On the heels of the Africa Climate Week in early September and happening just over two months before the beginning of COP28 in Dubai, on Wednesday UN Secretary-General António Guterres hosted the first-ever Climate Ambition Summit during the UN General Assembly high-level week in New York. As the name suggests, the goal of the summit was to identify and encourage serious and urgent action on climate change.
This is just the latest call for climate action from the Secretary-General. With this summer’s record-breaking temperatures, Guterres remarked that the “era of global boiling” and “climate breakdown” is upon us. These emotive words mirror what civil society organizations and even many governments have been saying for quite some time now: not only must we act now, but we must act at the proper scale, something that is still missing from many talks and proposals.
And while discussions at the international level continue, communities around the world continue to experience loss and damage from climate change. For these communities, high-level talks are a distant echo of what they are seeing each and every day: reduced livelihood options, threats to physical and mental well-being, entrenched poverty and development losses, human rights violations, and forced displacement.
As we recently detailed in our report based on visits in Kenya’s Great Rift Valley, climate change is making it difficult for many to survive. Both sudden and slow-onset events - flooding and prolonged drought for the communities we visited - are threatening the most basic of rights, driving gender-based violence and conflicts over resources, destroying cultural assets, and forcing many from their homes.
For residents of Kokwa Island, in Lake Baringo, inundation of healthcare facilities due to lake-level rise has severely reduced the availability of healthcare services and has exacerbated other flood-related issues, such as a rise in respiratory conditions and water-borne illnesses like cholera and dysentery. Lack of adequate health care access has particularly impacted the Island’s women. One woman we spoke to was forced to give birth on a boat in the middle of the night when it became clear that a crossing to the mainland - and the closest hospital - would not be possible.
For the Indigenous Endorois people of Lake Bogoria, climate change is causing cultural loss and worsening intergenerational trauma. Already dealing with a history of being forcibly evicted from their lands, the Endorois are now seeing their burial grounds flooded by rising lakes, literally submerging the “bones of our ancestors,” as one community member told us.
In arid Turkana County, pastoralists, forced to be increasingly mobile due to drought and resultant water scarcity, are coming into conflict with other groups over land tenure and access to resources. In some cases, these conflicts result in loss of life.
And in many of the communities we visited, some residents have been forced to relocate altogether, whether because of swelling lakes or loss of livelihood due to drought. A 2021 joint Kenyan government-UNDP report found that lake flooding in the Great Rift Valley had displaced nearly 76,000 households with many more in need of “urgent humanitarian assistance.”
These communities, who have been neglected by various actors for decades, are seeing climate change strip them of their livelihoods, well-being, and - in some cases - their lives. And they are not alone. All across the globe, in developing countries but also in parts of developed ones, frontline communities - with little to no responsibility for climate change - are running out of time as world leaders debate how to respond to the climate crisis.
As Climate Week and the UNGA high-level week come to a close in New York City, it is critical to remember that adequate, cross-sector action must be taken immediately if we are to both respond to existing losses and damages and minimize the scale of future harms. Rhetoric, such as the various interventions made at last week’s Climate Ambition Summit, will simply not be enough without action to match it.
With the clock ticking on the climate crisis, and COP28 right around the corner, there is an opportunity to build a response that puts impacted people - such as the communities we visited in Kenya - at the center. A failure to do so, and in time, will guarantee further suffering as a result of climate change.