Kenya’s great lakes are flooding, in a devastating and long-ignored environmental disaster that is displacing hundreds of thousands of people. One of the first scientists to realize that something was wrong with the lakes was a geologist named Simon Onywere. Between 2010 and 2013 he had been studying Lake Baringo, Kenya’s fourth-largest lake by volume. The bones of residents of the area around the lake weaken uncommonly fast, and Onywere was investigating whether this may be linked to high fluoride levels in the water. Then, in early 2013, while he was meeting with residents of Marigat, a town near the lake, one old man stood up, saying, “We don’t care about the fluoride. What we want to know is how the water has entered our schools.”
Curious to know what the man was talking about, Onywere visited the local Salabani primary school. There, he found the lake lapping through the grounds of the school. He looked at the location of the lake and the location of the school, and wondered how the lake had moved 2km without it becoming news.
Onywere rushed back to Nairobi, where he and his colleagues at several Kenyan universities studied recent satellite images of the lake. The images showed that the lake had, in the past year, flooded the area around it. Then Onywere searched for images of some of the lakes nearby: Lakes Bogoria, Naivasha and Nakuru. All of these had flooded. As he extended his search, he saw that Lake Victoria, Africa’s largest lake, had flooded, too. So had Lake Turkana, the largest desert lake in the world. By September 2013, it was clear to Onywere and his colleagues how extreme the damage was. In Baringo, schools had been flooded and people had been displaced. Lake Nakuru, which was previously enclosed by a national park, now extended beyond it. It had increased in size by 50%. Throughout the 2010s, the lakes rose slowly, and tens of thousands of people were forced to move from their homes. Then, at the start of 2020, after a particularly vicious period of rain in Kenya’s highlands, the lakes’ expansion accelerated.
Onywere found it extraordinary how little attention was being paid to the problem. Once the pandemic took hold in March 2020, the government seemed to take even less interest. Onywere went to see the Benjamin Cheboi (the governor of Baringo County), but claims the governor showed little interest. Cheboi now disputes this, saying that he and Onywere never met.
Over the past decade, as these lakes have risen, they have become a source of alarm rather than pride. Hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced from their homes. And this seems to be just the start of the disaster . . .
A recent UN report about Lake Turkana declared that flooding, which was until recently considered a rare event, “is likely to become more regular” unless adaptation measures are put in place.
Many people have theories about what is happening to the lakes. One explanation is that the rise of the lakes is cyclical. But the more popular theory focuses on the lakes’ location: the rising Kenyan lakes are almost all situated along the eastern branch of the Great Rift valley. Many observers find this too striking to be a coincidence: they feel that the rising lakes must be connected to tectonic activity. The Great Rift valley is splitting apart at a rate of roughly 2mm a year, and will at some point in the next tens of millions of years eventually separate east Africa from the rest of the continent. As the Rift valley separates, fresh groundwater has been brought to these lakes from a previously unknown underground aquifer.
For Onywere, however, the fact that Lake Victoria was also rising, despite not being on either branch of the Rift valley, disproved any tectonic theories. Onywere believes what is happening is a result of the climate crisis. There had been more rain in the Kenyan and Ethiopian highlands, and the volume of the rivers feeding these lakes had increased. Since 2010, Kenya has received more rainfall than usual – the yearly average has been significantly up on 2010’s 650mm almost every year since. In 2019, Kenya received the third most rainfall it had ever recorded.
While accepting that tectonic theories do not explain Lake Victoria’s rise, Lawrence M Kiage, a professor of geography at Georgia State University, isn’t completely sure that anthropogenic climate breakdown is the cause. What was needed, said Kiage, is a molecular investigation of the water, to determine where it was coming from. Finally, the Kenyan government announced the formation of a multi-agency team of geologists and hydrologists that would investigate the rise of the lakes. Onywere was appointed head of the team to Lake Turkana.
Local elders of the El Molo people had noticed the lake increasing in size as well, and through their fishing expeditions, they knew that it was becoming deeper, too. They told me about a road that had last been used 10 years ago, before it went underwater, and predicted that the road I had taken to come to Luyeni would also soon be underwater. They knew, too, that this is not solely a Turkana phenomenon; they had heard that the same thing was happening in other Rift valley lakes, as far away as Kisumu.
The Ministry of Environment recently announced that once the multi-agency report on the lakes was published, the Kenyan government would be appealing to the international community for assistance. In the short-term, 3bn shillings ($25.2M) was needed. Longer term, an extra 5bn ($42M) was needed. Informed observers have expressed scepticism about the government’s interest in helping the victims of the rising lakes. Many believe that was is really motivating Kenya’s notoriously corrupt political class is the prospect of international donations. After all, these lakes had not risen in secret. They had been rising steadily for 10 years. Only when the UN Environment Program published its own report about Lake Turkana, and the prospect of foreign aid became more likely, did Kenya’s politicians really become interested.
When the government finally released the report, Onywere's original hypothesis was borne out. While allowing for the possibility that tectonic activity was partly responsible, the report stated that greater levels of rainfall, caused by the climate crisis, was the main cause. Other forms of human interference with the environment – such as deforestation – had also led to landslides and increased water runoff, which had in turn contributed to the rising water levels. The report noted that nearly 400,000 Kenyans had been displaced, and that they required “urgent humanitarian assistance”.The impact was particularly severe around Lakes Victoria, Naivasha and Baringo, which support densely populated areas.
And that's where the long story stands for now. What is now most disturbing to to Onywere are the tall trees that stand inside Baringo lake, now brown and leafless. Inside Dunga Hill Camp, a popular picnic site next to Lake Victoria, pools of water surrounded jacaranda trees that were planted in the colonial era. When alive and in bloom, these trees are crowded with heavy cones of purple blossom, each flower a violet bell. Now, though, they were drab and brown, home to seagulls and herons who roost in their dying branches. Lake Nakuru national park's once-green acacia trees are being slowly suffocated by the water, which has pushed beyond the bounds of the park and into Nakuru city.
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