“If you walk around Nairobi right now, you'll see men in reflective attire digging up the drainage systems, trying to clear the silt from them or trying to clear garbage from them… But if you haven't moved people from indecent housing… That's a bigger problem. You're dealing with poverty… You can't unclog a system that was fitting for the 80s and expected to solve a problem in 2026.”
The Climate Question · Climate & Energy · October 2026
The BBC's Nairobi correspondent describes Kenya bracing for a super El Niño, with communities along rivers being moved and drains being cleared. His point is that the real exposure comes from millions of people living in informal settlements along rivers, which clearing drains can't fix.
Transcript
…hear of people drowning in their vehicles as they're trying to get home because roads flooded again and the vehicles were swept away. So that's the typical heavy rainfall, high flooding days here in Nairobi. It's intense and no one knows if where they're going is safe or the road to home is safe.
And the last El Niño? year was only a couple of years ago, right? And many people around the world are experiencing more weather extremes as a result of climate change. So what sort of state are communities going into given another potential extreme?
…is saying people should move from, but that's a very small minority of the population. Lots of people are psychologically preparing for something horrible to happen over the next two months, but also people are stocking up. As I mentioned, in most places, a food shortage follows. So everyone's psychologically preparing to stockpile as soon as the rains start falling. But there are preparations. If you walk around Nairobi right now, you'll see men in reflective attire digging up the drainage systems, trying to clear the silt from them or trying to clear garbage from them because that's also a big problem here, littering. But you can do that. And still, if that infrastructure that is in place is not enough to handle the waters that are coming, or if you've not solved the root problem, which is set. Settlements are along rivers, and if you haven't moved people from decent, from indecent housing, because what you see along these informal settlements is people…
And it strikes me that if people are living in these flood-prone areas and are repeatedly impacted by these floods, the inequalities that you see already are going to continue to widen. You also mentioned farmers before. What sort of impact are we expecting them to experience? And are they…
Yes, yes. So a lot of the farming in Kenya, as you'd expect, isn't happening in the city center of Nairobi. It's happening outside Nairobi. And on the news days ago, it was reports of the county government of Kitui, which is one of the eastern counties in Kenya, was stockpiling enough vaccines to…
Thomas, what about Somalia, the nation next door? It's suffered from instability and it's been a precarious situation for decades. How are they preparing for this El
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