Climate, Land, and Power: Conflict in Kenya’s Pastoral Regions

In northern Kenya, climate change isn’t some distant warning. It’s dry water pans, carcasses in the dust, and families moving sooner and farther each year, with more risk than before. Drought has always been part of life here. What’s changed is how it now piles onto every other pressure, pushing already fragile systems closer to collapse.

The Horn of Africa is living through its worst drought in over 4 decades. Since 2020, 5 rainy seasons have failed across parts of Kenya, Ethiopia, and Somalia. This isn’t cyclical bad weather. Researchers say this scale of failure would not exist without human-driven climate change.

Nearly 2.5 million livestock have died in Kenya during this drought. Cattle, goats, camels, not assets, but food, savings, social status, and insurance rolled into one. When animals die, households don’t just lose income. They lose resilience. Across the wider region, livestock losses have caused economic damage exceeding $1.5 billion. That loss doesn’t get rebuilt quickly. Often, it doesn’t get rebuilt at all.

Across Kenya’s arid and semi-arid lands, millions of people depend on pastoral livelihoods that only work if land stays open and movement stays possible. Both are disappearing. That system has always absorbed climate variability through mobility. What has changed is that both land and movement are disappearing.

What turns drought into violence is what follows scarcity. Pastoralists move in search of pasture, but routes that once absorbed pressure are now blocked. Communal rangelands have been subdivided. Group ranches in Samburu, Narok, and Kajiado were broken up and sold. Infrastructure corridors, conservation zones, farms, and settlements fracture the land. People converge where grass and water still exist. Tensions rise. Guns are already there.

Conflict numbers make this shift clear. In 2018, Kenya recorded just 22 reported pastoral conflict incidents. By 2022, incidents climbed to 345. By 2023, that number had surged to 396. During the same period, drought intensified and available grazing collapsed. In 2023 and early 2024, more than 60% of violent events in these regions directly targeted civilians. This is no longer about cattle alone. It’s about control.

According to Professor Kennedy Mkutu, a Professor of International Relations at United States International University-Africa, scarcity on its own does not explain why competition turns violent. Politics does. Devolution brought money, authority, and competition into rural spaces that were once politically marginal. County borders suddenly mattered. Development funds, oil prospects, geothermal projects, and infrastructure rents became prizes. Boundary disputes hardened. Elites moved in. Land speculation accelerated. Old agreements over water and pasture were pushed aside by new power struggles.

State responses have often made things worse. Disarmament campaigns are rolled out unevenly, leaving some communities exposed while others remain armed. Security forces concentrate around towns, roads, and projects, while rural grazing areas are left thinly policed. Mobility is restricted in the name of security, even though mobility is how pastoralists survive drought. When herders cannot move safely, livestock die faster. Hunger follows. Resentment builds.

Flooding adds another layer of instability. Climate change here isn’t a straight line toward dryness. In 2021, Lake Baringo burst its banks, forcing more than 3,000 households from their homes and wiping out tourism and infrastructure worth 95 million shillings, about $700,000. In Turkana County, hundreds of El Molo homes disappeared underwater. Disease followed. So did hunger, with roughly 2,500 people reporting acute food insecurity. One year the land burns. The next it drowns. People barely finish rebuilding before everything is taken again.

Professor Mkutu notes that when people migrate and converge around shrinking resources, outcomes vary. Sometimes elders, peace committees, and local officials manage cooperation. Other times, corruption, revenge, theft, or political mobilisation ignite violence. Climate stress raises the stakes. It does not determine the outcome, but it narrows the margin for peace.

Households adapt until they can’t. Herds are split. Young men travel farther with animals. Others abandon pastoralism entirely. Aid draws people into settlements where livestock livelihoods no longer function, creating dependency and long-term poverty. Insecurity accelerates the process. Once families drop out of pastoralism, returning is rare.

Looking ahead, the future is uncertain. Somali pastoralists are already moving south in search of pasture, increasing pressure on farming zones. Farmer–pastoralist conflict is rising. Pastoral dropout is accelerating. Young people turn to casual labour, transport work, or armed groups when nothing else pays. Climate variability, not just declining rainfall, is stretching systems beyond their limits.

Professor Mkutu warns that without serious reform in land governance, security provision, and political inclusion, climate stress will keep multiplying conflict. Not in one dramatic collapse, but through steady erosion. Violence flares. Settlements swell. Livelihoods thin. People leave.

This is what climate-induced conflict looks like in Kenya’s pastoral north. Not a single trigger. Not a single cause. Just pressure, layered on pressure, until survival itself becomes a daily negotiation, and sometimes, a fight.

Further information and opportunities to engage with organisations working in this area are listed below:
https://www.kenyalandalliance.or.ke/
https://www.cjrfund.org/impact-kenya
https://www.paraanalliance.org/about/

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