Shifting climate zones: Kenya arid regions expand 10pc in 40 years
Pastoralists graze livestock in an arid area in Morungole, Turkana County in Kenya. Increasing temperature and changes to temperature zones likely exacerbate the expansion of drylands in Kenya. PHOTO | KUIS TATO | AFP
Climate zones in Kenya are shifting toward hotter and drier conditions, a new study looking at how temperature and precipitation trends have changed over time and how the geographic distribution and arrangement of climate zones in Kenya shifted due to those trends has established.
“In the past 40 years arid climate regions in Kenya have expanded from 72 to 81 percent, a roughly 50,000-km2 shift from humid and semi-humid-to-semi-arid to arid regions. While tropical climate regions expanded from 91 to 93 percent with over 13,000km2 shifting from high-altitude and temperate regions to tropical ones,” say the research team that analysed Kenya’s geographic distribution and arrangement of climate zones between 1980 and 2020.
