After months in Germany’s winter, I returned to Kenya’s coast and found the heat overwhelming.
By midday in Kilifi, a tourism destination along Kenya’s Western Indian Ocean, temperatures exceeded 35°C under the intense sun.
International visitors are drawn here for pristine beaches, marine excursions, and trips to nearby islands and creeks.
As a tourism researcher, I study how women sustain livelihoods through coastal small businesses amid environmental changes.
My work in Kilifi brought me face-to-face with climate change realities in Kenyan coastal tourist towns: rising temperatures, ocean levels, droughts, and floods.
In Kilifi, local women’s groups nurture mangrove seedlings in rows of small plastic bags along the ocean’s edge. These seedlings are vital for replanting and regenerating forests in dense mangrove areas.
While mangrove trees thrive in coasts, estuaries, and river mouths where saltwater mixes with freshwater, their seedlings generally depend on freshwater before gradually adapting to coastal salinity and tidal conditions.
These seedlings were perishing due to diminishing freshwater supplies.
When mangrove forests decline or are cleared, women tour guides, souvenir vendors, hoteliers, and seafood suppliers are directly impacted, as one interviewee explained:
“If mangroves are flourishing, we get plenty of prawns. But now that all this has been cut, those prawns run away, and they are not found. Crabs are also found here in the mangroves.”
My research revealed that women tourism operators experienced climate change as a profound personal loss of identity, culture, and community.
For instance, women who defined themselves through preparing local cuisines saw their culinary traditions disappear when crab and prawn stocks dwindled or when cashew and coconut trees failed to bear fruit.
Community bonds weakened when shared cooking practices diminished.
This affected tourism growth, as cultural traditions support the industry.
Travel is enriched when local people share heritage, meaning, and traditions with visitors.
When climate change impacts women’s sense of identity and culture, it affects their livelihoods and well-being too.
These consequences ripple through tourism, impacting experiences and services for millions of visitors in Africa.
Women bear particular vulnerability; in Kenya, they hold most tour guiding and hospitality positions.
As part of my research, I facilitated workshops with women involved in cooking and food businesses.
“Cooking is part of our heritage as coastal women,” one explained.
Their coastal cuisine is rooted in specific plants and ingredients, acquired through practice and shared across generations. Most importantly, it’s integral to how people understand who they are and where they come from.
When baobabs dry out or other coastal plants wither, traditional recipes must change. Food flavors disappear, and culinary knowledge becomes harder to transmit.
These changes impact gastro-tourism, a growing segment of the local economy where visitors seek traditional dishes and coastal culinary experiences.
Seafood, vital in tourist hotels, is increasingly affected by mangrove loss and rising ocean temperatures.
These destroy fish nursery habitats and force fish to migrate to waters beyond the reach of artisanal fishers, women who supplied seafood to restaurants reported.
Another interviewee noted that land had vanished beneath rising sea levels.
“What used to be land is now water,” she recalled, referring to a land beacon that once marked property boundaries. “That beacon is still there,” she said, “but now it stands in the ocean waters.”
Such land loss carries profound effectsdisplacement, family burial site losses, adaptation to new neighbors, and psychological distress.
Women also reported that small-scale beachfront traders were being displaced as ocean waters rose, jeopardizing their livelihoods.
This represents not only economic loss but also a gradual erosion of place meaning. When women are displaced from coastlines, they lose opportunities to participate in ocean economy decision-making.
People experience climate change costs when ecosystems degrade and they lose income previously earned from working with natural resources.
However, climate change also brings heritage, knowledge, and sense of place loss. This carries deep consequences for identity and community.
The United Nations established assistance to help vulnerable countries cope with unavoidable climate damage like floods, storms, and sea-level rise.
This acknowledges culture, identity, and sense of place as important non-economic dimensions of global warming.
But local voices are essential for defining what such loss means on the ground and shaping responses.
One research finding was that the “ocean economy” concept focuses too narrowly on extracting economic value from the sea.
It often overlooks non-economic cultural practices and relationships that actually sustain tourism, fisheries, and other small coastal businesses.
My research shows climate policy needs better accounting for human and cultural dimensions of climate change.
When governments only focus on economic losses from climate change, this contradicts the lived experiences of Kenyan women in coastal tourism who rely on non-economic cultural practices and relationships that sustain tourism, fisheries, and other small businesses.
Coastal livelihoods give sea-adjacent communities greater capacity to cope with climate change. Cultural practices are closely tied to ecosystem care.
When policy overlooks culture, it weakens the very people whose daily work helps sustain and protect these environments.
Climate action and adaptation planners need to recognize non-economic losses alongside economic concerns.
This also means using gender-sensitive assessments within adaptation efforts to avoid further excluding women working in informal enterprises from the ocean economy.