The Kenya Subnational Children Climate Risk Index-Disaster Risk Model (CCRI-DRM)
Providing communities with information on climate risks
Despite contributing less than 0.1% of global greenhouse gas globally, Kenya is one of the countries hardest hit by climate change impacts. This becomes visible mostly through the frequent and more severe droughts and floodings, which not only threaten the development gains but also slow the growth and development trajectory. Although droughts and floods are certainly no new hazards to Kenya, climate change causes them to occur more often and to be more severe. In other words, climate change has significantly increased the risk of hazards such as droughts and floods among others.
On the ground, the cascading impacts of these hazards are felt most by children whose fundamental rights to education, water, good health, and quality nutrition are adversely impacted. A significant number of children face malnutrition and other health risks during droughts due to water scarcity and lack of sufficient and nutritious food. Floods cause children to be involuntarily displaced when their homes are washed away and their fundamental rights to education are violated when floods cause schools to close. Furthermore, increased distance to water sources puts women and girls, who are often responsible for water collection, at an increased risk of gender-based violence.
What is CCRI-DRM
The CCRI-DRM is a dashboard for assessing risk to Kenyan children, both in terms of exposure and vulnerability. The dashboard is a powerful tool for identifying risks associated with climate and environmental shocks and stresses.
What can the model be used for?
The interactive dashboard shows you how children face risks in different counties. This information helps efforts toward child-centred climate change adaptation, planning and resilience building. This allows users to prioritize programming to be tailored to underlying vulnerabilities (such as health, WASH and nutrition) and to the exposures (e.g. drought, floods) of children in Kenyan counties. Moreover, data input into the dashboard can be updated and used to monitor the impacts of targeted climate change adaptation and resilience-building programs. The dashboard is designed to be used alongside other national and subnational and regional strategic development planning tools, aiding to mobilize resources and generate climate financing, inform monitoring and evaluation tools and hopefully influence climate change and disaster risk policies and strategies. With a focus on children.
The Model Development Journey
UNICEF supported the development of the dashboard for Kenya in partnership with the Climate Change Directorate of the Kenyan government. For example, UNICEF co-hosted a series of meetings with Kenya’s Climate Change Directorate; identified and engaged national stakeholders from diverse sectors; a national workshop held in Naivasha, Kenya, where stakeholders agreed on the specific components, indicators, and datasets to be used in the model development; continuous consultation with national stakeholders and sector experts on fine data acquisition; a national validation workshop held in Nairobi where stakeholders critiqued the model and gave review comments to help improve the risk indices for each county; and improvement from feedback to the stakeholders and the directorate.
