It is only 8:00am, but Nyambura Karogo is already feeling the scorch. In the usually wet month of October, the sun is blazing over Kirima village, in the Aberdares region of central Kenya.

She sets off to tend to her young maize shoots, examines a withered one and furrows her brow.

"Oh I hope the rains come soon," she says. The 53-year-old mother of six has lived from what earth produces all her life. But now she does not understand the lands anymore, neither the changing rainfall patterns.

One thing she understands, though, is that her young maize shoots may wither due to lack of rainfall. "When I was young the short rainy season in Kirima village was known to start in early October, she says, "but it has shifted to unpredictable trends, sometimes starting in late November and sometimes in early September."

If her wish is granted, the rains will not pour down on the once densely forested Muruai escarpment, but on the barren slopes exposed by two decades of deforestation.

One thing she understands, though, is that her young maize shoots may wither due to lack of rainfall. "When I was young the short rainy season in Kirima village was known to start in early October, she says, "but it has shifted to unpredictable trends, sometimes starting in late November and sometimes in early September."

If her wish is granted, the rains will not pour down on the once densely forested Muruai escarpment, but on the barren slopes exposed by two decades of deforestation.

This is why the District Forest Officer, George Njenga, is in a combative mood. The reason he is upset is because he may have come a moment too late to try and make the villagers understand the importance of Mt. Satima forest to their livelihood - and to neighboring Lake Olborossat.

To the Southern side of the escarpment, 43 square kilometers of land have been hived off, and to the North, farmers have cultivated another 15 square kilometers.

And until Njenga pitched camp in Kirima, there were reports that villagers were being incited to encroach on the Satima forest reserve area. According to Njenga, about 100,000 ha of land were not secured after the colonial government left. "Most of the land around the escarpment has not been Gazetted" says the forester, "and that is why it was becoming hard to contain the encroachments which I could count up to 40." As the encroachments increased, recalls Njenga, and more trees fell to the axe man to supply building materials and wood fuel for the adobe village, so were the waters of Lake Olborossat.

"They used to argue that the Lake was fed by underground water sources," says Njenga, "but with the drying of springs that used to pour into the lake from the escarpment they have realized this was not the case."

And due to the slow administrative procedures surrounding the land in Kirima village, says Njenga, the authorities sort of watched as the once bulging lake became endangered because no one could really claim to own Lake Olborossat, which has a buffer zone extending 30 square kilometers to the south.

It was after networking with local environmental groups and cooperative local authorities that Njenga did convince a section of the village that the biting food shortage, and the natural calamities they were witnessing, were due to the clearing of trees on the Muruai escarpment - and a phenomenon called 'climate change'.

39-year-old Kirima resident, John Maina Gitonga, does recall an incident in 2004 when a mudslide swept over the village.

The cause, Gitonga later learnt, was heavy rainfall, which caused traction on the already loose soils due to lack of trees. "We heard strange noise, as came out of our huts we saw a blanket of mud coming down on our village," he says "we woke up everyone and moved to a safe point as we watched the mudslide cover the huts."

But even with these occasional downpours, Gitonga could not understand why the breezy settlement was hit by serious food shortages, or why Lake Olbollosat - a cherished tourist destination and a central community resource - was losing its waters.

So when he heard the area District Commissioner, Khamasi Shivogo, would join the District Forest Officer, the National Environment Management Authority (NEMA) and a team from the Green belt Movement (GBM) during the 2007 World Environment Day to initiate a tree planting campaign, he mobilized his fellow villagers, and formed the Lake Olbollosat Environmental Conservation Network (LOECN).

Leading the team from GBM - an environmental conservation organization chaired by 2004 Nobel Peace Prize winner, Prof. Wangari Maathai, and whose offices sit in Kenya's capital city, Nairobi - Lilian Muchungi, the project officer, dropped the bombshell.

She told Kirima residents that unless they stopped encroaching on the remaining forest reserve and started planting trees, they could expect more natural disasters in the future.

Her team was ready to show them how. "We had brought with us tree seedlings from our nurseries," she says, "that day, Kirima villagers, including school children joined us in planting more than 3,000 trees." But it was the presence of a network, the LOECN that offered the much needed inspiration. "Through the network we have spearheaded many tree planting exercises from that day," says Gitonga, who now sits as chairman.

The father of three hopes LOECN will at least mobilize the community to plant enough trees to save the endangered lake and its ecosystem.

This includes the Waterbuck, the Impala, the Thompson Gazelle and the Hyrax, which he says, fled the ecosystem once the forest was cleared. So too will be the Kurumbu Falls, which once dripped down the escarpment ten years ago. "We want Mt. Satima forest and Lake Olbollosat restored to earlier glory," says James Kosgey, 44, a resident farmer and father of five, "we are exposed to danger due to deforesting the escarpment."

By economic standards, NEMA projects Kirima village will suffer occasional environmental whiplashes before residents hope to restore the lost biodiversity.

According to Naftali Ndugire, the principal programmes coordinator at NEMA, poverty levels will rise as agricultural production scales down in the village.

"There will likely be social disintegration, spread of epidemics and more natural calamities unless there is tree cover on the escarpment again," he said.