The numbers behind this shift are remarkable. Africa hosts more than 80 percent of the world’s camel population, and roughly 60 percent of those animals are concentrated in eastern African countries including Sudan, Somalia, Ethiopia, and Kenya. Global camel milk production climbed from around 3 million tonnes in 2017 to 4.11 million tonnes in 2022, with actual output potentially reaching 5.4 million tonnes once underreporting is accounted for. That represents an average annual growth rate of approximately 2.45 percent, a substantial expansion compared with production levels in the 1960s. Projections suggest the global camel population may reach 60 million within the next 25 years, a trajectory driven largely by the species’ unmatched ability to produce milk where cattle and goats cannot.

In Ethiopia, home to an estimated 1.7 to 2.0 million camels concentrated in the Somali, Afar, and Oromia regions, pastoral communities such as the Afar, Somali, Karayu, and Borana rely on camels for milk, meat, transport, and income. Kenya produces approximately 1.165 million litres of camel milk and Somalia about 0.956 million litres, with camel milk accounting for around 40 percent of total milk output in Somalia and 12 percent in Ethiopia. Yet the review’s authors caution that official statistics likely underestimate true camel numbers across the region, because mobile pastoral herds, weak census systems, and cross-border movements confound data collection. Ethiopia serves as a documented example of this undercounting, and similar structural limitations are reported elsewhere in the region.

What makes camel milk scientifically distinctive is its unusual composition. Compared with bovine and caprine milk, camel milk generally contains lower fat, ranging from approximately 2.5 to 4.5 percent, and lower lactose, with protein levels between 2.5 and 3.9 percent. Its most celebrated feature is an exceptionally high vitamin C concentration that far exceeds the negligible levels found in cow and goat milk, a genuine nutritional advantage in regions where fresh fruits and vegetables are scarce. Camel milk is also rich in calcium, phosphorus, potassium, magnesium, and sodium, and contains bioactive components including lactoferrin and immunoglobulins that contribute to a longer shelf life than bovine milk and underpin traditional preservation practices.

At the molecular level, camel milk’s protein architecture sets it apart in ways that are both beneficial and technically troublesome. It lacks β-lactoglobulin, a major cow-milk whey protein associated with allergic reactions in infants, and contains lower levels of κ-casein alongside larger casein micelles and a higher proportion of β-casein. These traits improve digestibility and reduce allergenic potential, with some researchers noting compositional similarities to human milk. But they also create formidable technological challenges: weak rennet coagulation, poor curd formation, extended fermentation times needed to reach target acidity, and instability under ultra-high-temperature treatment. Butter and cheese made from camel milk yield lower outputs and display different textures than their bovine counterparts, which helps explain why the milk has historically been consumed raw or spontaneously fermented rather than processed.

Traditional utilization remains deeply embedded across the region. Pastoral households drink camel milk fresh, ferment it naturally into sour milk products, and use it as the base for camel milk tea, soups, and stews. Fermented camel milk has long been valued not only for its nutrition but for perceived therapeutic properties, and cultural associations with strength, endurance, and suitability for nomadic life generate stable local demand. In recent years, however, technological advances have begun to unlock new product categories: pasteurized milk, milk powder, yoghurt, cheese, ice cream, chocolate, and probiotic beverages have all been produced from camel milk under optimized conditions. Enterprises such as Tiviski in Mauritania, Camelicious in Dubai, and Addis Kidan Milk Processing Enterprises in Ethiopia now supply pasteurized and packaged camel milk to urban consumers and export markets.

