Climate solutions rooted in tradition: Communities share stories on how they are adapting

Across the semi-arid landscapes of northern Tanzania, Indigenous communities have long relied on traditional knowledge to live in balance with their environment. For generations, this knowledge has guided how land, water, and grazing resources and income are managed, building resilience in some of the country's most challenging landscapes. Today, however, climate change is intensifying prolonged droughts, increasing competition over natural resources, and shrinking access to land, placing increasing pressure on these time-tested systems. In response, communities are drawing on both traditional knowledge and innovative approaches to adapt to a changing climate. Here are some stories on how community members are adapting: 

In Yaeda Chini, the dry season used to end when it was supposed to. Now it stretches — weeks longer than the elders remember, the grazing thinning before the rains finally break. For Datoga women, whose strength has always been measured by what they can hold together for their families, that shift has meant finding new ground to stand on.
Before joining the Women's Rights and Leadership Forum and her VICOBA group, Mary managed the way many women in her community did—carefully stretching limited resources and hoping the rains would come. There was little room to recover from a poor season and no financial safety net to plan for the future. For generations, Datoga women have faced deeply rooted patriarchal norms that have limited their access to finance, land, and decision-making within their households and communities. As climate change brings more frequent droughts and unpredictable seasons, these inequalities leave women disproportionately exposed, making it even harder to adapt and build resilience.
However since the introduction of community savings group, VICOBA supported by the GEF-Funded Inclusive Conservation Initiative (ICI) in 2024, she began saving small amounts alongside other women in her group, and borrowing against those savings to start something of her own: a small poultry business at the local market. The Forum gave her the confidence and standing to run it, to negotiate prices, to speak up when a deal wasn't fair, to see herself as someone building an income rather than simply getting by.
The difference shows most clearly when the dry season runs long. Her poultry doesn't collapse the way cattle do when the grazing fails. Her VICOBA savings mean a bad month doesn't undo a good year. Between the two, her family eats and stands through droughts that would once have emptied everything she had.
"I am not just adapting for myself," she says. "I am able to use the money I gain from selling poultary to still send my children to school or pay for medical bills even if we have a long dry season.”

Across Maasai land, the pull of the city is strong. Climate change has made grazing harder to predict, and for many young men, security work in Arusha or Dar es Salaam looks like the safer bet — steady pay, no more gambling on a season that might not come. Slowly, a way of life built around cattle and land has been thinning at the edges.
Elias almost went that way too.
To the Maasai, cattle are not just wealth. They carry marriages, cultural identity and a person's place among their own. Watching the land struggle to hold enough pasture felt like watching that whole identity come loose.
With support from ICI, his village secured CCROs and put a land use plan in place — pasture zoned, grazing seasons agreed, rest periods respected. As grazing coordinator, it's now his job to carry that plan forward: coordinating plans that not only serve his future - but that of his community. 
The results show in the herds. Less cattle death and healthier rangelands. 
"This is more than land management to me," he says. "It's the reason I get to keep living the way my grandfather lived — instead of leaving it behind for a job in the city that isn't really mine."
His story is part of a wider shift: when young Maasai men have secure rights to their land, staying stops being a compromise and starts being a future worth choosing.

For generations, the Hadzabe people have depended on the forests and savannahs of northern Tanzania for their food, water, medicine, and way of life. Their deep knowledge of the landscape has enabled them to live sustainably, adapting to seasonal changes and caring for the ecosystems that sustain them. But as climate change brings longer droughts and increasing pressure on land from competing uses, this way of life has become increasingly vulnerable.
"When the rains don't come, everything changes," says Musa. "The fruits ripen later, water becomes harder to find, and the animals move further away. Our knowledge helps us, but we need our land to be able to use it."
For Musa, secure communal land rights have supported climate resilience. Through the protection of their ancestral lands, the community can continue to access vital forests, water sources, and wildlife corridors without fear of losing them to outside interests. This security allows families to plan for the future, safeguard traditional migration routes, and continue practicing sustainable hunting and gathering that has sustained the Hadzabe for generations.
As climate pressures intensify, secure land rights also strengthen the environment itself. Protected forests store carbon, conserve biodiversity, and safeguard the natural resources that communities depend upon during periods of drought. By securing land tenure, Indigenous communities are not only protecting their culture, they are protecting landscapes that are critical for climate resilience.
"Our land is our future," Musa says. "When our land is secure, we can protect it, and it continues to protect us."

Photos: Hope Kiwelu