Khalif H. Dalmar

Director of the Department of Environmental Protection
Office of the Prime Minister
Somalia

Mar 22, 2021

Khalif Hassan Dalmar is the Director for the Department of Environmental Protection in the Office of the Prime Minister of Somalia. Khalif has worked in the department since 2015, previously in the roles of National Ozone Coordinator and Environmental Conservation Officer. He is also a co-founder of the Somali Institute for Environmental Peace (SIEP) and has worked for UNDP-Somalia as a National Consultant on Environmental Governance. Currently, he is completing his master’s thesis on “Climate Adaptation and Governance” at the United Nations University for Peace in Mogadishu; he previously earned a bachelor’s degree in environmental management from Kampala International University in Uganda.

Khalif’s work spans the gamut from national legislation to local development projects. As National Ozone Coordinator, Khalif liaised between regional, national, and international partners to make Somalia the 91st party to ratify the Montreal Protocol’s Kigali Amendment in 2019. He also led the capacity building efforts to implement and monitor progress domestically. The process of ratifying the Kigali Amendment was linked to Somalia’s peacebuilding priorities because it helped reengage the international community, and it created non-violent livelihoods for technical experts such as air conditioning technicians.

Many of Khalif’s projects in the Department of Environmental Protection aim to create alternative livelihoods to conflict. He estimates that 80 percent of Somalia’s population are young people who need peaceful livelihoods that can counter the appeal of militant groups. A key focus has been stemming the charcoal trade, as rebel groups such as Ras Kamboni and al-Shabaab use the commodity to finance their operations. Khalif’s team helps promote other sources of energy such as solar energy and liquified petroleum gas to provide alternative livelihoods for workers dependent on charcoal. The anti-charcoal campaign has already reached 2,000 people, and Khalif expects it to reach over 5,000. The Biyoole project similarly centers around another resource closely linked to conflict in Somalia―water. The project uses a variety of water technologies such as subsurface dams and sand storage dams to bring improved water access to 250,000 people, 140,000 of whom are women. 

For Khalif, environmental peacebuilding is about securing sustainable, peaceful livelihoods. He notes that people in Somalia often do not think about environmental protection even though their livelihoods are dependent on resources such as water and soil. “There used to be a big forest in my village,” he says, “and now there is not a single tree.” Because radical groups recruit people without alternative livelihoods, Khalif aims to promote a sense of stewardship that can sustain livelihoods in the long-term. To this end, he co-founded the Somali Institute for Environmental Peace in 2017, which works with schools and universities to raise ecological awareness and undertake stewardship projects like tree planting. The organization also provides research on Somalia’s environment-conflict linkages for policy makers and the public. To gain a broader perspective on these linkages, Khalif became a founding member of the Environmental Peacebuilding Association. Throughout his work with a diverse array of stakeholders, Khalif brings a livelihood-centered approach to environmental peacebuilding.