At dawn in the town of Mai Mahiu, Kenya, all is quiet. No goat bells ring, no voices call across farm fields, there is no rustle of maize leaves in the morning wind. Instead, the air smells of churned mud and uprooted vegetation, a reminder of the April 2024 floods that tore through this valley.
More than 50 people died in the floods, thousands more were displaced – and an agricultural landscape a generation in the making was washed away in a single night.
Eighteen months later, the pain and uncertainty have not receded.
Forty minutes away in Naivasha, Grace, a small-scale farmer, mother of three and lifelong resident, stands on what remains of her farmland.
Where vegetables once grew, stagnant brown pools shimmer as the returning rains pour down. The foundations of her house lie broken, like a shattered clay pot. She wraps a torn shawl around her shoulders and looks to the sky as if for an answer.
"The flood took our goats, our seeds, even our soil," she said, exhausted. "We are starting from nothing again."
She is not alone in this. Across the Naivasha basin, families returned to plots that are no longer viable. Their wells are contaminated. Their cattle have died. Their savings were spent trying to survive. And now, as the rains return, the nightmare threatens to repeat itself.
'Seasons are breaking down'
It is here that Dr Kamau, a climate scientist based in Naivasha, spends his days tracking shifting weather patterns.
His office is cluttered with satellite printouts and rainfall charts, and his boots still caked in mud. When he explains the changes he's seeing, he barely looks at the papers – he knows the numbers by heart.
"We are witnessing climate whiplash," he says. "Drought one year, floods the next. The seasons that once defined East African life are breaking down. Communities can't adapt fast enough."
For farmers like Grace, adaptation requires more than patience – it takes money, government support and time, and none are in ready supply.
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Climate refugees
Whilst Kenya is drowning, across the border Somalia is cracking under the pressure of drought.
In Dadaab, dusty winds whip across a refugee settlement that has grown into a city in its own right. Thousands of Somali families have arrived here, fleeing not conflict but the effects of the drought.
Among them is 53-year-old Fadumo, a mother of eight from central Somalia who once owned 20 goats and a small sorghum plot.
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But year after year, the rains didn't come. Crops failed. Wells dried up. When her children were surviving on a single cup of tea a day, Grace did the only thing she could – she left.
"I walked for days to find water," she says, sitting outside the temporary shelter that is now her home. "We hoped the rain would come back. But it never did."
Her story is echoed across the Horn of Africa. Somalia has experienced its longest and most intense drought in 40 years. Humanitarian agencies also report that millions go hungry, and hundreds of thousands are displaced.
'Paying the price'
In Kenya, Dr Kamau shakes his head when asked whether these crises can be considered natural disasters.
"Floods and droughts have always existed," he says. "But the scale, frequency and erratic swings we're seeing now are climate-driven. And the people paying the price are the ones who did almost nothing to cause this problem."
East Africa accounts for less than 3 percent of global emissions, but its communities are losing livelihoods, homes and sometimes their lives.
As world leaders prepare to gather in Nairobi from 8-12 December for the seventh United Nations Environment Assembly, many in the region are asking the same question: what does climate justice look like when those who so the least to cause it suffer the most?
