Impact of land use land cover change and climate variability on pastoral grazing resources in Kajiado county, Kenya

In the recent past, important land tenure changes have occurred in marginal land in Kenya occupied by pastoralists, characterized by sub-division and fragmentation of communal grazing into individual smaller parcels. Overgrazing of the grazing lands has led to further vegetation degradation in form of bush encroachment and thickening. These types of vegetation degradation have had an overall effect of loss of grass cover and hence loss of grazing capacity by livestock. The objective of this study was to analyze land use/land cover change and climate variability and their relationship and their effect on grazing resources. Gis and Remote sensing are effective tools for characterizing land cover and analyzing change in biomass. This study identifies the relationship between NDVI, rainfall and temperature. Supervised classification was carried out with change detection to evaluate the changes that have taken place in the last 30 years and different land cover classes were identified. NDVI values were calculated and temperature and rainfall surfaces were generated to understand their performance in the three decades and how they have affected pastoral resources. The overall results indicated that there has been a downward trend in vegetation condition over the last 30 years which has affected the livestock productivity of the area. There has been reduction of pastoral resources while the temperatures have increased with low records of rainfall. This has given rise to low vegetation index values which show that the remaining grassland have poor performance. This implies that well defined policies ought to be formulated to help secure pastoral livelihoods since a continuation of this trend could mean collapse of pastoralists as a means of livelihood.