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The Ewaso Nyiro — meaning “river of muddy water” in the Maa language — runs 1,716 km from Lake Olbosat in Kenya's Central Highlands through the country's arid north, sustaining 3.6 million people across Laikipia, Isiolo, Samburu, Marsabit, Wajir and beyond before reaching the Lorian Swamp and eventually the Indian Ocean. The river's basin covers roughly 210,000 km² — about 36% of Kenya's total land area.

This feature paper documents the environmental crisis now unfolding along the river. Cumulative water discharge fell from 964 million cubic metres in 1969 to 572 million cubic metres by 2010 — a 40% decline in four decades. Drought cycles that once occurred every 8–10 years now repeat every 3–5 years. In 2021, Iresaboru, a 40-year-old village of 300 households, was entirely displaced by flooding. Nearly 190,000 acres of grazing land burned in wildfires across Lorian Swamp and Basa. Meanwhile, Kenya's greenhouse gas emissions stand at 1.75 tonnes per person — just 0.19% of the global share — yet pastoralist communities here absorb impacts far out of proportion to what they contributed.

The paper presents evidence on six crisis categories — drought frequency, rainfall unpredictability, shrinking river flows, flooding and displacement, wildfires, and resource-based conflict — and proposes five immediate interventions, from catchment restoration and climate finance to indigenous knowledge frameworks and a recurring State of the River monitoring mechanism.