The Kenya National Environment Policy

THE KENYA NATIONAL ENVIRONMENT POLICY 

The Kenya Government through the Minister of Environment and Mineral Resources has embarked on reevaluating its policy on environment hence coming up with a National Environment Policy, 2012, a revised draft No.4 of April 2012.  In this draft, the government defines the environment in a broad way. Where it includes physical factors of the surroundings of human beings including land, water, atmosphere, sound, odor, state, the biological factors of animals and plants and the social factors of aesthetics and includes both the natural and the built environment. 

Kenya has a wide variety of ecosystems ranging from mountains, forests, and semi-arid areas, freshwater, wetlands, coastal and marine, offering myriad opportunities for human, social and economic development. These ecosystems are natural capital which provides important regulatory services like forests and mountains serving to regulate water flow, sustain biodiversity, cultural services that include aesthetics, recreational or spiritual values, and their uses, supporting services that include soil formation, nutrients cycling, and primary production. 

The survival and socio-economic wellbeing of Kenyans are ultimately twined with the environment. Most Kenyan citizens depend directly or indirectly on environmental goods and services. In addition, Kenya's environmental resources contribute directly and indirectly to the local and natural economy through revenue generation and wealth creation in such productive sectors and agriculture, fishing, livestock, water, energy, forestry, trade, and industry. 

The environment is an essential feature of Kenya's development policy. This is captured through the periodic development planning cycles since independence. This is traced to the Rio Earth Summit of 1992 that helped in raising understanding of the link between environment and development. From this Kenya initiated the Natural Environmental Actions Plan (NEAP) process. This was completed in 1994 that recommended the need for natural policy and law on the environment.  This culminated into a draft sessional paper No.6 of 1999 entitled "Environment and Development" The legislative process that gave forth the Environment Management and Coordination Act (EMCA), Act No.8 of 1999 as Kenya's first framework environmental law.  This has created a diffuse system of environmental laws and policies, some of whose provisions are not in harmony, making them ill-suited to aid the pursuit of sustainable development objectives as set out in the vision 2030. 

The promulgation of the Kenya Constitution, 2010 marked an important chapter in Kenya environmental policy development hailed as a green Constitution. It embodies elaborate provisions with considerable implications, for sustainable development. These include environmental principles and implications of Multilateral Environmental Agreements. (MEAs) to the right to clean and healthy environment enshrined in the Bill of Rights. It's chapter five that is embodied on a host of social and economic rights of an environment such as the right to water, food, and shelter among others.113 

The National Environment Policy aims to provide a holistic framework to guide the management of the environment and natural resources in Kenya. It creates a linkage between the environment and poverty reduction as integrated, in all government and poverty reduction as integrated, in all government processes and institutions in order to facilitate and realize sustainable development at all levels.  

THE STATE OF THE ENVIRONMENT IN KENYA 

The main human activities contributing to environmental degradation in Keya include unsustainable agricultural land use, poor soil, and water management practices deforestation, overgrazing and pollution. This means that the country's natural resources of land, fresh and marine waters, forests and biodiversity threatens the livelihood of many people. These undermine the sink function of the environment which operates through such processes as nutrient recycling, decomposition and natural purification and filtering of air and waters. 

In Kenya, the environmental degradation is partly responsible for rising costs of water, treatment, food imports, and medical treatment. The loss of biological resources translates into a loss of economic potential and options for commercial development in the future that comes with considerable and ever-growing environmental issues and challenges. Harmonization of sectorial policy instruments with EMCA and constitutions, implementations. Sometimes the state resources are misplaced and dis-coordinated services in the implementation of land policy. The rehabilitation of degraded areas needs to be emphasized and followed up so as to the loss of biodiversity. This can only be reached through concessions and incentives that have to start from the local communities, counties, and parishes. 

The people should own the project and policy amendments, where they can own it hence creating a communitarian and public awareness that guards against: waste management, pollution, energy, climate change, disaster management, conservation of shared natural resources, invasive and alien species, public participation, environmental education and awareness, data and information, poverty, weak enforcement and then fragmentations which disintegrates the soil. 

The goal of the National Environment Policy, 2012 is for better quality for the current generation, without compromising the quality of the future generation through unsustainable management of the environment and natural resources.

