In 2008, Dr. Murray Watson, a world-renowned British environmental researcher and expert at environmental surveys, was reported to be kidnapped in Somalia.

Murray Watson was renowned for pioneering aerial environmental surveys in remote regions, and on 1 April 2008 he was abducted by six armed militiamen near the southern Somali town of Buale.

By United States Central Intelligence Agency – https://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/cia11/somalia_sm_2011.gif, Public Domain, Link

Watson, who was also a pilot, was carrying out aerial environmental surveys in the middle Juba region in order to produce accurate maps of flood prone areas for the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization. Watson was a world expert in environmental surveys of developing countries, working with many conservation authorities, United Nations agencies, and private clients including BP. He also spoke eight languages.

During the 1960s he piloted small aircraft at low altitudes and pioneered aerial surveying of remote parts of Asia and Africa as a means of collecting data for areas too difficult to reach by land. He first travelled to Somalia in 1974 when he surveyed the country’s livestock from the air.

Murray Watson was an English ecologist who spent his life developing a blueprint for climate adaptation. Then, on April 1, 2008, Watson and Patrick Amukhuma, a Kenyan engineer, left the Saakow hotel in rural southern Somalia and headed off to work in their Nissan Patrol.  Together with two guards and a translator, the group were on their way to complete a United Nations authorised environmental surveys of flood-prone areas using an aerial and ground survey technique pioneered by Watson decades earlier.

By The original uploader was Ekki01 at English Wikipedia
(Original text: A1C JEFFREY B. ALLEN) – http://www.dodmedia.osd.mil/, Public Domain, Link

The area covered by Watson’s environmental surveys were among the most hazardous, crawling with al-Shabab extremists who extorted the sugarcane and banana farms along the banks of the Jubba and Shabelle rivers. Increasingly erratic rainfall caused frequent flooding, threatening farms, and Watson was leading a ground-breaking climate adaptation effort in a country so vulnerable to climate change.

He was fully aware of the dangers of working in this region, but he knew how to stay out of harm’s way. He spoke basic Somali, had lived in Somalia for the best part of a decade, and was married to a Somali-Kenyan woman – and, he was aware of the countries ever-shifting power dynamics.

On that fateful day, as they travelled along a rough road running parallel to the Jubba River, they were blocked by a vehicle containing six gunmen. Watson was shot, one of the guards surrendered, and the other fled on foot. The driver and translator were tied up and left behind. Watson and Amukhuma were pushed into the gunmen’s car, which sped off into the wilderness.

One of the guards called the Saakow hotel and the local militia mobilised into action. They found the driver, the translator, and the guards; but the kidnappers and their victims were nowhere to be seen. For many days Watson’s friends and acquaintances and the authorities from Britain’s embassy in Kenya worked feverishly to track them down, but no-one was able to determine exactly where Watson was being held.

Then came the ransom demands: a Somali man claiming to be the kidnappers’ negotiator, believed to be a member of al-Shabab, made demands ranging from $2 million-$4 million for the safe return of the ecologist. His country wouldn’t pay, and his family weren’t able to, so the trail went quiet. Sadly, no-one has seen or heard of Dr Murray Watson since that fateful day: no-one has claimed his killing and no remains have ever been found.

For many years after the tragedy it was assumed that decades worth of scientific data compiled by Watson had been lost. Vital land environmental surveys had vanished during the Civil War and it was almost impossible to determine exactly how or at what rate the country’s climate was changing, thus making it impossible to design measures to limit the damage. However, a recent discovery in Britain has resurrected the possibility of carrying on Watson’s environmental work. And, it’s revealed the extent to which Watson’s legacy may be intertwined with Somalia’s fate.

By SGT. G.D. ROBINSON – http://www.dodmedia.osd.mil, Public Domain, Link

In Somalia, the margin for survival is very slim, and many bloodied conflicts over livestock and other resources have occurred because of droughts. Without rain, herds of goats and camel die, and so do the communities that depend on them. In 1974 and 1975 there was no rain at all and 19,000 people starved to death. Another 250,000 nomads lost most of their livestock, leaving them with nothing.

It was after the establishment of the National Range Agency and the country’s first national parks, that Murray Watson became attracted to Somalia. He’d already made a name for himself in Africa tracking hippos in Zambia and wildebeest in Tanzania, but he was fascinated with Somalia. It was in 1978 as the National Range Agency was just getting started that Watson arrived in Mogadishu. With Soviet maps and international funding, he led a small team of scientists through most of the 1980s, carrying out the most comprehensive natural resource and land surveys ever completed in Somalia. He appeared on Jacques Cousteau’s television series during the 1970s, which showed him studying hippos in Lake Tanganyika in Zambia.

Watson had a vast circle of friends and engaged easily with all types: he had a kind of dynamism that made him extremely popular. He was friendly with Somali elites, British commandos, and even Mohammed Farah Aidid, the future militia leader who was the target of American soldiers in the infamous Black Hawk Down operation in 1993.

Watson and his team used an airplane and Land Rover to crisscross the country and document the environment in minute detail at more than 1400 sites. They divided their tasks into water, flora, wildlife, and soil; producing detailed hand-drawn maps of topography and vegetation. They gathered thousands of samples of soil and flora and conducted a census of livestock: they took almost 10,000 photographs and slides. They couldn’t have known at that time that they were creating a detailed record of a country on the brink of calamity.

Dr. Murray Watson’s work lives on today. After 25 years of war, the Somali government has started to find its feet, and researchers firmly believe that Watson’s environmental surveys could help show precisely how and why the country’s environment has changed; and perhaps it will offer clues as to what can be done to restore it.