Every season, thousands of people in Kenya's Rift Valley wait for a natural event to bring their precious heritage back to life. It is not about the harvest, or a migration, nothing to do with births or anything else. It is about a huge seasonal body of water: Lake Kamnarok.

For several decades now, the large lake located in the Kerio Valley, in Baringo County and north of the great Maasai region, is no longer perennial but seasonal.

Today even, due to climate change, it is losing its biodiversity and is in danger of disappearing, and with it also thousands of animals that used to feed and water there and are an attraction of the national reserve. Now, since the end of the great rains, where the lake once stood, populated by crocodiles and hippos, there is a huge empty space, uncultivated and semi-arid, where livestock graze with difficulty, with the cows in the area becoming increasingly skeletal. The beds of the four rivers that used to feed it, Ketipborok, Cheplogoi, Oiwo and Lelabei, are also often very dry.

Many pastoralists have lost many cattle in recent years, but the Kamnarok is not only important to them as a source of water supply. It used to be a favourite place for bird lovers, a paradise for birdwatchers. But most of the species have abandoned these places, as have those who depended, at least for four months of the year, on fishing for tilapia, freshwater fish, who have gone elsewhere or been forced to change their occupation and source of livelihood.

In 1983, when Lake Kamnarok Game Reserve was created, it was presented by local institutions as the second largest ecosystem in Africa, with the largest number of animals after Lake Chad.

At that time, the large lake (whose name derives from the word kalenjin Narok, used to refer to a species of aquatic plant widespread in the lake, which often hid it from view) was home to more than 10 thousand white crocodiles, 400 elephants, 13 species of other mammals and a wide variety of bird species.

More than 40 years later, the number of animals has been drastically reduced due not only to the drying up of the lake, but torrential rains that have caused flooding, as well as episodes of heat waves and prolonged droughts. The great drought of 2023 saw the lake, which is subsiding over time, suffer a death toll of fish due to rising temperatures. A terrifying scenario: hundreds of fish, crocodile and cattle carcasses floated belly up on the surface that had become muddy.

Nothing new or strange in our times. Lake Kamnarok thus adds to the statistics of water bodies around the world affected by water loss. A survey of some 2,000 lakes published a year and a half ago shows that over the past three decades, water loss in large lakes around the world has been more widespread than previously thought. According to the study, climate warming and human water consumption have caused at least half of the decline in natural lakes.

The result is a climate-like threat to human settlement near the large area left empty by the lake. Against this risk, which can lead to conflict between humans and animals, especially elephants, but also the increasingly rare white crocodiles that now live in swamps and quicksand and can pose a danger and consequently be hunted down and killed. Many environmental organisations have planted seeds of acacia and other plants, in an attempt to at least create a protective forest, not least because it is clear from the remains of charcoal and cut tree stumps, just a few metres from the lake, that thousands of plants have been cut down to produce charcoal.

Who knows if it is really too late to see Lake Kamnarok again and to do something so that it does not remain just an African memory.