Former US President Barack Obama once said, "We are the first generation to feel the impact of climate change and the last generation that can do something about it."
It has now been confirmed beyond any doubt that climate change is real.
The sixth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, released in 2022 said that drought-related disaster events are costing nations billions of shillings in economic and social damage. It further stated that drylands are heavily exposed to climate change-related droughts.
Kenya has not been left behind. The recent heavy rainfalls that led to catastrophic flooding were caused by anthropogenic climate change. As a result, the region, which is now very dry, has witnessed mortality and losses due to floods and droughts, making it much more vulnerable and home to vulnerable populations.
They include the poor, women, children, indigenous people, and the elderly, due to historical, political, and socioeconomic injustices that have kept the region lagging as compared to other regions in the country. This happens days after a long drought that has exposed the country to starvation and diseases.
As a director of the Generation for Change and Growth, which is a NGO that works in the northern and eastern counties of Kenya — perceived to be the most arid — I call on stakeholders to come together to tame persistent droughts, conflicts, water scarcity, and flooding during the rainy seasons.
We, the stakeholders, should also put our brains and resources together to stop the disappearance of animal and plant species, as well as diminishing natural resources by developing appropriate policies to tackle climate change.
UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres is quoted saying: "The climate emergency is a race we are losing, but it is a race we can win.
It is, therefore, necessary to ensure the availability of water in the farms, in the wild, and at home throughout the year to save lives both for humans and animals.
If we don't think of solutions on how to address climate change and its impact, we will continue starving, being poor and having a miserable life on this planet.
This calls for urgent innovative methods and technologies for rainwater harvesting and water storage for small-scale farming, enhanced moisture and improved biodiversity, and hence ecosystems along water paths (sand streams and lagoons), and other water-related climate change initiatives.
The stakeholders should come together urgently to develop innovative rainwater harvesting methods and technologies that don’t expose water to direct sunlight, such as the sunken sand dam innovation, and build a better tomorrow for future generations.
They should also join efforts in planting billions of trees and put in place other mechanisms to stop climate change. The IPCC Assessment Report of 2020 says the projected changes in the water cycle will have a strong effect on various ecosystems across Kenya and other countries.
By 2050, environmentally critical stream flow is projected to be affected in 42 per cent to 79 per cent of the world’s watersheds, causing negative impacts on freshwater ecosystems. The country will also experience increased wildfires, soil erosion, deforestation, and degraded water supplies.
This means people will walk long distances for water, many crop and animal species will disappear, and we will have more diseases on the planet.
Projected climate-driven water cycle changes, including increases in evapotranspiration, altered spatial patterns, and amounts of precipitation, and associated changes in groundwater recharge, runoff, and stream flow, will impact terrestrial, freshwater, estuarine, and coastal ecosystems and the transport of materials through the biogeochemical cycles, impacting humans and societal well-being.
About 60 per cent of commercially harvested inland fish species are vulnerable to extinction following global warming, reaching extinction levels in Africa. The effects of the drought are projected to increase with every degree of warming.
As a result, water storage will reach up to seven per cent over the 21st century. Aridity zones could expand by one-quarter of the 1990 area by 2100. The projected water cycle changes will hurt agriculture, energy production, and urban water uses, destabilize industrialization, and threaten human life.
Agricultural water use will increase globally as a consequence of population growth and dietary changes, as well as increased water requirements due to climate change. Groundwater recharge in some semiarid regions is projected to increase, but worldwide depletion of non-renewable groundwater storage will continue due to increased groundwater demand.
This shows that climate-related water stress, as scientifically proven, negatively affects people’s lives, and will heavily affect the arid and semi-arid counties of Kenya.
There is urgent need to harvest rainwater for various uses at the community level, including building a secure food basket. We should address the lack of knowledge, capacity, and preparedness of the community to harvest rainwater and respond to climate change.
There is a need to build the capacity of county governments and communities for enhanced rainwater harvesting and utilization as a strategy for climate change response and wealth creation.
Lack of and improper utilisation of appropriate policy and legal frameworks on climate change will be more catastrophic than a war, and it’s up to this generation to save the world for the next generations of our sons, daughters, grandchildren, and many more.
It is time for civil society groups and authorities to develop the National Climate Change Response Plan and capitalize on the Change Fund Facility and the Climate Change Response Plan to make the environment better.
Counties should develop policies and legal frameworks to enable communities to build their resilience and the county governments to support locally-led initiatives in climate change. This will help counties and communities exploit climate change-related opportunities, which are supported by international organizations such as the World Bank and the UN, among others.
It is, therefore, highly recommended that county governments invest their efforts in coming up with pro-people policies and legal frameworks to create the environment needed for communities and the different actors to initiate local climate change initiatives. Observing the situation in arid and semi-arid lands, it is a fact that livestock fodder species have reduced drastically due to high temperatures and reduced rainfall amounts in these regions.
A case in point is the current drought situation in the northeastern, which has caused pastoralists to migrate to Somalia and parts of Kitui county for livestock pasture. This has caused frequent conflicts between the local communities and the pastoralists.
It is recommended that new strategies for sustainable livestock keeping and pastoralism be initiated moving forward and be readjusted to new technologies.
In conclusion, climate change is the most pronounced existential risk of this century. Communities, people, and their governments need to come up with concerted response initiatives so that people’s survival is assured.
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