The safety picture is considerably less rosy. The review documents marked variability in microbial quality across Ethiopia and neighboring countries, with total bacterial counts in the Somali Regional State of Ethiopia exceeding acceptable limits and indicating contamination along the value chain. Investigations in pastoral areas of Afar and other lowland regions detected Staphylococcus aureus, Escherichia coli, and other indicator organisms in raw camel milk, with contamination levels linked to poor udder hygiene and traditional storage conditions. Pathogens including Staphylococcus, Streptococcus, Listeria, Salmonella, and Pseudomonas species have been isolated from raw samples, frequently originating from the udder in cases of mastitis. The review emphasizes a common misconception: although camel milk’s natural antimicrobial components are real, their effect at ambient temperatures is limited, and inadequate hygiene during milking, collection, and transport readily overwhelms them. Seasonal variation matters too, with bacterial counts typically higher during the wet season.

The value chain connecting pastoralist herders to commercial markets remains largely informal and fragmented. Milk is often transported without cooling or formal quality control, reducing shelf life and increasing microbial risk. In parts of Ethiopia, women sell camel milk along roadsides without hygienic infrastructure or temperature control, and comparable informal systems dominate in Somalia and northern Kenya, where insecurity, poor roads, and insufficient collection centers restrict commercialization. Emerging peri-urban dairies are beginning to bridge the gap by aggregating milk, improving hygiene, and supplying growing urban demand, while informal cross-border trade among Ethiopia, Somalia, and Kenya reflects strong regional interconnectivity. Comparative benchmarks from Kenya, Kazakhstan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates show how investment in mechanization, regulation, and cold-chain infrastructure can transform the sector, though the review presents these as possible pathways rather than direct models.

Structural constraints run deep. The camel sector has historically received limited research investment and policy prioritization, with livestock development programs favoring cattle and small ruminants. Many countries lack national standards for processed camel milk products, and regulatory harmonization among Ethiopia, Somalia, Kenya, Sudan, and Djibouti remains limited, constraining cross-border trade despite robust informal flows. Feed shortages driven by rangeland degradation, deforestation, and recurrent droughts reduce milk output, while inadequate veterinary coverage and recurrent disease outbreaks depress productivity. Dromedaries’ slow reproduction, including a roughly 13-month gestation period and restricted mating season, further limits herd expansion under traditional management. Institutional initiatives such as Ethiopia’s Meat and Milk Institute and the PRIME project have provided training in milk handling and marketing, but sustained interventions remain scarce elsewhere in the region.

Despite these obstacles, the opportunities are substantial. Declining cattle productivity under recurrent drought has pushed pastoralists across northern Kenya, Somalia, and Sudan toward camels, which maintain milk production through prolonged dry periods and thereby stabilize both household food security and raw material supply for processors. Growing health awareness has expanded camel milk’s appeal in urban and niche export markets, and pilot-scale facilities in Kenya and Ethiopia have already introduced pasteurized milk and yoghurt to city consumers. The review’s authors argue that coordinated improvements in processing technology, cold-chain infrastructure, quality assurance, and regional policy harmonization, supported by public-private partnerships and targeted research investment, could transform camel milk from a predominantly informal commodity into a competitive regional and export product. If that transition succeeds, the white gold of the desert may prove to be one of the most consequential climate-adaptation stories in global agriculture, turning one of humanity’s oldest dairy traditions into an engine of food security, employment, and economic resilience for millions of pastoralists across the Horn of Africa.

Subject of Research: Camel milk production systems, nutritional quality, safety, and value chain dynamics in the Horn of Africa

Article Title: Camel milk in the horn of Africa: production systems, physicochemical, and nutritional quality, traditional utilization, safety, and market value chain dynamics

Article References: Mahdi Hassan, S., Bekele Tola, Y., Fikreyesus Forsido, S., Arimi, J., Abera Teka, T., & Makiso Urugo, M. (2026). Camel milk in the horn of Africa: production systems, physicochemical, and nutritional quality, traditional utilization, safety, and market value chain dynamics. Food Science of Animal Resources, 46(1), Article 67. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44463-026-00077-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44463-026-00077-6

Keywords: camel milk, Horn of Africa, pastoralism, dairy production, food security, climate resilience, milk safety, value chain, vitamin C, fermentation, Ethiopia, Kenya

The research team, led by scientists affiliated with Hawassa University and Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia, compiled more than 6,800 occurrence records for Loxodonta africana from field surveys in Ethiopian national parks, published literature, and the Global Biodiversity Information Facility. After removing duplicate and spatially redundant records, 4,298 verified presence points remained, spanning eight East African countries: Eritrea, Ethiopia, South Sudan, Somalia, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, and Rwanda. The authors restricted the dataset to records documented since the 1990s to avoid contaminating the models with historical distributions that no longer reflect where elephants actually live.

