‘Difficult to ignore’: how coalitions in Kenya are lifting up each other’s voices

By working together, small communities are scaling up climate solutions and protecting their lands

Lamu, where construction of Lamu port and Lamu Coal Power Plant has been proposed. (Photo: Luigi Guarino/Flickr)

New coalitions in Kenya are leading the fight against climate change.

In Lamu, an archipelago in the southeast, a coalition of local communities are working to push back against the proposed construction of Lamu port and Lamu Coal Power Plant.

The plant would be Kenya’s first coal power station and would jeopardise the country’s clean-energy pledges to reduce its small carbon footprint by nearly a third over the next decade.

Lamu is also a Unesco World Heritage Site, which is legally protected land. The town is the oldest and best-preserved Swahili settlement in East Africa, and one of the only settlements that have continuously been inhabited for over 700 years.

Save Lamu is a coalition of over 40 groups that helps to bring awareness of the concerns of the Lamu community about the port and power station to government actors, and through the coalition, the Lamu community have demonstrated how, together, they can bring about real change.

“The community have taken the government to court on certain aspects of public participation on [the Lamu coal station] project,” said Rose Birgen, Senior Programme Officer with Natural Justice, an environmental and human rights organisation in Nairobi that supports the coalition.

It was through those court proceedings that the Saving Lamu coalition and Natural Justice achieved a significant victory in pausing construction of the coal plant after a tribunal found that the public participation done on the project was insufficient. Many were unaware of the full scale of the project and its possible impacts on their health, the land, and the environment.

This success also means that a new environmental impact assessment must be undertaken, which has given time for the communities of Lamu to offer their voices on how the project will impact them and their livelihoods.

“The coalition has united the community around the issues that affect them,” said Birgen. “It has also helped communities demand the respect that they want to be shown by the government, demand respect to the law and judicial processes.”

“It is very difficult to ignore the voice of people who know their rights,” Birgen added. “It’s very difficult to suppress the voice of people who know what is expected of the government, and what the law speaks for,” she said.

The power of a united voice is being heard throughout Kenya. In the north, where the majority of pastoral communities live, coalitions are helping to foster sustainable land management and prevent conflict.

With the increasing frequency of droughts, more and more livelihoods are affected by conflicts that arise from competition over natural resources such as land and water. It can take years to rebuild typical household livestock after drought, making it harder for communities to survive as they traditionally would.

Land rights are important for communities, not only to keep valuable traditions alive but to help protect the environment in which those communities thrive.

New protections have been introduced in Kenya under the landmark 2016 Community Land Rights Act, which enables community lands to be formally recognised for the first time. These lands represent roughly 67% of Kenya’s landmass.

But the law is both complicated and has not been widely publicised, meaning most Indigenous communities throughout the country have not yet benefited from the new protections.

The Pastoralists Alliance for Resilience and Adaptation in North Kenya (PARAN), has been working to help those Indigenous communities register their land under the law. The coalition was created by the Indigenous Movement for Peace Advancement and Conflict Transformation (IMPACT) with an aim to directly support pastoralist peoples in the development of enhancing climate change resilience and adaptation.

“PARAN is a concept that came from thinking about scaling up climate solutions,” said Mali Ole Kaunga, Director of IMPACT. PARAN was initiated by five indigenous organisations and an additional 23 pastoralists organisations have added their voice to the alliance.

“By bringing together organisations, building an alliance that brings landowners, Indigenous peoples, resource users together, we bring our voices so they can really be reinforced when building policy issues,” said Kaunga.

“Each organisation has its own power,” added Kaunga. “When this power comes together, it becomes a spark, a voice that is difficult to ignore,” he said.

By using traditional institutions and Indigenous experience to build the PARAN platform, communities have created spaces for collaboration and collective decision making.

“It unlocks the potential within us,” said Kaunga. “Intercommunity dialogue is not easy. But with diverse representation, we are able to support each other. It is difficult to victimise one organisation on its own. But not altogether.”

The article originally appeared on Climate Home News, and is the result of a partnership between CJRF and Climate Home.

Indigenous communities are at the forefront of climate resilience

Indigenous communities have a vital role in developing climate resilience projects, using deep knowledge of environmental cycles

Fort William First Nation, an Ojibwa First Nation reserve in Ontario, Canada (Photo: Tony Webster/Flickr)

The impacts of climate change on Indigenous peoples are wide and immediate.

