KENYA: The nomadic way of life of Kenyan livestock herders is under threat from climate change, writes Frank McDonald, Environment Editor, in Nairobi.
Up to half a million nomadic pastoralists in northern Kenya have had to give up their traditional way of life and settle in makeshift villages because their cattle, sheep and goats have died as a result of severe droughts in recent years.
According to Christian Aid, their plight provides "fresh evidence of how poor people are on the receiving end of global warming" and gives added urgency to the latest round of UN negotiations on climate change in tropical rainswept Nairobi.
In a major report published yesterday, Christian Aid said the critical situation facing some three million pastoralists in northern Kenya was the first example it had encountered worldwide of "an entire group of people being threatened in this way".
It said hundreds of thousands of herders have been "forced to forsake their traditional culture . . . because consecutive droughts have decimated their livestock" and are now almost entirely dependent on aid hand-outs for day-to-day survival.
In a study commissioned by Christian Aid, livestock specialist Dr David Kimenye found that the incidence of drought in northern Kenya had increased fourfold over the past 25 years, leaving many pastoralists with herds too small to support them.
"Around half a million people have already been forced to abandon pastoralism due to adverse climatic conditions," the report said.
During the last drought, so many cattle, camels and goats were lost that 60 per cent of families needed outside aid.
Along the main route to Mandera, epicentre of the latest drought, new villages have sprung up. With this year's drought, the original roadside settlements have swelled substantially and dozens of smaller camps have appeared.
Herders, bereft of the animals that represented their entire wealth, have set up these camps over the past year in order to benefit from boreholes, passing aid convoys or emergency water tankers. Their wandering days, at least for now, are over.
In one roadside settlement, which now depends on selling milk from its few remaining animals to passing trucks, one man produced a book showing the community lost more than 500 sheep and goats and 250 cattle on a single day last February.
"Our whole life has been spent moving, but we are desperate people - people who have lost our livelihood," said Mukhtar Aden, one of the elders at the Quimbiso makeshift settlement.
"We didn't settle here by choice, it was forced upon us."
And though the herders had been able to adapt to unpredictable weather in the past, Christian Aid warned that "unless decisive action is taken to help them adapt to the extremes of climate change, they will no longer be able to sustain their way of life".
It said Dr Kimenye's research "demonstrates beyond doubt that the pastoralist way of life is now floundering", and there was no longer any question that the increasing frequency and severity of drought in the region had "brought it to its knees".
"It is a cruel irony that a people who have lived for so long in harmony with nature . . . have now become the world's 'climate-change canary', suffering and living in abject poverty due to the greenhouse gases emitted by developed countries."
Christian Aid called on the Kenyan government to "embrace its duty to meet the needs of this large section of its population" and also said that developed countries with the greatest responsibility for causing climate change "must pay for adaptation".
The Met Office in Britain recently warned that one-third of the planet will be desert by the end of 2100, at current rates of warming, and that the areas already stricken by drought - such as the Horn of Africa - will be the most seriously affected.