African nomads to be first people wiped out by climate change
Pastor Dale Morgan
African nomads to be first people wiped out by climate change*
Kenya's herdsmen are facing extinction as global warming destroys their
lands
Peter Beaumont, foreign affairs editor
Sunday November 12, 2006
The Observer
They are dubbed the 'climate canaries' - the people destined to become
the first victims of world climate change. And as government ministers
sit down in Nairobi at this weekend's UN Climate Conference, the people
most likely to be wiped out by devastating global warming will be only a
few hundred miles away from their deliberations.
Those people, according to research commissioned by the charity
Christian Aid, will be the three million pastoralists of northern Kenya,
whose way of life has sustained them for thousands of years but who now
face eradication. Hundreds of thousands of these seasonal herders have
already been forced to forsake their traditional culture and settle in
Kenya's north eastern province following consecutive droughts that have
decimated their livestock in recent years.
Earlier this year the charity commissioned livestock specialist Dr David
Kimenye to examine how the herders are coping with the recent drought,
uncovering a disastrous story. Over two months, Dr Kimenye talked to
pastoralists in five areas across the Mandera district, home to 1.5
million people.
The study discovered that:
· Incidence of drought has increased fourfold in the Mandera region in
the past 25 years.
· One-third of herders living there - around half a million people -
have already been forced to abandon their pastoral way of life because
of adverse climatic conditions.
· During the last drought, so many cattle, camels and goats were lost
that 60 per cent of the families who remain as herders need outside
assistance to recover. Their surviving herds are too small to support them.
The new findings follow recent warnings from the UK Met Office that if
current trends continue one-third of the planet will be desert by the
end of 2100. The scientists modelled how drought is likely to increase
globally during the coming century because of predicted changes in
rainfall and temperature around the world.
At present, according to their calculations, 25 per cent of the Earth's
surface is susceptible to moderate drought, rising to 50 per cent by
2100. In addition, the areas susceptible to severe drought - 8 per cent
- are expected to rise to 40 per cent. And the figure for extreme
drought, currently 3 per cent, will rise to 30 per cent.
And what is doubly worrying about Kimenye's research is that it has
revealed that a system of nomadic pastoralism that has, over the
centuries, been able to cope with unpredictable weather patterns and
regular drought has been brought by climate change to the point of utter
extinction.
It is a fact not lost on those who have been forced out of their
historic lifestyle to settle at the Quimbiso settlement. Nearby is a
stinking pit where the bones of the last of once thriving herds were
dumped and burned - victims of the worst drought in living memory.
The families who until a few months ago herded these animals across
northern Kenya and beyond now huddle in this riverside settlement, their
children prone to malaria and other illnesses, but at least close to a
reliable source of water. Now they are completely dependent on aid
handouts for most of their food.
'Our whole life has been spent moving, but we are desperate people.
People who have lost our livelihood,' says Mukhtar Aden, one of the
elders at the Quimbiso settlement. 'We didn't settle here by choice, it
was forced upon us.'
Everywhere are tales of huge livestock losses. In one roadside
settlement, which now depends on selling milk from its few remaining
animals to passing trucks, a man produces a book recording the dark days
of the drought. One entry, for 15 February, shows that the community
lost more than 500 sheep and goats and 250 cattle in a single day.
And while rain did came to the region for the first time in more than a
year last month, it was too late for the makeshift roadside communities
who no longer have animals to put out to pasture.
Wargadud is another sizeable community running along either side of the
region's main road. The chairman of Wargadud's water users' association
is Abdullahi Abdi Hussein, who describes how the periods of rain have
got shorter and the dry spells longer - changing the pattern of four
seasons on which the pastoral communities depended.
And while there were always droughts, he says: 'Decade after decade it
has been getting more severe. It has only been getting harder and harder
and more and more serious.'