Indigenous land encompasses about 22% of the world’s surface and overlaps with areas that hold 80% of Earth’s biodiversity.

Hunters, fishers, herders, farmers, and wild harvesters, indigenous communities depend intimately on this ecological richness for their economic, social, and cultural well-being. This makes them especially sensitive to the effects of extreme weather events such as floods, droughts, heatwaves, wildfires, and cyclones. And at the same time, it makes them powerful actors in the fight against climate change.

For Indigenous peoples in eastern Canada, rising sea levels have led to the salination of freshwater, which in turn affects food security and traditional medicines. In the north, temperature rise has seen disappearing ice roads not only threaten transport systems, but also create profoundly negative impacts on the mental health of increasingly isolated communities.

Additionally, through colonisation, “communities were rounded up and put onto reserve systems,” said Eriel Deranger, executive director of Indigenous Climate Action (ICA). “Climate change has not just destabilised the local biospheres, it’s led to communities needing to move, but because of colonial structures, we’ve been unable to move our communities.”

To combat this “underpinning of imbalance,” Deranger believes that Indigenous knowledge must be at the centre of the climate action discussion. “Many of the richest biodiverse regions are protected largely in part because of the resistance by Indigenous communities to those regions,” she said.

It is a close relationship with the environment, and deeply spiritual, cultural, social, and economic connections with that environment, that makes Indigenous peoples uniquely positioned to anticipate, prepare for, and respond to the impacts of climate change.

Indigenous science is based on building deep, long-term connections with the natural world. “You learn to have a different relationship with the environment, it exposes to you a different way of seeing and relating to the world,” Deranger said.

“It’s critical to have that lens,” she added. “Without that connection to the natural world, we’re doomed to repeat this again.”

The ICA works across Canada to raise Indigenous voices on climate change and is currently developing a toolkit to help Indigenous communities plan climate action together. “The best way for us to build the capacity of our people is through gatherings. It’s part of our cultural makeup, we ground a lot of our work in creating space for gatherings to foster a network of indigenous climate champions,” said Deranger.

Using the toolkit, ICA and its local partner group Dene Nahjo are working with Arctic Indigenous communities to host dialogues and gatherings to build community-driven plans for climate action. The workshops are designed to highlight the importance of the unique Arctic knowledge held by the Dene and other Northern peoples. They also centre Indigenous peoples’ rights and values in developing climate solutions.

In other places across the world, Indigenous knowledge has been effective in developing measures to cope with climate hazards. For example, Inca traditions of crop diversification to strengthen knowledge of genetic diversity and, in the Sahel, the use of water-harvesting strategies and weather forecasting.

“Indigenous peoples are repositories of learning and knowledge about how to cope successfully with local-level climate change and respond effectively to major environmental changes such as natural disasters,” said Myrna Cunningham Kain, chair of the Pawanka Fund.

The Pawanka Fund helps communities across the world to build resilience by promoting and supporting the participation of Indigenous peoples in public policies, strategies, and other decision-making spaces. They also fund Indigenous-led plans and projects for adaptation to and mitigation of climate change.

With funding from the Climate Justice Resilience Fund, they are conducting two special calls for proposals on Indigenous-led approaches to resilience during 2019 and 2020. The fund has a transformational vision for these calls.

“Resilience is no longer just about absorbing shocks, but also about harnessing the changes triggered by external stresses to catalyse the evolution of the social-ecological system in question,” said Cunningham.

“Indigenous knowledge is key in building climate change resilience because it includes the interrelationship between diverse aspects: human being, Mother Earth, and cosmos,” she added. “Indigenous peoples have been living in the same territories and ecosystems for centuries and are the best experts in knowing environmental cycles and processes.”

The article originally appeared on Climate Home News, and is the result of a partnership between CJRF and Climate Home.

Around the world, young people are driving climate innovation

From the Arctic to a Kenyan wildlife reserve, young people are helping their communities adapt to an uncertain future.

Newly-trained Maasai safari guides at a graduation ceremony in 2018, Maasai Mara, Kenya. (Photo: MMWCA)

2019 will be remembered as the year young people took to the streets around the world to fight for their future.