To translate those sightings into a predictive map, the researchers built an ensemble species distribution model that combined seven algorithms: three regression-based methods, namely generalized linear models, generalized additive models, and multivariate adaptive regression splines, and four machine-learning approaches, including boosted regression trees, maximum entropy, random forests, and support vector machines. Each algorithm was trained on 70 percent of the occurrence data and validated on the remaining 30 percent using a ten-fold subsampling scheme, with 10,000 background points generated across the study area to represent pseudo-absences. The final ensemble prediction was produced by averaging the individual model outputs, weighting each by its true skill statistic, a standard technique for reducing the uncertainty inherent in any single algorithm.

The environmental backbone of the models came from twenty predictor variables: nineteen bioclimatic layers drawn from the WorldClim 2.1 database at roughly one-kilometer resolution, plus a human footprint index that quantifies cumulative pressure from roads, settlements, agriculture, and infrastructure. Because many climate variables are strongly correlated with one another, the team screened them for multicollinearity, retaining only predictors with pairwise correlations below 0.7 and variance inflation factors under 5. Ten variables survived the filtering. Future projections relied on the HadGEM3-GC global circulation model from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6, run under two shared socioeconomic pathways: SSP2-4.5, an intermediate emissions scenario, and SSP5-8.5, a very high emissions pathway in which atmospheric carbon dioxide roughly triples by 2100.

The models performed exceptionally well. The average area under the receiver operating characteristic curve reached 0.94, with random forests and support vector machines delivering the strongest individual results, and the machine-learning algorithms significantly outperformed the regression-based approaches. Sensitivity and specificity values of 0.91 and 0.86 respectively indicated that the models were both reliable at identifying where elephants can live and where they cannot. Importantly, the predicted current suitable habitat of approximately 887,000 square kilometers under the weighted-mean threshold closely matched the species’ extant range of about 889,000 square kilometers delineated by the IUCN, lending the projections considerable credibility.

Which environmental factors mattered most? Not the human footprint, surprisingly. At the broad regional scale of the analysis, the dominant drivers of elephant habitat suitability were climatic: precipitation of the warmest quarter, isothermality, the mean temperature of the driest quarter, and precipitation of the driest month. These variables govern water availability, forage productivity, and thermal stress tolerance, all of which directly shape elephant distribution, migration corridors, and survival. The authors note that while climate determines the overall pattern of suitable habitat across East Africa, human pressures such as agricultural expansion, roads, and poaching remain critical local threats that fragment landscapes and squeeze the corridors elephants need to move between resource patches.

The future projections are where the study turns alarming. Under the intermediate SSP2-4.5 scenario, mean suitable habitat is projected to decline by 51.9 percent by 2050 and 52.6 percent by 2070 compared with the current average of roughly 821,000 square kilometers. Under the worst-case combinations, losses reach as high as 71.3 percent by 2050 and 73 percent by 2070, depending on the threshold applied. New habitat gains are minimal, amounting to only about 4 to 5 percent of the current range, meaning the species faces a net contraction of nearly half its climatic niche. The Horn of Africa fares worst of all: suitable areas in South Sudan and Somalia are projected to become unsuitable entirely, and the already fragmented habitats of Eritrea and eastern Ethiopia shrink to isolated patches.

