Climate change 'genocide' threatens Kenyan herders: aid groups

People of the region, the epicenter of a cycle of killer drought and floods that have hit east Africa in recent years, are on the front line of a war not of their making, struggling for survival against climate change, they say.

"Governments meeting at the UN climate change conference only have to look to a few hundred miles north to see how climate change is having an immediate and devastating effect on people's lives," said British-based charity Oxfam.

For centuries, tribes like the Turkana, hardy livestock-dependent herders who inhabit the region's stark moonscape, have lived and adapted to natural disasters, persisting and often thriving despite the vagaries of Mother Nature.

But now, facing increasingly erratic weather patterns, their traditional culture may be on the verge of extinction due to the failure of far-away developed nations to curb greenhouse gas emissions blamed for global warming.