Climate Risk Diagnostics Across Kenya’s Protected Areas to Prioritize Nature-Based Restoration Pathways in Arid and Semi-Arid Landscapes

Nature-based Solutions offers pragmatic pathways to restorations of land, water, and biodiversity, especially in the protected areas and open land systems that have been degraded due to multiple factors ranging from population pressure, urbanization, or climate change. This is especially of great importance to regions that have faced degradation to desertification and aridity conditions like Arid and Semi-Arid landscapes (ASALs) and protected areas that host multiple biodiversity ecosystems. Here, we conduct a risk assessment of the impact of mean climate shift and extremes across Kenya’s protected areas, like game reserves, National parks, community conservancies, and ranches. Using a range of observational products sourced from the Kenya Meteorological Department (ENACTs) witha timescale ranging from 1980 to 2020 and at a high spatial grid resolution of 4km, we conduct a study to evaluate the long-term trends and estimate the impact of extreme events relevant to ecosystem functionalities. Our findings demonstrate that protected regions across the landscape experience peak rainfall during the March to May season, resulting in the restoration of ecological functionality after long dry periods of January and February.  Conversely, the mean temperature exhibits heterogeneity in spatial distribution, with lows being experienced during June to July and highs being observed during the month of January/February. Rainfall trends across the protected landscape reveal equally spatial heterogeneity at ~ - 19 to + 28 mm yr^-1 whereas warming trends exhibit widespread positive tendencies in both maximum and minimum temperature (up to ~0.09 °C yr⁻¹ for Tmax and ~0.15 °C yr⁻¹ for Tmin). Considering the impact of extreme events in the wildlife protected regions, most parks show an increase in the days of consecutive dryness (CDD) of up to ~81 days in national reserves and pronounced thermal contrasts across the forest reserves due to the cooler refugia. The highest warming and dry-spell burden was noted across the protected regions in northeastern areas, which are mainly characterized by ASAL climate. The observed impact of climate across the protected areas calls for diagnostics into NbS prioritization,s including water provision, restoration,n and drought buffering in high-risk ASAL conservancies; protection/restoration of forested ecosystems and conservancies, and integration of extreme-event monitoring and early-warning into conservancy governance to sustain land–water–biodiversity restoration under accelerating warming.