Perhaps the most sobering finding concerns protected areas. East Africa’s protected area network covers about 573,000 square kilometers, yet only 17.2 to 17.9 percent of the currently suitable elephant habitat falls inside it. More than 82 percent of predicted suitable habitat lies outside formal protection, exposed to agricultural conversion, charcoal production, and infrastructure development. The concept of Anthropocene refugia, areas that remain climatically suitable and protected over time, offers a framework for identifying the landscapes most likely to sustain elephants through the coming decades. The study found that only about 21 percent of the remaining stable habitat projected for 2050 and 2070 sits within protected areas, and these refugia themselves decline under the harsher emissions scenario, shrinking by more than 21,000 square kilometers between the moderate and severe 2050 projections.

The authors caution that legal designation alone does not guarantee viable habitat. Substantial portions of the existing protected area network are already climatically unsuitable for elephants, and many reserves face severe encroachment and anthropogenic pressure. Elephants surviving in marginal or degraded habitats may function as refugee species, confined to forests and fragments to avoid people rather than occupying the landscapes their climatic tolerances would predict. This behavioral compression can mask the true extent of range loss and complicates conservation planning, particularly in the Horn of Africa where continuous population monitoring is limited and corridor establishment remains insufficient.

The study’s conclusions point toward an urgent agenda: reassess and realign protected area boundaries so that future climatic refugia are actually captured within conservation networks, establish transboundary corridors to maintain connectivity across national borders, strengthen community engagement and stewardship, and protect current habitats even where models forecast future unsuitability, especially for the vulnerable populations of Eritrea, Somalia, and South Sudan. Neither the suitable habitats inside protected areas nor those outside them, the authors conclude, can by themselves guarantee the long-term survival of the species. With Africa’s savanna elephants already down 30 percent over recent decades according to continent-wide surveys, and roughly 415,000 individuals of both African elephant species remaining, the window for proactive, climate-informed conservation in East Africa is narrowing rapidly. Mapping where elephants can persist, and securing those places before the climate closes them off, may be the difference between a managed decline and a functional extinction across much of the species’ eastern range.

Subject of Research: Climate-driven habitat suitability and Anthropocene refugia for the African savanna elephant in East Africa

Article Title: Persistence Vulnerability of the African Savanna Elephant Loxodonta africana to Anthropocene Threats in East Africa

Article References: Ahmed, A. S., Melese, D., Aligaz, M. A., Atickm, A., & Kufa, C. A. (2026). Persistence Vulnerability of the African Savanna Elephant Loxodonta africana to Anthropocene Threats in East Africa. Ecology and Evolution, 16(9), Article e74389. https://doi.org/10.1002/ece3.74389

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1002/ece3.74389

Keywords: African savanna elephant, Loxodonta africana, species distribution modeling, climate change, Anthropocene refugia, East Africa, protected areas, habitat loss, ensemble models, human-elephant conflict, conservation planning, Horn of Africa

The scale of the plant’s importance is difficult to overstate. In Ethiopia’s Tigray region alone, cactus pear historically occupied more than 360,000 hectares, supporting roughly 200,000 rural households with virtually no alternative means of securing a livelihood. In some areas, the fruit provides up to 40 percent of the annual food intake for rural families, while during the lean summer months from June to August it serves as a critical bridge when other crops have not yet matured. The plant’s unique Crassulacean Acid Metabolism, a photosynthetic adaptation shared with other succulents, allows it to open its stomata at night and minimize water loss, giving it extraordinary water-use efficiency in landscapes where indigenous woody vegetation has long since declined. Beyond food, the cactus anchors a seasonal economy of harvesting, transport, and urban street vending that once provided employment for more than 183,000 households, offering a low-entry livelihood for youth and women in cities such as Mekelle, Adigrat, and Asmara.

