Deciphering climate-induced displacement in Somalia: A remote sensing perspective

and 2019. The Fig 8 shows the aggregate LC map on Deyr 2018. The Agricultural fields shows as light green colour represents the croplands and orchards mainly distributed across the She- belle and Juba rivers. Following this, LC change maps were produced to highlight changes in agricultural fields and human settlements due to flood and drought events. LC change maps for flood events were generated by comparing post-flood LC maps to corresponding aggregate LC maps. Simi- larly, for drought, LC Change maps were produced by comparing each aggregate to the previ- ous years’ aggregate map for the same season; for example, Gu 2016 was compared to Gu 2017. Fig 9A presents the aggregated Land Cover (LC) map for Deyr 2019 over the city of Beled- weyne. A series of LC Changes were determined by comparing each LC map of the Gu and Deyr with the subsequent year’s LC maps. These LC Change maps highlight the effects of drought and flood on settlements and agricultural fields. All the LC and LC change maps were produced with a 10m spatial resolution. The flood LC Change map in Fig 9B shows the clear impact of floods on the agricultural fields and settlements of the affected areas, whilst Fig 9C and 9D demonstrate the impact of the flood by showing the agricultural fields and settlements that were lost in the Beledweyne District, respectively. All the LC and LC change maps were produced in 10m spatial resolution. . . Most notably, evidence of migration from major urban areas close to the rivers to smaller communities far away from rivers can be seen after flood

events. This suggests that migrants from major floods try to stay close to their homes but out- side the direct disaster zone. An unsupervised clustering was performed to further explore the impact of flood events. Regular flood events exhibits similar characteristics, whereas extreme floods led to higher IDPs, more affected people, and caused larger damage to agricultural fields and human settle- ments. It is expected that, compared to regular floods that are part of the agricultural climate and essential for the growing season, extreme floods are more likely destructive and lead to migration. Compared to flood events, drought events typically take place over a much longer time scale. As such for determining the LC change, a single post drought image cannot be defined in the same way as for flood. As a result, six drought LC change maps were produced based on Fig 9. Flood maps of the study area. a. Aggregated LC map in Deyr 2019; b. LC Change map on flooded areas of Beledweyne after flood event (No 11); c. LC Change map with drought impact on agricultural fields; d. LC Change map with the impact of flood event (No 11) on settlements area. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0304202.g009 PLOS ONE Deciphering Climate-induced Displacement in Somalia: A Remote Sensing Perspective PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0304202 August 9, 2024 16 / 27