The former freedom fighter spoke on Thursday at the UN conference on global warming, invited by the green group WWF to speak as a "climate witness".

Macharia told AFP he was convinced climate change was already on the march.

He blamed it for vicious droughts that had turned famously fertile soil around his village of Murungaru, 100 kilometers (60 miles) west of the capital, into a cake-like dust.

"We cannot find fodder to feed our livestock, we cannot grow crops to feed our families or sell for money, even the seasonal riverbeds have run dry," he said. Macharia is slowly being forced to sell off his dwindling number of cattle, goats and sheep to feed his family. He said he does not know how he will cope once his precious animals have gone.

Scientists caution against relying upon anecdotal evidence, as climate change is a process that can evolve a far longer span than a human lifetime. Its effects can also be confused with other factors, such as human settlement in areas that are vulnerable to extreme weather.

But they also say climate change will strike Africa worse and more swiftly than any other continent because of its widespread water stress and its slender resources for adapting to the challenge.

According to a UN report issued this month, some 480 million people in Africa may face water security problems by 2025. It also estimated that more than 70 million Africans could be displaced by floods due to rising sea levels by 2080, up from one million in 1990. Rajabu Mohammed Soselo, who lives on the shores of the Indian Ocean in Kunduchi, a Tanzanian fishing village 18 kilometers (11 miles) north of the capital Dar es Salaam, said rising sea levels and changes in ocean temperatures are already crippling coastal communities.

"It is now a struggle to bring home a catch every day to feed your family because the water has grown warmer and fish have traveled away from shore to deeper, cooler waters," the 67-year-old fisherman told AFP.

"I have also seen the homes of seven of my friends and my local mosque wash away during storms and floods," added Soselo, who said the shoreline has receded at least 200 meters (yards) over the course of his lifetime.

Nelly Damaris Chepkoskei, a 50-year-old farmer with five children in a village called Kipchepor in western Kenya, said local tea plantations were suffering increasingly lower yields as a result of persistent droughts and were laying off workers.

Her own farm used to produce up to 38 bags of maize, now "it produces at most 12," she said, adding that each bag was 90 kilos (198 pounds) of corn. The decline had started in 1995, she said.

In that same year, mosquitoes, which she had never recalled seeing in her highland region, started to appear. She lost a son and four friends to malaria.

Delegates from 189 countries attending the 12th session of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Nairobi, due to wrap Friday, have been grappling with ways to help African countries adapt to the effects of climate change. But Macharia said he could not wait for attention and funding from the international community and called on fellow Africans to start taking matters into their own hands.

Still imbued with fighting spirit, the old warrior embarked on a one-man tree-planting campaign to redress bad deforestation in his village, and said he already notices a difference.

"My land is much cooler than my neighbor's (land) which has very few trees," said Macharia. "So far, I am fighting this war on my own but I need a lot of help."

earlier related report
Climate change worsening biodiversity crisis: UN report
by Gerry Smith
Nairobi (AFP) Nov 16 - Climate change is having an alarming impact on whales, dolphins, turtles and birds and other rare species that migrate over long distances, the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) said on Thursday.

Rising temperatures are already having a dramatic effect on many of these species' food, habitat, health and reproduction, UNEP said in a report coinciding with UN talks on climate change in the Kenyan capital.

Achim Steiner, executive director of UNEP, said evidence was mounting that when a migratory species dwindled or an exotic species showed up in places where previously it was absent, global warming was to blame.

"The consequences of habitat change -- changes in temperature, food -- will, and is already beginning to, fundamentally affect the ability of species to survive," Steiner said.

"If people in one part of the world don't have a species there, the cause for its disappearance may well be at the other end of the world."

The species at risk include the North Atlantic right whale, whose main food supply, plankton, is declining because of a shift in ocean currents, according to the document, compiled by UNEP's Convention on Migratory Species (CMS) with help from Britain's Department of the Environment.

The range of white-beaked dolphins is reducing because it follows its prey and cannot adapt to warmer waters.

"Global warming may engender algal blooms and contribute to epizootics," or outbreaks of disease among animals, UNEP warned.

"Mass die-offs of marine mammals have increased, and where the cause has been viral, environmental factors have contributed to the outbreaks or reduced the ability of the animals to fend off the illnesses."

Tumorous growths in green turtles have become more common since the 1980s, a phenomenon linked to warmer water, which allows diseases and parasites to thrive, it said.

High temperatures on nesting beaches can also affect the sex ratio among certain turtle species. Higher temperatures, in the range of 25-32 C (77-89 F), lead to a greater number of female hatchlings.

An imbalance of one male to two females or one to three will have no ill effect, but if the proportions move towards one to four, populations could decline.

"Some nesting beaches are seeing temperatures rise above 34 C (93 F), which is often lethal," said the report, Migratory Species and Climate Change: Impacts of a Changing Environment on Wild Animals.

Among birds, lower water tables and more frequent droughts will reduce habitat for the Baikal teal and foraging grounds for the aquatic warbler.

Rising sea levels, coastal erosion and more powerful waves will threaten the lesser-white fronted goose, a migratory species that makes several stopovers on its long migration.

"Since migratory species rely on a number of different habitats, once you affect one you can effect the whole migration of the animal," said Paola Deda, coordinator of CMS's wildlife monitoring initiative.

She said her unit was documenting major changes in the length, timing and location of migration routes and had found that, in extreme cases, species had abandoned migration altogether.

Increasingly, species that had never been spotted in areas except as exotic vagrants are taking up residence or migrating there.

Examples include southern fish such as the red mullet, anchovy and sardine, which are now being found in the North Sea, and the rosy-breasted trumpeter, one of many birds once normally confined to arid North Africa and the Middle East but now increasingly seen in southern Spain.

Warmer waters also favour the common dolphin, whose range is increasing.

"Part of the challenge of understanding biodiversity is that its complexity in terms of interdependence is so little understood by us as humans," said Steiner. "We may often think 'What does it matter if we lose a species?' And only years later do we realize that the displacement of one species may have a series of effects on other species."

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