text: Impact Comments from the public indicate that the exhibition stimulated a change in ideas, perception and attitudes - particularly regarding the conflict in Somalia and the humanitarian dimension.
  Description The aim of this research was to investigate how/whether war and conflict causes land degradation in Somalia. This is particularly important for Somalia and other contemporary conflict-affected dryland regions such as Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Egypt, Libya etc. Drylands cover ~40% of global land area and support ~2.5Bn people, 90% of whom live in developing countries. When managed well, dryland regions can be productive and sustain agro-pastoral livelihoods, but they can also be easily perturbed to a degraded (less fertile and productive) state through climatic factors (e.g. drought) or anthropogenic activities (e.g. overgrazing, deforestation, land overuse). Conflict can both directly (through direct impacts on the land) and indirectly (through changes in human practices of land use) cause land degradation. Through this research we found: 1) At the country scale (whole of Somalia) there are statistically significant links between patterns in armed conflict levels and land degradation for the period 1989-2015. The results are robust across different models in which we explored relationships between conflict levels and degree of land degradation with 1- and 5-year time lags (i.e. does conflict in the previous 5 years help explain land degradation this year?) and other variables such as distance to conflict (i.e. the closer a place was to conflict, the more likely it was to be degraded). 2) At the local level the links between conflict and land degradation become more complex as the mechanisms begin to vary between militant groups and social communities. Here we find that conflict can lead to a multitude of different social behaviours which affect land use dynamics and therefore land degradation outcomes. In other words, at the local level, we need to better understand the various direct and indirect causal mechanisms linking conflict to land degradation. 3) Pathways to building social and ecological resilience in conflict-affected dryland regions are challenging to establish and require understanding local community practices and their changes under conflict, as well as large scale (country-wide) associations.
  Exploitation Route Our partnership with Transparency Solutions (TS) and the Somali First (SF) initiative is key in our findings being potentially taken forward. The SF team often feed into policy-making at Ministerial level for Somalia and Somaliland, including intensive work with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in devising Somalia's new foreign policy and direct participation through the Ministry of Planning and International Cooperation in devising Somalia's National Development Plan. The SF network underpins and enhances future communication and engagement with communities and actors in Somalia and provides a key pathway to achieving impact. Due to the short timescales, there was limited scope to engage with Somali communities and Somali-based development agencies directly during this project. However, our involvement with the Somali First initiative will afford us the capacity to extend our impact plan directly and swiftly to Somali communities in a future phase of the project. In the meantime, the new multi-faceted databases and analyses produced from this project can be used to support ongoing environmental recovery work and sustainable land use plans by other agencies in Somalia. We have already engaged with some of these agencies through our international engagement workshop on "Conflict-Environment Links in Dryland Regions".