The catastrophe began, ironically, as a business venture. In April 2003, the carmine cochineal insect, Dactylopius coccus, was intentionally introduced from South Africa to southern Tigray with formal authorization from the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, with the goal of launching a commercial carmine dye industry. The insects were officially released in September 2004 across three trial sites, including the Endayesus campus of Mekelle University. Early returns were promising: farmers collected and exported dried cochineal worth up to 984 dollars per hectare, and the venture generated more than 550,000 dollars in foreign exchange during its first ten months. But the project lacked structured containment protocols, and when the investor’s license was revoked in 2010, monitoring ceased entirely. The insects escaped cultivation and transformed from a managed bio-resource into a devastating invasive pest, capable of killing cactus plants within six to ten months of attack through chlorosis, dieback, and total tissue collapse.

By 2019, more than 75,000 hectares in Tigray were infested, and communities had organized remarkable grassroots responses, including community mobilization campaigns and buffer zones that held the spread roughly in check between 2016 and 2020. Then came the Tigray War. The conflict, which raged from 2020 to 2022, caused a total collapse of these community-led mechanical and chemical control systems. Routine physical monitoring, quarantine enforcement, and the pruning and burning regimens that had kept the pest at bay simply stopped. In the vacuum, wind-borne dispersion of the insect’s mobile first-instar crawlers, driven by prevailing seasonal wind patterns, accelerated unchecked across contiguous cactus belts. Regional infestation coverage surged from roughly 80,000 hectares in 2020 past a projected 120,000 hectares by 2026, a trajectory the review’s author, Mulat Kebede of the Tigray Agricultural Research Institute, characterizes as a rapid post-war surge driven directly by the collapse of human governance.

The review, which followed PRISMA guidelines and distilled 170 core studies from an initial pool of 3,159 records across Scopus, Google Scholar, and Web of Science, quantifies the ecological toll in stark terms. In Tigray, four key indicators of ecosystem health, biodiversity, faunal habitat, soil fertility, and drought resilience, are projected to approach near-zero values by 2026, with biodiversity and faunal habitat plummeting from baseline scores of 100 to approximately 10. In the Eritrean Highlands, the decline is slightly less steep but equally sobering, with drought resilience falling from a near-perfect 98 in 2004 to roughly 32 by 2026. The social consequences are captured in a social crisis index that reaches 95 in Tigray, alongside a degraded land index of 92 and an economic loss index of 88, reflecting a regional catastrophe in which the loss of food security, livestock feed, and soil conservation has fueled rising food insecurity and youth migration from rural areas.

One of the most alarming findings concerns carbon. Managed cactus pear plantations in Tigray sequester approximately 12.8 tonnes of carbon per hectare per year, among the highest rates of any evaluated land-use category in the region, while naturalized wild stands in Eritrea sequester 8.9 tonnes and even abandoned farmlands recolonized by the cactus store 4.5 to 5.1 tonnes annually. Under sub-optimal growing conditions typical of degraded landscapes, the Food and Agriculture Organization and ICARDA estimate that cactus pear can generate sequestration rates equivalent to roughly 30 tonnes of carbon dioxide per hectare per year. As these stands die and their woody biomass decomposes, that stored carbon is released back into the atmosphere, threatening to transform a climate-smart carbon sink into an active carbon source. In a region already battered by drought and displacement, the loss of this biological buffer compounds both the humanitarian and the climate crisis simultaneously.

The review also formalizes the conceptual framework of the conflict-pest nexus as a self-reinforcing feedback loop. Armed conflict drives insecurity, displacement, and institutional disruption, which in turn produce governance failures: diminished surveillance, weakened early detection, inadequate pest control, and collapsed agricultural extension services. These deficits unleash biological outbreaks, marked by heightened insect reproduction and rapid geographic dispersal, which then drive ecological degradation and the loss of forage, soil cover, and ecosystem resilience. The resulting socioeconomic hardship, from plunging household incomes to deepening food insecurity, further erodes societal resilience and administrative capacity, feeding directly back into the initial instability. It is a cascade in which ecological collapse and human suffering amplify one another, and it explains why the cochineal crisis in the Horn of Africa has progressed so much faster than comparable invasions elsewhere.

