public funding used to be simple, but it has been it has since become impossible due to sanctions imposed last year on the Taliban.
Although the Taliban have provided emergency assistance for recent disasters, including floods, and are coordinating with NGOs, the group is short on cash because of frozen Afghan assets, which the United States this week announce that they would not be released “in the short term” – also like the sanctions.
An updated plan, worked out by the former government and the United Nations, outlining Afghanistan’s climate actions through 2030 and detailed next steps has been left unfinished because of the Taliban takeover, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP).
The The United Nations agency launched a crisis response initiative last October support local communities in a number of ways, including improving natural disaster mitigation and resilience.
It prioritizes community-level interventions and work with local NGOs, with a “robust” control and risk management system that “completely isolates the flow of any funding to the de facto authority,” the communications specialist said from UNDP Won-Na Cha.
However, as droughts and erratic weather intensify, increasing numbers of people are at risk of losing their livelihoods and incomes, and may end up being forced to migrate despite nationwide instability, UN and climate change experts have warned.
In his role as a police trainer in Kandahar province, Ali earned 18,000 Afghanis ($199) a month, most of which he sent to his family. Now, like many other former supporters who have returned to the village since August, he fears for the future.
“This is our home, but if the water goes away, we will have to go too,” Ali told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
“I lost my job and now I could lose my village.”
triple threat
Conflict, severe drought and economic crisis have left 24.4 million people, more than 60 percent of Afghanistan’s population, in need of humanitarian aid, according to the United Nations. “Recurring drought and erratic climate shocks are leading to a below-average harvest, further threatening incomes and livelihoods,” said Ramiz Alakbarov, Acting Head of the UN Mission in the ‘Afghanistan, in emailed comments.
Last year, a drastic reduction in rainfall led to water and food shortages in 25 of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces, he added.
Bamyan, where Ali lives, is one of those 25 provinces, and climate change-related droughts have been increasing.
In Khoja Bidak, another Banyam village, perched atop a hill overlooking the snow-capped peaks of the Hindu Kush, water supplies, mostly from melting snow, have also dwindled.
“We already wash clothes and carpets less because there is not enough water,” said Zakia Musa, a 50-year-old mother of four.
“Our lives depend on water. So if we don’t find any, we will pack our clothes, carry them on our heads and migrate to another place”, he added, stressing that it may be a matter of months until they are forced to move
Stay or go?
Her husband, Ali Musa, stands atop a nearby hill with several village elders, looking out over barren fields stretching into the horizon with mud-brown houses dotting the landscape.
“This year, the usual rains have not come, so the wheat we planted has died,” said the 50-year-old.
The community had asked the former government for help, which built a water basin to collect the snow melt, he said. But it was empty after two particularly poor years for the town.
Musa said he had sold most of the goats he previously owned and the economic crisis had left him almost empty-handed, with little to eat apart from bread and potatoes.
People have been spending up to 90% of their income on food since January, according to the United Nations, while wages have fallen and prices have risen.
“Poor governance by the Taliban will make things worse,” said Erin Sikorsky, director of the Center for Climate and Security, a US-based think tank.
“Afghanistan is likely to see more IDPs in the future as disruptions from substance farming intersect with other security risks.”
Although the war has been declared over, threats – including from the Islamic State Khorasan (IS-K) – remain, and Hazara communities – to which the ethnic Shia minority Ali Musa and Hussain belong Ali- have been specifically targeted.
The possibility of migration poses a dilemma for Ali Musa.
“This is not a good place,” he said, looking at the landscape. “But it’s home, it’s our land. We can’t afford to go somewhere else, but we can’t survive here without water either.”