By Matilda Atieno
Kisumu County experiences extreme climate events that are becoming more common and severe, causing climate vulnerability, bearing in mind its tropical climate, which ensures two rainy seasons a year, following an ideal condition for a healthy and prosperous agricultural sector.
As climate change makes an impact across the county, residents have to adapt rapidly to new and uncertain conditions. Climate change is not locally uniform and affects some areas more than others, thus participatory climate risk assessment looks at the risk vulnerability of Kisumu County in each ward and actions towards increasing their climate change resilience by adoption strategies.
The PCRA process took place concurrently in all 35 wards through a co-created participatory approach and the outcomes used to propose projects that focus on climate risk management. The proposed strategies are crosscutting among sectors such as health, infrastructure, energy, water resources environment and waste management, and agriculture.
The climate risk assessment allows the understanding of the climate hazards that Kisumu is exposed to and the probability of occurrence alongside their historical, current and potential impacts. The outcome of the PCRA process was taken through the County validation workshop that brought together a multi-sectoral meeting including community representatives from each ward, state and non-state stakeholders, and county government officials.
The County government together with its stakeholders, organized a two days workshop to validate the results from the participatory assessment on the climate change impacts and adaptive capacity of rural, urban, and Peri-urban communities in Kisumu. The outcome of the process will be the publication of a report related to the resilience of communities in Kisumu towards climate change.
