Shared Climate Change and Natural Resource Management Issues in East Africa

Abstract

This review uses a mixture of academic and grey literature to explore key shared climate change and natural resource management issues across the East Africa region.1 Climate change involves different impacts (flood, drought, changing rainfall patterns, etc.) which simultaneously affect numerous issue-areas (agriculture, transport, energy production, etc.), different levels of society (ranging from local to regional), across different spatial and temporal scales. Because of these multi-faceted characteristics, discussing the socioeconomic impacts of climate change is very complex. Given the limited time available for this review and the interrelated nature of climate change and its impacts, it was necessary to narrow the focus of this paper down to some key issues. The issues selected were highlighted through an initial scoping of the literature and by the DFID advisers who requested this review. This review aims to provide a general overview of the literature and is not exhaustive or complete in the issues it focuses on, nor does it make a judgement on the importance of these issues over other climate change related issues in the region. This review provides a brief discussion of the observed and projected climate changes for the East Africa region. Some key economic and social impacts of climate change that are broadly shared by the countries in the East Africa region are then highlighted. The areas explored for East Africa in this review include: drylands management, pastoralism and agriculture; urbanisation and flooding; water availability and supply; forestry and ecosystem changes. The literature reviewed illustrates how complicated and at times speculative the expected socioeconomic impacts of climate change are.