Yet the research also points to genuine hope, grounded in tools that smallholders can deploy even amid instability. Laboratory bioassays and field trials have shown that aqueous extracts of Tree Tobacco, Nicotiana glauca, mixed with liquid soap surfactants, dissolve the insect’s protective waxy coating and achieve mortality rates exceeding 90 percent. Even more striking, methanol extractions of Solanum linnaeanum, which concentrate lethal secondary metabolites such as tannins, saponins, and alkaloids, have secured up to 99.3 percent pest mortality in controlled tests. These botanical biopesticides, alongside evaluated extracts from neem, Tagetes minuta, and Euphorbia tirucalli, offer a low-cost, decentralized alternative to synthetic organophosphates like Dimethoate, whose supply chains and ecological risks make them poorly suited to conflict zones. Complementing these interventions, tissue-culture protocols using Murashige and Skoog media enhanced with benzylaminopurine can regenerate completely pathogen-free, high-vigor planting stock, while the selection of cochineal-resistant genotypes is supported by documented smallholder willingness to pay for resilient clones.

The taxonomic complexity of the invader adds another layer of urgency. While Dactylopius coccus was the species originally introduced for dye production, ongoing regional monitoring indicates morphological and genetic overlap with Dactylopius opuntiae across expanded infestation zones. This distinction carries real operational consequences, because biological control strategies depend on host-specific predatory beetles such as Cryptolaemus montrouzieri and Hyperaspis species, whose effectiveness varies with the target biotype. Management protocols must therefore verify biotype susceptibility before releasing mass-reared predatory agents, a task that requires exactly the kind of sustained surveillance capacity that conflict has destroyed. In the Near East and North Africa region, where similar cochineal invasions threaten cactus systems, research has moved toward resistant cultivars and biological control; in the Horn of Africa, by contrast, the science has become what the review describes as a science of survival.

Halting the terminal decline, the review concludes, demands a coordinated package: immediate regional stability, formal cross-border scientific cooperation between Ethiopia and Eritrea, tissue-culture propagation hubs producing entirely insect-free clean planting stock, and the large-scale deployment of conflict-resilient integrated pest management that combines field sanitation, resistant varieties, and botanical biopesticides. The stakes extend far beyond a single crop. The cactus pear of the Horn of Africa is a soil guardian, a carbon vault, a famine buffer, and an economic lifeline all at once, and its loss would ripple through food systems, livelihoods, and climate commitments across the borderlands. Whether these highlands retain their prickly green ramparts, or watch them dissolve into white, waxy colonies of a runaway insect, will depend on whether peace and science can arrive before the last cladodes succumb.

Subject of Research: The combined impact of armed conflict and cochineal insect invasion on cactus pear ecosystems and ecosystem services in the Horn of Africa

Article Title: The conflict and pest nexus drives the catastrophic decline of cactus pear ecosystem services in the Horn of Africa

Article References: Kebede, M. (2026). The conflict and pest nexus drives the catastrophic decline of cactus pear ecosystem services in the Horn of Africa. Discover Agriculture, 4(1), Article 293. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44279-026-00762-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44279-026-00762-6

Keywords: cactus pear, Opuntia ficus-indica, cochineal, Dactylopius coccus, Tigray War, conflict-pest nexus, invasive species, carbon sequestration, integrated pest management, botanical biopesticides, food security, Horn of Africa

The research team confronted a fundamental methodological problem that has plagued dryland monitoring for decades. Most regional assessments rely either on tracking the sheer extent of land classified as grassland, or on a single vegetation indicator such as the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index, the workhorse greenness measure of satellite ecology. Both approaches have blind spots. Land cover extent can remain nominally unchanged while the vegetation within those persistent grasslands quietly deteriorates in productivity, phenology, and functional health. Conversely, any single index captures only one facet of vegetation condition, and different indices can disagree, sometimes dramatically, about whether a landscape is improving or declining. A grassland can appear healthy in greenness terms while its productivity or photosynthetic efficiency is slipping, or vice versa.

