Why a loss and damage fund is crucial for LREB

The week has been interesting, with the 12th Lake Region Economic Bloc (LREB) summit in Busia and stakeholders from Rift Valley, Nyanza and Western, under the theme: “Food security in the face of climate change”.

The timely summit focused on partnerships, communities and resilience. Without food security, everything locally-led climate action delays. Food security directly affects poverty eradication, good health and nutrition, access to quality education, and all SDGs.

In 2024 alone, internet sources show flooding in April and May killed 267 people, injured 188, with 75 reported missing. Up to 281,800 were displaced, and school opening postponed because facilities were marooned or destroyed. Transport was disrupted, and businesses collapsed.

A number of livestock either died or were sold at throw-away prices. Crops were swept. There was disease outbreak, including cholera, and more than 62 health facilities damaged. The LREB region was not spared these misfortunes.

What, then, after disaster? Most disaster victims are the poorest, whose adaptation limits get stretched beyond limit, hence loss and damage. The climate crisis will tarry.

We must prioritise adaptation. As many speakers put it at the summit, the LREB needs serious and modern agriculture backed by renewable energy.

After loss and damage, building back better post-disaster is best. The devolved governments must ensure limited massive losses, including that of disrupted ecosystems. This calls for disaster assessments beyond the earlier mentioned immediate economic costs, to long-term impacts on livelihoods and mental health.

The LREB has a huge role as the country’s food basket. The Western region, for instance, does sugarcane farming. When affected by erratic rain patterns and prolonged dry spell, like in 2022 when the Kenya Meteorological Department indicated a 20 per cent decline in crop yields, homesteads are affected beyond the obvious financial implications captured by the assessments metrics.

Rift Valley, the breadbasket, experiences unpredictable rain patterns, occasioning wrong timing in planting, in the end negatively affecting maize and wheat production. For those near landslides-prone areas, loss of arable land, displacement, and infrastructure damage is not all. There is also the cumulative impacts on human lives and biodiversity.  

Counties need to consider assessments that capture the intangible losses. They must capture losses in cultural heritage, biodiversity and social cohesion. Communities, even in the remotest areas, must be involved.

Kudos to Kisumu County, which has established community early warning systems for floods. Since this is not the silver bullet, it should come with comprehensive loss and damage tracking that captures tangible and intangible losses.

Kakamega County’s partnership with NGOs to restore degraded forests shows how collaboration and localised interventions can improve resilience.

Here, again, database that tracks the benefits of forest restoration in reducing losses is important. Nakuru County’s Climate Change Action Plan is great in data collection on drought impacts. These efforts should include intangible losses.

In Fiji, a Loss and Damage Reporting System combines indigenous knowledge with satellite data, enabling accuracy in response, to the household level. LREB counties can emulate such and build more capacity for innovative data collection methods.

The same counties can then boldly advocate maintenance of a national loss and damage fund that captures their unique vulnerabilities, something akin to the Equalisation Fund.

The full extent of loss and damage must be reported for adequate response. Devolved governments have the duty to ensure no loss — tangible or intangible — goes unnoticed and uncompensated.

The writer advocates climate justice.