Attachments
This paper explores how community-driven nature-based solutions can simultaneously support watershed restoration, livelihood improvement, and climate resilience.
Context
Afghanistan remains one of the world’s most complex humanitarian emergencies. Recent political, social and economic shocks have resulted in a massive deterioration of the humanitarian situation. After decades of war, displacements, corruption, and natural disasters, Afghans are especially vulnerable to food insecurity, social and economic upheaval. Afghanistan is among the world’s most climate-vulnerable countries. According to the Afghanistan Climate Vulnerability Assessment (ACVA) conducted by IOM, nearly 3 million people were displaced by climate- and disasterrelated events between 2021 and 2024. In 2024 alone almost 1 million experienced temporary displacement and more than 500,000 were displaced overall due to droughts, floods, and other hazards. Additionally, the ACVA finds that over 11 million people live in areas at high risk of future climate-induced disasters, and that 73% of livelihoods are climate-sensitive. Meanwhile, large fractions of villages have severely limited access to essential services as 92% lack adequate emergency services and 96% lack early-warning or rescue capacity. Climate hazards in Afghanistan are manifesting as prolonged droughts, increasingly erratic and heavy rainfall, flash floods, shrinking groundwater, declining glacier-fed river flows, and rising temperatures. These trends threaten water security, agriculture, food production, and livelihoods. The crisis, which has affected Afghanistan since 2021 has exposed the already-vulnerable communities to a combination of economic recession, job losses and inflation. Eighty percent of the population relies on agriculture for their livelihood, with the majority being small-scale farmers, primarily growing wheat (the staple food crop) as well as rice, maize, pomegranate, apple, grapes, tomatoes and potatoes. Despite their critical role in sustaining both their families and local communities, these small-scale farmers face increasingly severe climate challenges, including prolonged droughts and devastating floods. In recent years, such extreme weather events have severely damaged Afghanistan’s already fragile agricultural sector. Yet, these men and women remain the backbone of Afghan society, playing a vital role in ensuring food security and community resilience. Following unprecedented levels of food insecurity during the 2021 to 2022 lean season, a combination of increased poverty, reduced harvests and high food prices has led to continuing high levels of food insecurity throughout the post-harvest period. Between March and April 2025, an estimated 12.6 million people (27 percent of the total population) faced high levels of acute food insecurity (IPC Phase 3 or above) highlighting the urgent need of humanitarian food assistance (IPC 2025).