To close these gaps, Chaka and Hu fused six complementary vegetation-condition indicators for the March to May growing season, the critical window when the region’s long rains determine forage availability for the year ahead. The indicators were combined using an agreement-based fusion approach, which weights the evidence from multiple sensors and metrics rather than trusting any one of them, and the resulting time series from 2001 to 2022 was analyzed with nonparametric trend methods that make no assumptions about the statistical distribution of the data. Extent dynamics were assessed separately using two independent land cover datasets, the European Space Agency’s Climate Change Initiative Land Cover product and the Global Pasture Watch, providing a cross-check on where grasslands, including herbaceous, woody, and shrubland types, were expanding, contracting, or persisting.

The extent results reveal a region under genuine spatial pressure. Shrublands experienced the largest net shrinkage of any grassland type, losing 7.83 million hectares over the study period. Herbaceous grasslands, the classic open grass ecosystems that dominate pastoral grazing systems, declined by more than 4 million hectares net, even though this loss occurred alongside concurrent expansion elsewhere in the region. Woody grasslands showed comparatively limited net shrinkage. These gross and net changes matter because the Horn of Africa’s grasslands are not a monolith; they span the southern Sahel margin, the Ethiopian highlands’ fringes, the Somali rangelands, and the acacia-dotted savannas of Kenya, each with distinct ecological dynamics and distinct vulnerabilities to drought, cultivation, and overgrazing.

Perhaps the study’s most striking contribution is its demonstration that extent and condition are partly decoupled. Within grasslands that persisted throughout the entire 22-year record, vegetation condition changed in highly heterogeneous ways. Shrublands showed the strongest responses of any type, with 51 million hectares improving and 21 million hectares degrading, a signal of how dynamic and sensitive these ecosystems are. Herbaceous grasslands displayed intermediate responses, while woody grasslands proved relatively stable. In other words, a satellite map that simply marks a pixel as

shows no change, it may conceal either a landscape in vigorous ecological recovery or one sliding slowly toward degradation. Condition and extent must be read together, and the study’s fusion framework makes that joint reading possible at a scale and resolution previously unavailable for this region.

The geography of change is far from uniform. Improvements in vegetation condition clustered along the southern Sahel margin, a belt where decadal rainfall recovery and shifting land use have elsewhere been associated with greening trends in semi-arid Africa. Degradation hotspots, by contrast, concentrated in Somalia, Kenya, and eastern Ethiopia, precisely the areas that bore the brunt of the devastating multi-year drought of 2020 to 2023, when five consecutive failed rainy seasons displaced millions of people and killed untold numbers of livestock. The overlap between the study’s degradation map and the epicenters of recent humanitarian crisis is not coincidental. It underscores that vegetation condition is not an abstract ecological variable but a direct proxy for forage availability, herd survival, and ultimately food security in pastoral economies where livestock constitute both livelihood and savings.

Attribution analysis using partial-correlation techniques revealed that the drivers of change are layered rather than singular. Vegetation-condition improvement was mainly linked to combined climate and non-climatic factors, which accounted for 50.8 percent of improving areas, suggesting that favorable rainfall trends interacted with land management, mobility patterns, or reduced grazing pressure to produce recovery. Degradation told a different story: 43.18 percent of declining areas were associated primarily with climate-related factors, while another 40.68 percent reflected combined climate and non-climatic influences. The residual shares in both categories point to purely anthropogenic or purely climatic drivers operating alone, but the dominance of combined categories is the more important message. In a region where drought recurrence is intensifying and human populations are growing rapidly, climate stress and human pressure rarely act in isolation; they compound one another, often amplifying each other’s effects beyond what either would produce independently.

