Most people picture Kenya’s climate crisis as dry land, cracked soil, and dead cattle. That picture is accurate in many parts of the country. But at Lake Naivasha, the crisis looks completely different.
Rental houses in Kihoto village now sit chest deep in water. Boats paddle between rooftops.
A police station, a church, and an electrical substation have all gone under.
NASA satellite images comparing 2010 and 2026 show the lake’s surface area growing so much that entire neighborhoods that were once dry land are now open water.
Dickson Ngome leased farmland near the lake back in 2008. At the time, the shoreline sat more than two kilometers from his plot, and people worried the lake might dry up completely.
That worry turned out to be backwards. One night in late 2025, Ngome and his family woke up to find their home and farm inside the lake. His wife, Rose Wafula, later described it simply. The water came from nowhere.
This is Kenya’s other climate story. Not shrinking lakes. Rising ones.
The Numbers Behind the Story
The scale of this shift is well documented. A 2024 study in the Journal of Hydrology found that lake surface areas across East Africa expanded by more than 71,800 square kilometers between 2011 and 2023. That is a continental scale change, not a local anomaly.
Lake Naivasha’s growth over that period is visible from space. NASA imagery comparing 2010 and 2026 shows the lake spreading well beyond its earlier boundaries, swallowing farmland and settlements along its edges.
The human toll is just as stark. A 2021 study commissioned by Kenya’s Ministry of Environment and the United Nations Development Program found that more than 75,000 households across the Rift Valley had already been displaced by rising lake waters.
That figure predates several more recent flooding events, so the true number today is almost certainly higher.
Lake Naivasha: Flowers, Homes, and a Sh81 Billion Question
Lake Naivasha sits at the center of Kenya’s flower export industry, a sector worth over a billion dollars a year and responsible for around 40 percent of the roses sold in the European Union. That industry is now directly exposed to the lake’s rise.
Environmental planning lecturer Simon Onywere, who has studied the lake for years, has described the water as engulfing three quarters of some flower farms.
Kenyan media have reported that as much as 81 billion shillings in flower industry value now sits within reach of the rising waters.
Farms that once sat safely back from the shoreline have watched greenhouses disappear beneath the surface one by one.
The Kihoto settlement has taken the heaviest human toll. Families who built homes on land near the lake decades ago, when the water was actually receding, now find themselves living in flooded streets or displaced entirely.
Landlords describe losses running into millions of shillings, with no clear timeline for when, or if, the water will recede.
Lake Turkana: A Real Scientific Disagreement
Lake Turkana, the world’s largest permanent desert lake, has risen by as much as 10 meters over the past 15 years. What makes Turkana different from Naivasha is that scientists do not agree on why.
One school of thought points to rainfall. Kevin Obiero, a researcher at the Kenya Marine and Fisheries Research Institute, describes heavier rains upstream in the Omo River catchment in Ethiopia, combined with increased rainfall in northern Kenya, as a major driver of the lake’s expansion.
A second school of thought points underground.
Researcher John Malala, also at the Kenya Marine and Fisheries Research Institute, argues that slow tectonic movement beneath the Rift Valley may be reshaping lake basins across the region, altering underground drainage and trapping water that would otherwise drain away.
Malala considers rainfall a weaker explanation, given the high evaporation rates in the area.
A third factor sits alongside both theories. Siltation from the Omo River, worsened by erosion and land use change in both Kenya and Ethiopia, has reduced the lake’s storage capacity over time, which can raise water levels even without more total rainfall.
This debate is not just academic. Ethiopia’s Gibe III Dam on the Omo River was expected to sharply reduce inflow into Lake Turkana when it began filling in 2015.
Instead, the lake kept rising, defying that prediction entirely. Understanding why matters for how both countries plan future water use along the river.
Lake Victoria: Floods and an Old Enemy Returns
Around Kisumu, Lake Victoria’s rise has brought its own set of problems.
Heavy rainfall in the lake’s catchment has pushed water into homes, roads, and business premises along the shoreline, displacing residents and disrupting beach based tourism and hotel operations.
Rising water has also fed the return of water hyacinth, an invasive floating plant that clogs bays and waterways.
Fishermen around Kisumu report that when the weed settles over a bay, boats cannot pass and nets become tangled, cutting into daily catches.
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The weed also lowers oxygen levels in the water, pushing away the fish that fishing communities depend on.
Past outbreaks have prompted large scale, internationally funded clearance efforts, but the weed has returned more than once as conditions along the lake continue to shift.
The Human Cost, Up Close
For Rose Wafula and Dickson Ngome, the numbers behind this crisis are secondary to the immediate reality.
Their home and farm are gone, swallowed overnight by water that was never supposed to reach them.
The family has been camping on the first floor of an abandoned school nearby, with no clear sense of when, or whether, they will be able to return.
Their story is not unique. Across Kihoto, families describe similar nights. A quiet evening, then a morning where the lake has simply moved in.
Many of these households built their homes on land that was informally settled decades ago, when the lake was believed to be permanently receding.
That belief has now been proven wrong twice over, first by drought fears in past decades, and now by a rise that some residents describe as unprecedented in living memory.
Why Scientists Still Disagree
It would be simpler if there were one clean explanation for Kenya’s rising lakes. There is not.
Richard Muita, now acting assistant director at the Kenya Meteorological Department and a coauthor of a major 2021 study on the phenomenon, has noted that researchers have proposed drivers ranging from geological shifts to broader planetary factors.
His own department’s analysis links the rise mainly to shifting rainfall patterns. Other researchers place more weight on tectonic activity, land use change, and sediment buildup reducing the lakes’ natural capacity.
What most researchers agree on is this. Rainfall in the highland catchments that feed these lakes has increased in recent years, and human activity, including deforestation, wetland loss, and unplanned construction near shorelines, has made the runoff from that rainfall worse.
Where scientists diverge is on how much weight to give geological explanations layered on top of that climate signal, particularly at Lake Turkana.
This is an honest unresolved debate, not a case of some experts being right and others wrong. More monitoring data, collected over more years, will be needed to settle it.
What Is Being Done, and What Is Not
A 2020 scoping mission led by Kenya’s Ministry of Environment and Forestry, in partnership with the United Nations Development Program, examined the rising lakes crisis across the Rift Valley in detail.
A related UNEP report on Lake Turkana called for stronger international cooperation between Kenya and Ethiopia, along with concrete adaptation steps including reforestation, agroforestry, and avoiding new construction in areas at risk of flooding.
In practice, progress has been uneven. Riparian land protections exist on paper in Kenya, but enforcement has historically been weak, and informal settlements like Kihoto grew for decades on land that was never legally available for housing in the first place.
Flood risk mapping, recommended by researchers as an urgent priority, remains incomplete in many of the areas now underwater.
Cooperation with Ethiopia on the Omo River, which feeds Lake Turkana, remains a work in progress.
Better shared data between the two countries on rainfall, dam operations, and river flow would help clarify how much of Turkana’s rise is driven by conditions upstream, but that kind of sustained cross border monitoring is still developing.
What to Watch For Next
Three things will determine how this story develops. First, whether East Africa’s recent above average rainfall trend continues or reverses, since that single factor could either keep pushing lake levels up or start reversing the trend.
Second, whether new tectonic and hydrological research at Lake Turkana produces a clearer answer on how much of its rise is geological versus climate driven.
Third, whether Kenya’s government follows through on stronger land use enforcement near lakeshores, which would determine whether the next flood displaces as many families as the last one did.
For now, the lakes keep rising, and families like Dickson Ngome’s are left waiting to see whether the water that came from nowhere will ever fully retreat.
