SUNCASA Dechatu River Restoration — Nature-Based Flood & Water-Security Programme, Dire Dawa

Dire Dawa sits downstream of the Dechatu River catchment, an Ethiopian dryland corridor where deforested slopes send flash floods and silt into the city and leave upstream farms exposed to erosion and water stress. Since 2024, the Scaling Urban Nature-based Solutions for Climate Adaptation in Sub-Saharan Africa programme (SUNCASA) — delivered by the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) and the World Resources Institute (WRI) with Dire Dawa's city administration and Haramaya University, and funded by Global Affairs Canada at roughly CAD 29 million (about USD 21.2 million) across three cities through 2026 — has been restoring the catchment through afforestation, riverbank buffer planting and agroforestry.

IISD's first-year reporting records 313,330 seedlings planted in Dire Dawa during 2024, including more than 128,000 as afforestation that recovered 60 hectares of bare land, on the way to a 2027 target of over 1.3 million trees across more than 800 hectares.

The programme states it aims to benefit more than 200,000 people in Dire Dawa's flood-prone neighbourhoods. These are so far activity and output figures — seedlings planted and hectares treated — rather than independently measured flood-reduction or water-quality outcomes, which the programme has not yet published; SUNCASA is only one year into its three-year Dire Dawa timeline.