© Don. J.B Nyamunga'20

AN AFRICAN UNDERSTANDING OF A COMMON HOME

In Africa the common home can only be understood in terms of community, relationship, and belonging. In order to be realistic and concrete, we need to factor in the African concept of family that will help us have a sense of belonging and contribution towards building this “common home.” As we have mentioned in the contextualized perspective of Common home, the same thread runs through from Pope Francis’ understanding of family. Pope Francis proposes the paradigm shift and personal insights and compressive approach to ecology and environment as a “common home”. It is also good that we slot in the African understanding of family amidst ecological and environment crisis that has befallen humanity. African continent is at the receiving end of this crisis, Africa has to wake up. The lying giant needs to wake up to roar again to claim its space at the international platform. The environmental crisis that is affecting the globe has to be viewed from the localized altitude so as to see the bigger panoramic picture of this ecological crisis. African families are crawling on their knees due to colonial hangovers, political poor leadership, terrorism, poverty, poor governance and so forth. The question is how can the African perspective help us understands Pope Francis’s encyclical letter laudato Si’ in the context of African families? The challenge that is first before us is that in Africa the “common home” has a definition that is concretized by place, region, nationality, culture, ideology and traditional believes. In this section our focus will be more on what unites Africans than what divides them. Fact is if the enemy attacks and finds the household in disorder, he will run over the homestead but if he gets the homestead guarded and its members awakened, they will be able to repel off the enemy. Truth is African families are wounded, and disengaged from the global scene. Others in the global scene have turned African continent into a dumping site for western waste, cheap market. Right now the African continent is almost being auctioned by the invasion of china. How can African families, Christians, churches come together to face these invading enemies who are raping Africa off her dignity and morals due to technological advancements? Oborji in his discourse builds clearly on this when delves into the problems which he basis it on cultural and political undertones. He argues that add religious sentiments to them, and there you will witness out blown phenomenon which are simply meant to serve the above goals.This according to Oborji categories it as some of the exaggerated ethnicity if these factors are not well addressed, they will continue to frustrate the on-going work of evangelization and the church formation on the continent, because this is the real cancer that is eating into ecclesial and civil communities. In Africa when we talk about family, it’s goes beyond the western understanding of family. There are many modern changes in the definition of family that the traditional understanding seems discarded. In this part of the thesis, we want to focus on African meaning of extended family that incorporates all as a clan. Most Africans put a lot of emphasis on the brotherhood where there is an amplified sense of family. According to Oborji he stresses that if we have a sense of development in Africa, the language should be that of deepening the relationships among Africans of different ethnic groups living in the same community and nation and between them a people of other religions in the same society of relationship and pluralistic society. The African families have to get their places in the “common home” that Pope Francis is building on. We need to think internationally but also act locally within this common home. African families can get their roles and responsibilities in the common home, but not as spectators or passive fellows, but activity persons in moving the ecological agenda and finding solutions of these ecological crises. These big families in Africa ought to forge the way forwards, not only to wait to be given handouts but being protagonists of transformation. African families need to come up with local bred solutions to their challenges. Ecology seems not be something on the priority list because of what Oborji calls laziness. African families are becoming a burden to themselves, unless they get back to the root of Ubuntu (African ethics), Ujamaa (oneness) and Umanna,(extended family system) Undungu (brotherhood), concepts that real define who Africans are in on a global stage. Oborji’s concept of family is that of which each person is born within an extended family. One has to have a sense of belong. He argues that no one falls from a tree and finds himself automatically in some realities, he quotes Cardinal Arinze on what an extended family is and what it is composed of: African are at home both in the nuclear family and in the extended family. The sense of family belongingness is rather strong. Many African languages have the same word for brothers, sisters, cousins, nephews and nieces, the same word for grandfathers and uncles, and sometimes even the same name for fathers and masters. The sense of family belongingness pervades all these scales on the genealogical ladder. We all live in the community and this has to help us to build a spirit of working together towards a united front with collaborative global outlook. All this is towards protecting and safeguarding the “common Home” which Pope Francis proposes in the encyclical letter. With the African family model of family as Church, we should be in good position of understanding Laudato Si’ not like any other document but as a call to conversion and reawakening from our long slumber to care of this common home. As Oborji reminds us, that we are sons and daughters of the soil entrusted to carry the torch mantle that has to lead us towards environmental care and protection. This re-awaking has to get us to re-educating ourselves and our people. It’s through re-educating ourselves in new ideals that we can rightly redefine and rebrand our theology in understanding an African concept of family in her resilience in the contemporary changing cosmos. This pedagogy should be based on self-awareness and search for new paradigm shifts of identity amidst the plurality of ideas and religions in this big “common home” Oborji thus states: The stress should be on togetherness, communion, respect for traditions and unquestionable acceptance of what the ancestors have practiced, sectioned and established as the way things are done for maintaining the relationships. In this context environmental and ecological relatedness and co-existence. Nobody should exploit the other or engage in communal strife to endanger the common world amidst the tribal conflicts and civil wars, for they are alien to the practice in traditional African communities and cultures.