The Mount Kenya region offers a great deal of beautiful scenery and attracts tourists from all over the world. What these tourists may not see, however, is the crucial function of Mount Kenya as a water tower for its footzones and adjoining lowland areas. This function is becoming ever more crucial, as populations in these areas are growing at a rapid pace and new land use systems require far more water. These developments have set the stage for increasing conflicts over water resources; to make things worse, water is becoming ever scarcer, especially in the dry areas of the Laikipia Plateau and the Samburu Plains to the north and west of the mountain. This article summarizes the complex ecological and socioeconomic dynamics prevailing in the highland-Blowland system of Mount Kenya—the Ewaso Ng'iro North Basin—and presents a multilevel strategy for mitigating the emerging conflicts over water resources.

Mountains play a crucial role in the supply of freshwater to humankind, in highland and lowland areas alike. Increasing demand urgently requires careful management of mountain water resources in order to mitigate growing water crises and conflicts. Monitored river flow was analyzed for 3 selected catchments (Timau, Burguret, and Likii) on the slopes of Mount Kenya from 1960 to 2004. In the 10 years from 1995 to 2004, the extreme low flow (Q95) of the rivers was found to have been reduced to 10%, 23%, and 71%, respectively, of the values for the decade from 1961 to 1970. Water awareness creation campaigns in 1997 and 2004 revealed that the number of abstraction points had more than doubled, and that there was a two- to eightfold increase in the amount of river water abstracted. The present article documents increasing water abstraction and the difficulties in establishing limits for low flows such as the Q80 value (flow available on 80% of the days per year). The article also presents the role of ...

This study spatially assesses, quantifies, and visualizes the agricultural expansion and land use intensification in the northwestern foothills of Mount Kenya over the last 30 years: processes triggered by population growth, and, more recently, by large-scale commercial investments. We made use of Google Earth Engine to access the USGS Landsat data archive and to generate cloud-free seasonal composites. These enabled us to accurately differentiate between rainfed and irrigated cropland, which was important for assessing agricultural intensification. We developed three land cover and land use classifications using the random forest classifier, and assessed land cover and land use change by creating cross-tabulation matrices for the intervals from 1987 to 2002, 2002 to 2016, and 1987 to 2016 and calculating the net change. We then applied a landscape mosaic approach to each classification to identify landscape types categorized by land use intensity. We discuss the impacts of landscape changes on natural habitats, biodiversity, and water. Kappa accuracies for the three classifications lay between 78.3% and 82.1%. Our study confirms that rainfed and irrigated cropland expanded at the expense of natural habitats, including protected areas. Agricultural expansion took place mainly in the 1980s and 1990s, whereas agricultural intensification largely happened after 2000. Since then, not only large-scale producers, but also many smallholders have begun to practice irrigated farming. The spatial pattern of agricultural expansion and intensification in the study area is defined by water availability. Agricultural intensification and the expansion of horticulture agribusinesses increase pressure on water. Furthermore, the observed changes have heightened pressure on pasture and idle land due to the decrease in natural and agropastoral landscapes. Conflicts between pastoralists, smallholder farmers, large-scale ranches, and wildlife might further increase, particularly during the dry seasons and in years of extreme drought.

In recent decades, the Mount Kenya highland–lowland system, which includes the Ewaso Ngiro North Basin, has experienced complex ecological and socioeconomic dynamics. These are reflected in changing land use systems and practices as well as in a rapidly growing human population, especially in the footzones and adjacent lowlands. These changes have exerted unremitting pressure on water resources, especially because the demand for water by different user groups has continued to grow, against the backdrop of expensive alternative sources (rainwater and groundwater harvesting) and increasingly dwindling river water resources. As each of the user groups moves to make substantial claims to available river water, competition for the resource becomes even sharper, thus setting the stage for conflicts related to scarcity that intensify during the dry season, at times resulting in fatal physical conflicts among different user groups in the basin, especially between upstream and downstream users. Different ...

In response to the development and climate crisis of the Anthropocene, world leaders at the 2015 UN Sustainable Development Summit in New York have reconfirmed the urgency of a sustainability transformation. This paper shows how a strong conceptualisation of sustainability can guide scientists in contributing to this transformation. The Eastern and Southern Africa Partnership Programme (1999–2015) offers experiences in framing and implementing research as a transdisciplinary future-forming process. Its procedural, reflexive programme design proved adequate to support the democratisation of knowledge generation. This fostered evidence-based contextualised knowledge and corresponding institutions, and strengthened the future-forming capacity of all partners involved.