Highlights

• Studies assessing households' vulnerability to floods significantly ignore the element of underestimation.

• The concept of “Perceived Vulnerability” enhances the value of assessing flood risks.

• Gender differences of household heads exist in Perceived Vulnerability to urban floods.

• Age among male household heads determined underestimation of floods although non-linear.

Implications for Participatory Forest Management and Payments to Communities for Ecosystem Services

• Communities living near Kenya’s forests place a monetary value on conservation.
• Mountain forests are the source of rivers that provide water for agriculture and other “ecosystem services” such as flood control and water purification.
• It is possible for downstream communities that benefit from these ecosystem services to pay the upstream communities to conserve the forests.

Pervasive threats of climate change and land degradation have compounded the inherent low farm productivity problem in sub‐Saharan Africa. Though sustainable agricultural intensification practices have been shown to improve the resilience of farm production in the face of these emerging threats, they suffer low adoption rates typical of any technology adoption in these regions. Recent evidence points to an emergence of large traders in smallholder grain markets of countries in sub‐Saharan Africa.