Hydroclimate whiplash in Somalia and the need for integrated water security governance

Somalia has moved repeatedly between severe drought and severe flooding since 2020, with a multi-season drought giving way within months to intense flooding in 2023, a renewed drought warning in 2025, and a strengthening El Niño and a forecast positive Indian Ocean Dipole pointing to another extreme flooding season in 2026. These episodes are typically documented, funded, and studied as separate disasters, each triggering its own appeal, response plan, and body of literature. This separation obscures a pattern that a growing body of international research has begun to describe as hydroclimate whiplash, the rapid swing between extremely wet and extremely dry conditions within a single year or even a single season. Emerging global evidence indicates that such swings are intensifying with warming; however, Somalia, one of the settings where the human consequences of rapid wet-to-dry reversal are most visible, remains almost entirely absent from this literature. Water monitoring networks, government institutions, humanitarian financing mechanisms, and physical infrastructure in Somalia continue to be organized around individual hazards rather than the transitions between them. This article argues that Somalia's recurring climate emergencies are better understood as a single hydroclimatic pattern than as a sequence of unrelated events and that this reframing has direct implications for how water security is monitored, financed, and built. It proposes four principles for a whiplash-aware water security framework: integrated monitoring, transition indicators, flexible financing, and adaptive infrastructure, as a starting point for governance that anticipates reversal rather than reacting to each extreme in isolation.