Introduction
The frequency and intensity of extreme climate events is projected to increase as global warming continues to take place. This will be particularly acute in sub-Saharan Africa, which has been identified by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as one of the most vulnerable regions due to its high exposure and limited ability to adapt (Niang et al. 2014). The prolonged and severe droughts and floods act as a threat multiplier, often with negative outcomes for pastoral livelihoods such as reduced pastureland and lack of water for livestock, which inevitably lead to famine, death of livestock, and food insecurity. Climate change interacts with non-climatic drivers and stressors to exacerbate vulnerability of pastoral systems, particularly in the arid and semi-arid lands (ASALs) of sub-Saharan Africa. At the same time, this will make the poverty and inequality that already exists worse and create both new risks and some opportunities for these communities (Niang et al. 2014, Olsson et al. 2014). Extreme climate events such as drought and floods continue to have devastating impacts on the pastoral economy in northern Kenya. These impacts, however, can be reduced by effective response strategies such as diversification of livelihoods and community-based early-warning systems that integrate both the indigenous and conventional weather forecasts. This reduces reliance on climate-sensitive livelihoods. It also allows for better water management and the early sale or destocking of animals as measures to make pastoral livelihoods more resilient (Senaratna, et al. 2014, Ndiritu 2019) in the face of increased frequency and intensity of extreme events.
This chapter explores how intersecting social identities such as gender, age, and marital status shape community responses to extreme climate events in Turkana, Kenya. By using an intersectionality lens, it unpacks the differentiated vulnerabilities and adaptive capacities among community members and how these influence access to early-warning systems and alternative livelihoods. The chapter draws on empirical data to reveal both the limitations and opportunities that arise in adapting to climate extremes. It highlights the dynamic interplay between climate change, socioeconomic factors, and cultural practices, offering insights into how pastoral communities navigate a rapidly changing environment. Understanding these localized, gendered experiences is crucial for designing inclusive and effective climate adaptation strategies.
The impacts of climate extremes in Turkana create a vicious cycle where communities are driven to take actions that further degrade the rural environment in order to cope with immediate challenges. In response to these climate extremes, communities often resort to short-term coping mechanisms to survive, such as overgrazing of available pastureland, cutting down trees for firewood/charcoal, and over-extracting water resources. These immediate coping strategies often lead to environmental degradation. Overgrazing reduces vegetation cover, leading to soil erosion and loss of fertile land. Deforestation for firewood/charcoal further diminishes the land’s ability to retain water and support diverse plant life. Over-extraction of water depletes local water sources, making them less reliable. In the face of a changing and variable climate, the future of the rural community in Turkana is greatly compromised. The degraded environment becomes less resilient to future climate extremes, which in turn increases the rural community’s vulnerability to future climate events. The increased vulnerability and compounded challenges force the rural communities to continue or even intensify their environmentally degrading practices, perpetuating a cycle of degradation and vulnerability. Degraded environments are less resilient to climate extremes, making rural communities more vulnerable to future events.
Gender interacts with other intersectional inequalities to shape people’s vulnerabilities and capacities to respond to the impacts of extreme climate events. The utilization of an intersectionality lens in climate-change-adaptation and vulnerability studies is an attempt to move away from the simplistic binary gender analysis, which tends to ignore or take for granted the nuanced differences of the seeming homogeneity among men and women (Demetriades and Esplen 2009, Arora-Jonsson 2011, Dzah 2011, Carr and Thompson 2014, Ravera et al. 2016, van Aelst and Holvoet 2016). Crenshaw (1989) is credited with coining the term intersectionality, which she first used in feminist scholarship to show the marginalization and power struggles of African American women, who face double discrimination because of the intersection of their identities in terms of race, gender, and class, amongst others. The application of an intersectional framing in climate-change discourse seeks to unravel complexities by looking beyond the differences between men and women to understand how the intersections of social identities such as seniority, marital status, age, ethnicity, cultural roles, and livelihoods produce differentiated and distinct vulnerabilities and adaptive capacities in response to climate change. (Dankelman 2010, Dzah 2011, Demetriades and Esplen, 2009, Djoudi, et al. 2016, Carr and Thompson 2014, Kaijser and Kronsell 2014, Thompson-Hall et al. 2016, Jerneck 2018).
Individuals and communities are embedded in larger sociocultural, political, and economic relationships. Power dynamics that determine access to resources, information, and the availability of options and choices have a significant impact on one’s ability to adapt and respond to change. Therefore, intersectionality frameworks acknowledge that the roles and responsibilities that come with different identities determine who does what, how they do it, when they do it, with what resources, and why (Tschakert 2012, Djoudi et al. 2016, Thompson-Hall et al. 2016). Studies using an intersectionality lens show how roles and responsibilities intersect with social identities to shape a person’s ability to deal with climate and non-climate stressors. These studies contend that approaching climate-change vulnerability through an intersectional lens can enhance the resilience of the affected communities. Vulnerability is generated by a variety of processes and circumstances; therefore, to effectively address the range of impacts that a community or household may experience as a result of climate change necessitates the examination of the specific form of vulnerability and discrimination that people face in order to respond to it. An intersectionality lens provides a more holistic explanation for exclusion, marginalization, and inequality and is therefore useful in interrogating vulnerability and adaptation to climate change (Dankelman 2002, Wawire 2003, Arora-Jonsson 2011, Dzah 2011, Ravera et al. 2016, Anbacha and Kjosavik 2019, Rao et al. 2019).
Early-warning systems have emerged as a key strategy for increasing the resilience of climate-sensitive livelihoods such as pastoralism and farming. Pastoralists and farmers may make decisions and adopt policies that will help to increase their adaptive capacity using indigenous and conventional early-warning systems. This is because early-warning systems enable farmers to comprehend risks and to anticipate and manage extreme events (Diouf et al. 2019, Gumucio et al. 2020). There is an emerging body of literature that seeks to understand how gender intersects with other identities to determine access to and usage of adaptation strategies among communities faced with a changing and variable climate. The marital status of a female farmer is a significant factor in determining access to resources and obtaining material support from family members that enable her to adapt or become vulnerable (van Aelst and Holvoet 2016). Married women who get divorced or who are widowed are less likely than married women to have access to valley land for farming during the dry season. However, female divorcees are better off than their widowed counterparts because they can take up more non-farm income-generating activities that increase their resources and access to non-farming adaptation strategies (van Aelst and Holvoet 2016).
According to Sprout (2022), women are excluded from many of the avenues through which climate information is shared due to their cultural subjugation. One mode of dissemination is through capacity-building workshops. While these workshops are supposed to be participatory spaces that stimulate knowledge co-production, they are also places where power relations play out and can potentially worsen helplessness (Nyantakyi-Frimpong 2019, Sprout 2022). Among some communities in sub-Saharan Africa, the uptake of climate information is influenced by how seniority, religion, and class intersect with gender. For instance, in polygamous households, the junior wives were least likely to receive climate information; often only doing so through family members. Thus, the uptake of climate information is an intersection of gender, the power dynamics of information sharing, and social networks (Nyantakyi-Frimpong 2019, Sprout 2022). These studies underscore the wisdom of moving away from frameworks that see gender as a dichotomy and instead espouse an intersectionality lens. This is particularly important in climate-change discourse; if ‘adaptation is to leave no one behind’, then the intersection between gender and other social identities must be taken into consideration.