As delegates from around the world meet this week to debate adaptation schemes and possible solutions to the Earth's rising temperatures, the nomadic pastoralists of Kenya's semi-arid north are suffering, they say.

People of the region, the epicenter of a cycle of killer drought and floods that have hit east Africa in recent years, are on the front line of a war not of their making, struggling for survival against climate change, they say.

"Governments meeting at the UN climate change conference only have to look to a few hundred miles north to see how climate change is having an immediate and devastating effect on people's lives," said British-based charity Oxfam.

For centuries, tribes like the Turkana, hardy livestock-dependent herders who inhabit the region's stark moonscape, have lived and adapted to natural disasters, persisting and often thriving despite the vagaries of Mother Nature.

But now, facing increasingly erratic weather patterns, their traditional culture may be on the verge of extinction due to the failure of far-away developed nations to curb greenhouse gas emissions blamed for global warming.

"Under threat is the way of life of pastoral communities," said Antonio Hill, a senior policy adviser with Oxfam, which along with other groups is sounding the alarm during the conference that ends this week.

"People such as the Turkana are on the front line of the injustice of man-made climate change," he said. "They are least responsible for climate change but are amongst the worst affected."

Droughts in the region have risen fourfold over the past 25 years, ravaging livestock and forcing 500,000 herders -- about one-third of the population -- to depend on aid handouts, according to a study by relief agency Christian Aid.

The report, "Life on the Edge of Climate Change: The Plight of Pastoralists in Northern Kenya," found that severe drought in the region was now occurring once every five years, twice as frequently as a similar 1997 report discovered.

It said the effects in the region are the first it has found were the first example it had found worldwide where an entire sub-group of specifically identifiable people are threatened with virtual extinction by global warming.

"Knowing what we know, if we don't respond, we're committing a very serious crime," said Andrew Pendleton, senior climate change analyst for Christian Aid. "It would be the climate change version of Rwanda."

The report, which focused on the Turkana in Kenya's Mandera district, about 800 kilometers (500 miles) north of Nairobi, says livestock loss in some areas had risen as high as 93 percent during the most recent drought.

"It is cruel irony that these people, who have done so little to contribute to climate change, could become the world's 'climate change canary,' as their traditional way of life is extinguished by global warming," Pendleton said.

"Their plight illustrates what will happen to countless million other poor people unless industrialised countries world start reversing emissions immediately," he said.

While top polluters like the United States and Australia -- which have refused to submit to mandatory emission cuts in the Kyoto Protocol -- and China, India and Brazil -- which as developing nations are exempt -- bicker over what to do, conditions in northern Kenya grow bleaker.

Rainy seasons have become shorter and less widespread and at the peak of the most recent drought earlier this year, UN agencies estimated that up to five million Kenyans were at risk, most of them in the north of the country.

Last month, the UN World Food Programme said it still needed 44 million dollars (35 million euros) of its 225-million-dollar drought emergency operation to assist three million people in northern Kenya.

As water becomes scarcer, political boundaries and encroaching farms have restricted the Turkana from finding grazing and water sources for their herds, according to the aid groups.

This had led to a surge in violent clashes between rival groups competing for the little water and pasture available as well as for surviving cattle, camels and goats, they say.

In the past five months alone, at least 150 people have been killed in increasingly deadly livestock raids in the vast area runs along the Kenya-Uganda-Ethiopia border, according to Kenyan authorities.

And these woes are compounded by chronic government underfunding of education, health services, roads and other infrastructure, the groups say.

"Unchecked climate change could deal a crippling blow to a way of life that has existed for centuries," Oxfam said, urging the Nairobi conference to boost funds to help the most vulnerable cope and cut greenhouse gas emissions.