Abstract Livelihood Vulnerability to Drought and Adaptation Strategies among Pastoral Community in Dollo Ado Woreda of Somali Regional State, Ethiopia Drought in sub-Saharan African countries is among the leading contributory factors of vulnerability to pastoral communities. Understanding pastoralist livelihood vulnerability to drought, adaption and coping mechanism is critical for mitigation and resilience building planning. This study was carried out to assess the livelihood vulnerability to meteorological drought on pastoral community through analyzing the trend of rainfall variability, identifying the most vulnerable segments in the community and kebeles and to analyze the adaptation strategies in the face of climate variability in Dollo Ado Woreda of Liban zone, Somali Regional State, Ethiopia. Situated in the south-eastern part of the country, the Dollo Ado woreda has large population of pastoralists that are exposed to the effects of recurring meteorological droughts. The study has been conducted in six sampled kebeles selected from pure pastoral areas and field survey activity is done in ninety-nine sampled households. Besides this, key informant interview, focus group discussion, observation and secondary data were used in the study. The collected data were analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively. Also, climate variability was analyzed to understand the magnitude of the drought using 8-years precipitation data (2010-2017). The result indicated that the majority of the pastoral respondents were male, married and illiterate to larger percentage. Most of pastoral community possess mix of livestock (camel, cattle and goat and sheep). On average, the mean livestock holding estimated to be eleven heads of camels, four heads of cattle and fourteen heads of sheep and twenty heads of goats. From the climate variability analysis, Dollo Ado Woreda had experienced between five to six droughts in the last eight years (2010 – 2017) alone. From these droughts most of them seems to be severe. From the survey result again, most of the pastoralists believe that temperature have kept increasing while the rainfall has decreased during the past decade. With regard to drought effects on pastoral livelihoods, the survey result shows that there were wider negative effects on livestock production and productivity; sustained water and fodder shortage, livestock weight loss, disease and livestock loss. In addition to this, pastoralists had replied drought has negatively affected on household food consumption and overall pastoral livelihoods at large. The others which are relatively affected by the drought are children’s access to education, environmental degradation and shortage of water and pasture and this had again resulted to conflict over scarce resources (water and pasture) among pastoralists. The vulnerability analysis showed that the recurrent drought triggered by climate variability (erratic and short rainfalls) and its persistent and long sustained water and pasture shortages coupled with poor drought adaptation strategies made the pastoralists in Dollo Ado Woreda to be more vulnerable to drought. Among the six sampled kebeles, three of them (Hilowayn, Kobe and Bur-amino) were found to be the most vulnerable kebeles to which prior emphasis of intervention should be given. Community wise, women and children, female headed household, elderly people, disabled and people living with chronic diseases are found to be the most vulnerable segment of the community. Lastly, in order to address the impacts of future droughts, integrated development programming that work towards improving the living condition of pastoral community and building their resilience is required. These programmes should focus on introducing drought resistant livestock, water and pasture development, and voluntary sedentarization, among others. The pastoral community should be involved in all stages of programme implementation. Key words: Dollo Ado, Climate variability, Vulnerability to drought, Pastoral livelihoods, Adaptation strategy, Water and Fodder shortage, Somali Region