Future climate adaptation investments by Kenya’s County Climate Change Fund (CCCF) are poised to promote peace thanks to research-backed recommendations.
Kenya’s County Climate Change Fund (CCCF) enables communities to prioritize, design, and obtain funding for locally led climate adaptation projects. The CGIAR Research Initiative on Climate Resilience (ClimBeR) has partnered with the Adaptation Consortium (ADA), which coordinates the operationalization of the CCCF, to identify how this mechanism can resolve climate-related conflicts and sustain peace. As a result of the joint research and ClimBeR’s recommendations, ADA is keen to make conflict prevention and resolution a more deliberate goal of the CCCF.
In Kenyan counties, climate change impacts put pressure on farmers and herders, reducing their access to water, pasture, and food—something that can cause tension within and between communities. At the same time, efforts to build resilience may themselves increase competition over resources—and therefore the risk of conflict—unless designed and implemented in a conflict-sensitive manner.
Conflicts have been triggered, for example, when the CCCF’s climate adaptation projects are implemented near political or administrative borders. In one case, a CCCF-supported water pan became a source of conflict when traveling pastoralists were refused access by the local community, who were also struggling with insufficient water supply. The escalating conflict eventually displaced people from the area, cutting off access to the water pan entirely.
ClimBeR researchers learned about such conflicts when they, in collaboration with ADA, conducted focus group discussions with CCCF stakeholders in the Isiolo, Wajir, and Kitui counties. However, speaking to community members and representatives from CCCF planning committees also revealed how some CCCF procedures and protocols, such as its participatory proposal processes, already help reduce the risk of conflicts because new projects build on wide consensus. These insights confirmed that the CCCF plays an important role in preventing and resolving any climate-related conflicts that break out around its projects.
In addition, ClimBeR researchers conducted a survey among CCCF beneficiaries, which showed that the CCCF already contains a variety of promising practices for conflict sensitivity. Still, more opportunities exist to systematically mainstream such capacities and actively leverage the CCCF as an instrument for peace.
For example, ClimBeR researchers recommended systematically embedding peace and conflict actors at the levels where communities’ proposals are reviewed so that new projects are designed not only to prevent conflicts but also to promote peace. ClimBeR researchers also suggested that improving the coordination between local committees and governmental authorities, especially those responding to conflict, could help address conflicts at the landscape level, such as those between traveling pastoralists and local communities.
As a result of the joint research and ClimBeR’s recommendations, ADA is keen to make conflict reduction a more deliberate goal of the CCCF. The ongoing scaling of the CCCF—from 5 to 47 counties—represents an opportunity to foster both climate adaptation and security across Kenya. Expanding the CCCF to all counties is included in Kenya’s National Climate Change Action Plan III 2023-2027 as a key enabling condition for its successful implementation.
ClimBeR researchers first identified the CCCF as a potential mechanism for fostering climate security in Kenya at its common vision workshop in 2022. By mid-2024, they had developed the Conflict Sensitive Adaptation Governance tool, which they used to evaluate the conflict sensitivity of the CCCF, as agreed in a memorandum of understanding with ADA. ClimBeR presented the tool to ADA and invited feedback on potential opportunities for making the CCCF more sensitive to risks of conflict—for example, by increasing investments in collective action—before the joint assessment took place.
To ensure that the tool corresponds to the needs of other potential users, ClimBeR researchers shared the tool in several interactions with the Path to The Hague consultation process on environmental peacebuilding and at the Third International Conference on Environmental Peacebuilding in Hague. They also presented it at the 29th Conference of the Parties of the UN Convention on Climate Change.
Further collaboration with the ADA Consortium is planned for 2025 to find ways for the CCCF to integrate conflict sensitivity in landscapes and across communities while maintaining each community’s power to respond to their own climate adaptation needs. This work will be carried forward under CGIAR’s upcoming Climate Action Science Program.
“Something valuable from this collaboration is the sensitization that this mechanism has potential to resolve conflicts []. Now it is not going to just be said that if conflict comes there is a grievance mechanism. It will now be that if we are planning, let us also plan for conflict reduction.”
Joab JL Osumba, policy engagement, resource mobilization and agriculture lead at the ADA Consortium.