The choice of the March to May growing season deserves emphasis. This window corresponds to the long rains, known regionally as the Gu season in Somalia and much of Kenya, which historically deliver the majority of annual precipitation to much of the Horn. Recent research has documented that the region’s long rains have shifted toward shorter, more erratic delivery, and that the Indian Ocean Dipole and other sea-surface temperature patterns strongly modulate year-to-year variability. Evaluating vegetation condition specifically during this season therefore captures the period when forage deficits translate most directly into livestock losses. An index computed over the full year would dilute this signal; one computed during the critical window reveals it clearly. The multi-indicator approach likewise guards against the known pitfalls of relying solely on greenness measures, which can saturate over dense vegetation and respond ambiguously to woody encroachment, a phenomenon particularly relevant given the strong responses recorded in shrubland systems.

The use of two independent land cover products for extent assessment reflects a broader maturation in satellite-based land monitoring. The ESA CCI-LC archive provides a consistent multi-decadal record of land cover at global scale, while the Global Pasture Watch offers a more recent, dedicated mapping of grasslands and pastures tailored to livestock systems. Discrepancies between such products are well documented, arising from differences in sensor resolution, classification schemes, and definitions of what constitutes grassland versus shrubland or sparse woodland. By treating both datasets as complementary evidence rather than choosing one, the study follows best practice in a field where definitional ambiguity, including longstanding FAO deliberations over harmonizing forest-related and grassland-related definitions, has historically hampered regional comparisons. The substantial gross changes recorded in herbaceous grasslands, where losses occurred alongside concurrent gains, illustrate why reporting both gross and net change matters: net figures alone can mask extensive churn within a landscape.

For dryland management in the Horn of Africa, the implications are concrete. Because roughly a third of persistent grasslands changed condition in some direction, blanket policies are unlikely to succeed. Degradation hotspots in Somalia, Kenya, and eastern Ethiopia align with areas of high stocking density, recurrent conflict, and constrained pastoral mobility, suggesting that interventions supporting flexible grazing access, early destocking during drought warnings, and restoration of key forage resources could yield disproportionate benefits. Meanwhile, the improving belt along the southern Sahel margin offers a natural experiment worth studying: understanding why vegetation there recovered, whether through rainfall trends, changed land use, or both, could inform replication elsewhere. The finding that shrublands are both shrinking in extent and responding most dynamically in condition adds urgency to debates over bush encroachment and shrub clearing, practices with competing consequences for carbon storage, hydrology, and grazing access.

The study also contributes methodologically to global grassland science. Degradation is notoriously difficult to define and detect because it is gradual, spatially variable, and contested among stakeholders. Fusion-based condition assessment, paired with explicit extent tracking and driver attribution, offers a template applicable to other dryland regions, from the Sahel proper to Central Asian steppe, where similar decoupling between land cover extent and vegetation health has been suspected but rarely quantified. As climate change continues to intensify drought severity across the world’s semi-arid belt, such integrated monitoring will become essential for distinguishing ecosystems that are resilient from those approaching thresholds of irreversible change, and for targeting scarce restoration and adaptation resources where they can do the most good.

Subject of Research: Grassland degradation, vegetation condition trends, and their climatic and non-climatic drivers in the Horn of Africa from 2001 to 2022

Article Title: Grassland degradation and its drivers in the Horn of Africa: insights from multi-index vegetation fusion and grassland cover dynamics

Article References: Chaka, D. S., & Hu, Y. (2026). Grassland degradation and its drivers in the Horn of Africa: insights from multi-index vegetation fusion and grassland cover dynamics. Regional Environmental Change, 26(4), Article 196. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10113-026-02687-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10113-026-02687-8

Keywords: grassland degradation, Horn of Africa, remote sensing, vegetation condition, drought, rangeland management, shrublands, driver attribution, land cover change, drylands, pastoralism, satellite monitoring