The people most at risk are the 300,000 mainly Somali refugees in the Kakuma and Dadaab camps.  Kakuma is in northwestern Kenya and Dadaab in the east on the border with Somalia.   The overcrowded Dadaab complex of three camps was built to hold some 90,000 people but its population has swollen to three times that, in the process becoming home to more refugees than any other site in the world, according to the UNHCR.

U.N. aid agencies have activated contingency plans, bringing food, water treatment chemicals and mosquito nets to flood-prone areas.  The flooding, which follows on from a period of drought, is also bringing disease in its wake – the WHO is reporting that cholera has already infected 10,000 people this year in Kenya.

Elsewhere in Kenya, hundreds of people have been evacuated from their homes in the central part of the country after mudslides, brought on by the heavy rain, destroyed houses.

When Advance Aid was in Nairobi at the end of September the grass almost everywhere was brown and the Masai were bringing their cattle into the centre of the city in search of grass verges that might have been watered that the painfully thin cattle could feed on.

Now there are floods as the country goes, almost overnight, from too little to too much water.  The same story is being repeated in Somalia, on the border with Kenya, where 15,000 people in the town of El-Waq are reported to have been displaced by floods.

And today Sir Gordon Conway, Professor of International Development at Imperial College, London, is arguing that Africa is already warming faster than the global average and that people living there can expect more intense droughts, floods and storm surges.

His Discussion Paper No 1 published by Imperial College’s Grantham Institute for Climate Change suggests that:
• The drier subtropical regions will warm more than the moister tropics.
• Northern and southern Africa will become much hotter (as much as
4 °C or more) and drier (precipitation falling by 15% or more).
• Wheat production in the north and maize production in the south
are likely to be adversely affected.
• In eastern Africa, including the Horn of Africa, and parts of central
Africa average rainfall is likely to increase.
• Vector borne diseases such as malaria and dengue may spread and
become more severe.
• Sea levels will rise, perhaps by half a metre, in the next fifty years,
with serious consequences in the Nile Delta and certain parts of
West Africa.

The humanitarian consequences of these types of changes are very clear.  And very worrying.

The Reuters report on the signing of The new African Union Convention for the Protection and Assistance of Internally Displaced Persons in Africa reported that it is “the first legal instrument of its kind in the world. It defines the obligations that states, and even armed groups, have to protect and assist their own uprooted citizens.”

Forty-six African nations unanimously adopted the landmark convention while 17 heads of state and government, and foreign ministers signed it, including the presidents of Uganda, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Somalia, and the prime ministers and vice presidents of Burundi, the Central African Republic, Equatorial Guinea and Rwanda.

However, before it can come into effect the convention will need to be ratified by a minimum of 15 countries.  And there have to be question marks over the capacity of African governments to enforce the Convention, even once it is ratified, let alone police the application of its provisions by the many armed groups that are active within the continent.

The AU reported in the course of the meeting last week that the continent had more than 11 million IDPs, a much higher number than that reported by the UNHCR.

Let us hope that this Convention is ratified rapidly not just by the minimum 15 countries but by all 46 signatories and that it then works on the ground to protect some of the most vulnerable people in Africa.

For example, Sudan has an estimated 4-5 million IDPs, thanks to the recent civil war in the south, and violence in Darfur and the east.

And at the peak of Uganda’s northern conflict, at least 1.8 million people were displaced, although most have now returned home.  But there are still nearly 500,000 displaced people there, down from 710,000 earlier in the year.

Other highlights (if you can call them that) of this report:
•    1.3 million displaced by violence in Somalia
•    2 million displaced in the Eastern DRC by the violence and civil war there
•    100,000 displaced in the Central African Republic
•    168,000 displaced in Chad

Overall, it’s a terrifying number and, as the report points out, IDPs do not have the same rights as refugees (who have crossed international boundaries) and this makes their situation worse and the problem much harder for aid and UN agencies to deal with.

There are already nearly 20m people in the region dependent on food aid and the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) is forecasting that this number will increase.

The Guardian carried a particularly disturbing picture and report on the disastrous effects that the drought was having on pastoralists.

And the FAO suggests that the current drought could be followed by floods, “The effects of El Niño, which usually brings heavy rains towards the end of the year, could make matters worse, resulting in floods and mudslides, destroying crops both in the field and in stores, increasing livestock losses and damaging infrastructure and housing.”

Food prices are rising as a result, “In Uganda and Kenya, for instance, prices of maize in June 2009 were almost double their level 24 months earlier.  In Khartoum, Sudan, June 2009 prices of sorghum, another staple crop, were more than double their levels in June 2007.  Similarly, prices in Mogadishu, Somalia, still remain higher than the pre-crisis period, despite declining since mid-2008.“

Conditions are probably worst for the people of Somalia, “According to FAO’s Food Security and Nutrition Analysis Unit, Somalia is facing the worst humanitarian crisis in 18 years, with approximately half the population – an estimated 3.6 million people – in need of emergency livelihood and life-saving assistance.  This includes 1.4 million rural people affected by the severe drought, about 655 000 urban poor facing high food and non-food prices, and 1.3 million internally displaced people, a result of escalating fighting and conflict.”

In Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia and Eritrea poor harvests are being reported and in Kenya forced migrations in search of water supplies and pasture have worsened livestock conditions, increased disease outbreaks and exacerbated resource-based conflicts among pastoralists.

During her day-long visit, Jolie visited one of the three camps that together host around 285,000 refugees. She met a number of families including a mother just arrived in the camp, after walking for days with her three young children to flee war-torn Somalia.

Like the West African floods commented on below, the ongoing war and displacement of people in Somalia is one of those African disasters that is going on below the radar of the general public in the West.

The country is also going through its worst drought for ten years yet, ironically, there is also flooding expected shortly in parts of the country – classic symptoms of the mix of extreme weather events that global warming brings.

Speaking to CNN, Robbert Van den Berg, a spokesman for Oxfam International in the Horn of Africa said, “Somalis flee one of the world’s most brutal conflicts and a desperate drought, only to end up in unimaginable conditions in camps that are barely fit for humans.  Hundreds of thousands of children are affected, and the world is abandoning the next generation of Somalis when they most need our help. Why does it seem like you matter less in this world if you are from Somalia?”

Oxfam accused the international community of failing the refugees, who have little access to basic services such as water and medicine.  It added that about 8,000 Somali refugees flock into the Dadaab camp in northern Kenya every month – the camp, which has facilities for about 90,000, is currently housing 280,000 refugees who have no access to basic necessities, including clean water.