Growing up in a pastoral community in northern Kenya gave me a certain clarity about the climate crisis, a clarity born not from abstract understandings but from visceral experience. In 2000, a drought killed much of my father’s cattle herd and destroyed our neighbors’ livelihoods. I helped distribute parcels of food to starving people knowing that the supplies might keep them alive only until the next inevitable dry spell. In northern Kenya, droughts used to occur once every ten years. But in the last few decades, their frequency and severity have increased thanks to climate change. Droughts now occur once every two to three years, and they will likely become even more frequent, threatening nomadic pastoralism as a viable way of life.

It was devastating to see herds built over many years wiped out in one season. My neighbors had nurtured and cared for these animals. They were vital for my community’s livelihood and prosperity—and its future. Like many people in my community, I don’t have a conventional pension plan of stocks and shares; I have some goats and camels. When I have the resources, I add a camel to the flock.

It always breaks my heart to see the bodies of dead camels during a drought. Cows are normally the first to go—they are not very resilient to the changing climate. Sheep follow. Goats are much hardier, which is why I keep some in my flock back home. When they start dying, you know it’s a serious drought. But camels are so tough and so capable of enduring through droughts that their dead bodies are signs of a real disaster, of a terrible tragedy unfolding in the surrounding communities.

The over five million pastoralists who live in northern Kenya face an increasingly desperate situation. The way of life that has supported them for centuries—herding animals in the rangelands—could soon evaporate thanks to climate change. Consecutive droughts in recent years have devastated livestock populations, forcing hundreds of thousands of herders to give up their traditional lifestyles and move, as unskilled workers, to sprawling towns. They are not alone. Climate change has imperiled or disrupted the lives of millions of people in developing countries around the world.

Herders in Kenya, farmers in Bangladesh, and fishermen in the Mekong River basin are not responsible for this crisis; the rich countries are. Not only do those nations emit more carbon into the atmosphere per capita than poor countries do, but also their very wealth and stature rest on a century of emissions and environmental degradation. And yet it is people in the developing world who disproportionately suffer. For them, climate change is not a theoretical matter but the difference between having dinner or going hungry, having a home, however ramshackle, or not having a roof over their heads at all.

In Western capitals, meanwhile, well-meaning officials are beginning to share the sense of urgency, holding increasingly frequent summits and speaking of a “climate emergency.” But none of this has translated into meaningful change: greenhouse gas emissions, temperatures, and sea levels continue to rise. Moreover, wealthy countries have struggled to reckon with the fundamental injustice of climate change, the fact that those least responsible for its cause now bear the brunt of its consequences.

The most straightforward way that developed nations can address that inequity is through financial transfers and technological support to developing nations. As part of negotiations under the aegis of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), wealthy countries have agreed in principle to provide $100 billion a year by 2020 to assist their poor counterparts—hardly enough to help developing nations adjust to the effects of climate change, receive compensation for loss and damage as a result of extreme weather, and transition to low-carbon economies. Even that funding has not fully materialized, and its lack of implementation suggests a continuing imbalance between the rich and the rest. Rich countries are far more interested in forcing poor countries to cut their own emissions than they are in helping protect them from the ravages of climate change. The economies of developing countries must indeed cut emissions and transition to low-carbon sources of energy. But while that process plays out, many in the developing world will remain vulnerable to a crisis they did not make…

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