Aspects Of Climate Variability And Change: A Menace To The Pastoralists At The Horn Of Africa (Marsabit, Kenya)

The dominant livelihood in Marsabit district is pastoralism, a system of production that is characterized by livestock mobility and the communal management of natural resources. These resources, which include water and grazing lands, are directly influenced by climate variability and change.

Temperatures in Kenya have risen by 1°C over the past 50 years, and warming is expected to accelerate, with temperatures rising nearly 3°C by 2050. The recent prolonged and severe drought in Kenya is widely perceived to be symptomatic of the changing climate. Drought in itself is nothing new in East Africa. This is a normal and recurring but temporary characteristic of arid areas, rather than an aberration brought about by climate change. However, the drought cycle in East Africa does appear to be contracting sharply. Rains used to fail every nine or ten years. Then the cycle seemed to go down to five years. Now, it seems, the region is experiencing drought every two or three years.

As noted above, vulnerability to the effects of climate variability depends to a considerable degree upon adaptive capacities, both at national and community levels. It has long been recognized that poorer countries bear the biggest burden since climatic variability increases with the degree of aridity and many of the world?s dry land areas are located in developing countries. In these countries livelihoods are more reliant on the natural resource base and on environmental goods and services, but their capacity to invest in adaptive technologies, such as improved varieties or water systems, is lower.

The ASALs of Kenya share many of these socio-economic challenges, such as endemic poverty and restricted access to capital, making adaption more difficult. Governance structures concerned with the distribution and management of natural resources will be critical in determining whether resource scarcity arising from climate change leads to violent conflict. It also requires the political will and capacity to utilize these structures, which has often been lacking in the past, for instance in the case of land administration.

Nevertheless, the impacts of climate variability in Marsabit are potentially highly destructive, given that people rely heavily on natural resources and food security is already fragile. Pre-existing developmental challenges and weak governance in the area make the climatic stresses more threatening. Indeed pastoralist groups have been referred to as the „climate change canaries? since their livelihoods are so vulnerable to environmental changes.

Research in pastoralist areas in Kenya indicates that an increasingly adverse climate has already contributed to lowering income levels, the expansion of settlements lacking basic services, migration, deforestation and growing aid dependency.
However, others challenge this view of pastoralists as helpless victims, arguing that “the livelihood patterns of pastoral communities hinge upon strategies that continuously adapt to a limited, highly variable and often unpredictable resource endowment”. There may therefore be opportunities to learn from the flexibility and mobility that characterize pastoralist adaptive capacities.

A number of potential connections between climate variability and conflicts in the ASALs can be identified. Pasture and water availability is largely determined by the distribution and incidences of rainfall. Less predictable and decreasing rainfall due to climatic variability (combined with rising evapotranspiration rates) mean that supply of these resources may decrease. Other climatic extremes, such as extremely high rainfall and flash floods, may also stress resources by damaging top soil and the vegetation that grows on it. Rising scarcity is likely to lead to increased conflict among pastoralist groups and between pastoralist groups and sedentary farmers. Long periods of drought in the past seem to confirm this pattern. These conflicts may manifest themselves in short-term clashes over specific pastures and water points or in longer-term struggles as groups attempt to control and secure their own access to resources. Indeed more structural disputes over exclusive land use (on which resources are found) and land boundaries are likely to increase.

Coupled with this, pastoralist coping strategies like migration can also contribute to conflict dynamics. In periods of low climatic stress, migration is limited to a relatively small area; in periods of high stress pastoralists will take their herds as far as necessary to find water and pasture supplies. Wider migration leads to increased contact with other migrating pastoralists, with whom historical conflicts may already exist, which can lead to inter-community violence. It also pushes pastoralists into areas that are increasingly claimed for farming, ranching, conservation or other forms of exclusive use and private property. In the short term, these tensions usually arise on a seasonal basis in the dry seasons. However, the potential for such conflicts is likely to increase if climate variability forces greater migration of pastoralist groups. Since climate change is predicted to cause increased variability, these adaptive strategies are likely to be more ad hoc and unpredictable, making the conflicts that arise from them more difficult to manage.

Climate variability driven by climate change has the potential to impact negatively on water availability, and access to and demand for water in most countries, particularly in Africa. Climate change and variability is expected to alter and hence bring changes to the hydrological cycle, temperature balance and rainfall pattern. This has wide range implications since water is one of the most important of all natural resources for socioeconomic, cultural, political and environmental development.

During rainy season, members of one village can access water at another village. However, as water becomes scarce owing to prolonged drought, villagers may prohibit members from another village from using water resources located within their jurisdiction. This kind of restriction on water access and use has sometimes resulted in inter-village fighting, especially where members of the two villages are from different ethnic groups.

The practice of livestock raiding causes large numbers of casualties in Northern Kenya. While conflicts over scarce resources may be largely explained by drought conditions, population pressure, and access problems, livestock raiding is more violent during wet seasons, when pasture and water are abundant and when the livestock is in good health. The higher incidents of violent deaths during wet seasons hint at opportunistic behavior of the raiders.

From the assessment that I did, I found out that raiding is mainly dependent on the seasonal variability of rainfall while clashes are dependent on drought. Since raids depend on rainfall variability, then the annual variability of rainfall tends to either increase or reduce these incidents. From the analysis, it was found that conflicts, on yearly basis, tend to increase during March, April, May and also during October, November and December. These correspond to the two rainy seasons of MAM and OND. We can therefore deduce that most raiding incidents occur during the rainy seasons of the year. This is when most livestock are healthier so raiding for restocking in rife.

From the assessment, increased number of conflicts during certain years may be attributed to the droughts which devastated the region in the earlier year(s). For example, there was a significant increase in the number of conflicts just after the years 1983/1984, 1991/1991/1992, 1999/2001 and 2004/2005. Since inter-communal clashes occur mainly due to resource scarcity, we can deduce that the drought which occurred during years mentioned above fuelled the conflicts on a greater scale.