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