Inspired by Greta Thunberg and other outspoken teens, millions of young people have been making headlines to raise global awareness of the dire consequences climate change could have for their generation’s future.

Meanwhile, more quietly, but also around the globe, young people have been charting that future as they help their communities adapt to the changes already happening.

“Everywhere our fund works, we see young people making change happen, though their activism and also though their jobs and livelihoods,” said Heather McGray, director of the Climate Justice Resilience Fund, which makes grants to support climate resilience. “Youth are both demanding action and taking action, and a lot of it is very innovative.”

In the Arctic, for example, sea-ice travel is essential for Indigenous communities: hunting, public services, and social visits all require travel on sea-ice. But climate change has made the ice environment increasingly unpredictable, making it harder for the younger generation to learn how to navigate it.

20-year-old Shawna Dicker is an Inuit person from Nain, in north-east Canada. “Climate change is affecting Indigenous communities most deeply and permanently, it affects our knowledge of the land and we are unsure of the future,” she said.

Rex Holwell, 44, has seen how the ice has changed over his life. “We have people with years of experience who would know the ice inside and out. It’s changed so much, they can’t predict it anymore,” he said.

Inuit like Dicker and Holwell used to be able to go out on the sea ice as early as October, but with climate change, the ice doesn’t freeze enough to be reliable until late December or even early January.

But there are new solutions aimed at supporting communities in the Arctic in dealing with the unpredictability. In Nain, Dicker and Holwell are working with SmartICE, a social enterprise developing tools to help bring some certainty back to the ice.

SmartICE have developed the @SmartBUOY to measure the thickness of the sea-ice and give insights into local ice conditions, allowing for safer travel. The stationary sensor provides reliable near-real-time sea-ice thickness measurements and delivers this information by satellite. It is then put onto app-based maps together with traditional Inuit travel routes, hunting grounds, and other indigenous knowledge from elders.

The high tech SmartBUOY being installed in Pond Inlet (Nunavut), Canada. (Photo: SmartICE)

Holwell is the Northern Production Lead for SmartICE and trains young people for employment making the buoys. “They’re going to help make a change,” he said. “Projects like the @SmartBUOY’s mean traditional knowledge is still being handed down to young people [alongside] the implementation of new technology, and they are still using Inuit knowledge of the ice.”

Dicker also works with SmartICE as their Northern Logistics Coordinator and is excited about the innovation and opportunity this work brings. It highlights the transfer of traditional Inuit knowledge to Dicker’s generation through the new technology, and how, because of climate change, it’s the younger generation that will use this knowledge differently.

Unpredictability is a similar problem in the Maasai Mara, a wildlife reserve in south-west Kenya. In the Mara, the rainy season used to be guaranteed in the months from March to May. But this has changed dramatically over the last five years due to the changing climate.

“Even in the months where a lot of rain would be expected, it doesn’t come anymore,” said Daniel Sopia, Chief Executive Officer of the Maasai Mara Wildlife Conservancies Association (MMWCA). Rain is essential for pasture for livestock, land conservation, wildlife tourism, and sustainability in the greater Mara ecosystem.

MMWCA supports community-led wildlife conservancies, through which local landowners team up to manage the savannah together to provide multiple benefits. MMWCA works to support young people, especially young women and girls, by building their skills in land and natural resource management and involving them in the conservancy process so that together the Maasai community can adapt to the changing weather patterns.

Youth opportunities at MMWCA take into account the importance of gender. “Climate change affects women most of all,” said Angela Paswa, MMWCA’s gender officer. “In the prolonged drought season, women spend more hours getting water.” This makes young women and girls much more likely to drop out of formal training and education programmes to help their families make ends meet, with serious consequences for their employment and income over the long term.

So MMWCA has been supporting a new generation of young women, who are trained as guides, rangers, and in hospitality. They will have a very different experience and role in the Mara than their mothers and grandmothers.

When MMWCA first started working with conservancies, of 307 local committee members, only five were women. Now, that has increased to 25%. “This is still not good enough,” said Paswa. “But we have created a space for Maasai women now. The forum has influenced younger women and girls to take up more roles. Young women have more options in life.”

The article originally appeared on Climate Home News, and is the result of a partnership between CJRF and Climate Home.