Kenya Showcases Climate-Security Model at Africa Climate Summit
Kenya has positioned itself at the forefront of linking climate change to national security, unveiling an innovative model that embeds climate resilience at the grassroots level during the Second African Climate Summit (ACS-2) taking place in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
Dr. Raymond Omollo, the Principal Secretary in the State Department for Internal Security, spoke on the sidelines of the Africa Climate Summit where he highlighted the Kenya's National Climate Change Security Resilience Programme (NCCSRP) as a groundbreaking program that combines environmental protection with governance and peacebuilding.
“Climate change is no longer a distant environmental concern; it has evolved into the defining security challenge of our time, threatening livelihoods, fueling conflicts over scarce resources, destabilizing economies, and undermining peace within and across our borders,” Dr. Omollo told delegates.
Launched under the leadership of President William Ruto, the NCCSRP has placed Kenya’s 4,000 Chiefs and National Government Administrative Officers at the heart of climate response.
Through the programme’s flagship initiative, Chiefs Climate Action Day, administrators mobilize their communities on the first Friday of every month to plant trees, restore landscapes, and promote environmental stewardship.
Since its inception less than a year ago, the programme has recorded remarkable progress: over 114 million trees have been planted thereby, contributing to Kenya’s National Tree Growing Restoration Campaign, which targets 15 billion trees by 2032.
In this program, more than 2 million citizens have been mobilised nationwide for the tree planting exercises with 6.4 million seedlings distributed, achieving a 60% survival rate as the community is charged with taking care of the planted trees, including those within their respective homesteads. Dr. Omollo indicated that these achievements had been made possible without external funding, underscoring the power of community-driven climate action.
“This is living proof that community-driven action works, with the right investment, it can be scaled not only across Kenya but throughout the IGAD region and the African continent,” Dr. Omollo said.
In addition to tree planting, the NCCSRP faciliates the resolution of climate-induced conflicts among the communities. Chiefs and administrators are required to arbitrate conflicts and will use community-wisdom and intelligence to support early warning systems.
Dr. Omollo outlined the programme’s guiding philosophy, built on three pillars: climate action must be locally owned yet nationally coordinated; resilience is strongest when built from the bottom up, from villages, locations, and the entire communities; chiefs, with their convening power and trusted position, are invaluable ‘force multipliers’ for peace and sustainable development.
Speaking on regional partnerships and innovation, Dr. Omollo stated that the country’s collaboration with IGAD and the IGAD Climate Prediction and Applications Centre (ICPAC) remained central to building capacity for local officers. This had been achieved through the introduction of a specialised Climate, Peace, and Security Curriculum and a Digital Decision Support Framework, a mobile platform that allows Chiefs to report and monitor climate actions in real time.
Dr. Omollo stressed that financing grassroots climate-security solutions had the potential of delivering ‘triple dividends’ of peace, resilience, and green growth. The Principal Secretary concluded with a call to scale up investment in community-led climate leadership, ‘the battle against climate change will not be won in boardrooms or policy forums alone. It will be won in our villages, locations, farms, rangelands, and forests, where ordinary citizens, guided by visionary leadership, transform resilience into reality. Together, let us make climate security a governance imperative, the foundation of a peaceful, safe, and prosperous Africa.’