I returned home to Kenya’s coast after months of winter in Germany, and the heat felt extreme. Temperatures rose past 35°C by midday under the blazing sun of Kilifi, a tourism destination on Kenya’s shores of the Western Indian Ocean. It is here that international visitors come for pristine beaches, marine excursions, and trips to nearby islands and creeks.
As a tourism researcher, I study how women earn a living through coastal small businesses in times of environmental change. My research work in Kilifi brought me into close contact with the everyday realities of climate change in Kenya’s coastal tourist towns: rising temperatures, rising ocean levels, drought and floods.
In Kilifi, local women’s groups cultivate mangrove seedlings in rows of small plastic bags along the ocean water’s edge. The seedlings are crucial in replanting and regenerating forests in dense mangrove areas.
However, while mangrove trees survive in coasts, estuaries and river mouths where saltwater from the sea mixes with freshwater from rivers, their seedlings generally rely on freshwater to grow before they are gradually acclimatised to the salinity and tidal conditions at the coast. And these seedlings were dying because freshwater was drying up.
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When mangrove forests die off or are cut back, this has a direct impact on women tour guides, souvenir item sellers, hoteliers and seafood suppliers, said one of the women I interviewed:
If mangroves are flourishing, we get plenty of prawns. But now that all this has been cut, those prawns run away, and they are not found. Crabs are also found here in the mangroves.
My research found that women tourism operators also experienced the changing climate as a deeply personal loss of identity, culture and community.
For example, women whose sense of self comes from preparing local cuisines saw their culinary traditions vanish when crab and prawn stocks dwindled or when cashew and coconut trees failed to bear fruit.
Read more: What Kenya’s government can do to protect, and benefit from, ocean resources
Community bonds were also lost when shared cooking practices weakened. This affected the tourism industry because cultural traditions support the growth of tourism. The human experience of travel is deepened when local people share heritage, meaning and traditions with visitors.
When climate change affects women’s sense of identity and culture, it affects their livelihoods and well-being too. These impacts ripple through the tourism industry, affecting the experiences and services that millions of visitors rely on in Africa’s tourism. Women are particularly affected; in Kenya they occupy the bulk of jobs in tour guiding and hospitality.
Traditional coastal cuisines decimated by climate change
As part of my research, I held workshops with women involved in cooking and food businesses. “Cooking is part of our heritage as coastal women,” one explained. Their coastal cuisine is rooted in specific plants and ingredients, learned through practice and shared across generations. Most importantly, it’s a part of how people know who they are and where they are from.
When baobabs dry out, or when any other coastal plant withers, longstanding recipes are forced to change. Food flavours disappear, and culinary knowledge becomes harder to pass on.
These changes affect gastro-tourism, a growing part of the local tourism economy, where visitors come for traditional dishes and the coastal culinary experience.
Read more: Coastal and island heritage offers a rich resource for the world
Seafood, important in tourist hotels, is increasingly affected by mangrove loss and rising ocean temperatures. These destroy fish nursery habitats and force fish to migrate to waters far out of the reach of artisanal fishers, women who supplied seafood to restaurants told me.
Homes and land are being swallowed by the sea
Another person I interviewed pointed out that land had disappeared under rising sea levels. “What used to be land is now water,” she said, recalling a land beacon that once marked the boundary of a piece of land. “That beacon is still there,” she said, “but now it stands in the ocean waters.”
Such loss of land can have profound effects – displacement, the loss of family burial sites, the need to adapt to new neighbours, and psychological distress.
The women also told me that small-scale beachfront traders were being displaced as the ocean water rose, affecting their livelihoods.
This is not only an economic loss but also a loss that unfolds gradually, erasing the meaning of place. When women are displaced from the coastline, it also means they have far less chance of being part of decision making in the ocean economy.
Economic and non-economic losses unfold together
People experience the cost of climate change when ecosystems erode and they lose the income they’d once been able to earn from working with natural resources. However, climate change also brings about a loss of heritage, knowledge, and sense of place. This carries deep consequences for identity and community.
The United Nations has a mechanism to help vulnerable countries cope with climate damage that can’t be prevented or adapted to, such as floods, storms and sea-level rise. This acknowledges culture, identity and sense of place as important non-economic dimensions of global warming.
But local voices are essential for defining what such loss means on the ground and how responses should unfold.
Read more: Review of nine African ‘blue economy’ projects shows what works and what doesn’t
One of the findings from my research was that the “ocean economy” idea focuses too narrowly on extracting economic value from the sea. It often overlooks the non-economic cultural practices and relationships that actually sustain tourism, fisheries and other small coastal businesses.
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What needs to happen next
My research shows that climate policy needs to account better for the human and cultural dimensions of climate change. When governments only focus on the economic losses caused by climate change, this contradicts the lived experiences of women working in coastal tourism in Kenya who rely on non-economic cultural practices and relationships that actually sustain tourism, fisheries and other small coastal businesses.
Coastal livelihoods give communities living near the sea more chance of being able to cope with climate change. Cultural practices are closely tied to caring for ecosystems. When policy overlooks culture, it weakens the very people whose everyday work helps sustain and protect these environments.
Planners of climate action and adaptation need to recognise non-economic losses alongside economic concerns. It also means using gender sensitive assessments within adaptation efforts, to avoid further excluding women who work in informal enterprises from the ocean economy.
Lucy Atieno, Postdoctoral Researcher, Leibniz Centre for Tropical Marine Research (ZMT)
