Legislative frameworks can help facilitate and promote shared prosperity between governments, the private sector, and frontline communities for an energy transition that is centred on human rights.  However, Manson Gwanyanya, the researcher and representative for South and Anglophone Africa at the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre, told the African Climate Conversations podcast that implementing these existing frameworks is key to delivering a shared prosperity for the communities whose land and resources are crucial for the energy transition in Africa.”. Demand for critical min ..read more

Sensors on aeroplanes measure wind speed, humidity, and temperature, which is crucial for weather forecasting. As climate-related extreme events increase in frequency and intensity, effective weather-related infrastructure is critical not just for the agriculture sector but also development sectors such as agriculture, industries, and communities, which require timely, accurate data to adapt to the changing climate and mitigate future losses. On today's episode, Dr. Abubakr Salih Babiker, a Technical Coordinator for Meteorological Infrastructure for Africa at the World Meteorological Organisat ..read more

Our children are the next generation. We, as humans, pass on our legacy to them, whether good or bad.  The environment underpins humans’ survival today and tomorrow. As the world warms, it’s important to remember the vital role the environment's natural resources, such as forests, play in balancing human activities such as the burning of coal and other fossil fuels and reducing the amount of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere. Hence, teaching our children about the environment and the need to protect it at an early age is critical. Environmental education helps children understan ..read more

This week, I was visiting a town in Makueni County, located in the southeastern part of Kenya. About an hour's drive from Makueni’s capital town Wote, I met a 70-year-old lady who, after a severe three-year drought hit the village, learned how to weave beaded baskets. She is relying on WhatsApp, her family, and Facebook to make sales. Have a listen to our conversation ..read more

Humanly speaking, forests, minerals, oceans, water bodies, and other natural resources are seen as infinite by the human eye. Infinite in the sense that there are more resources to be mined or prospected for, more land to be utilized, a vast ocean and waterbodies that can handle enormous levels of pollution, vast underground water resources that can never be drained, and billions of fish to be caught. This attitude that the earth has an unlimited capacity and the insatiable human nature to get as much as we can out of the earth for ourselves regardless of the harm we are causing the ecosystem ..read more

Mangroves are versatile and flexible forests that can cope with enormous disturbances. Dr. Judith Okello, a senior research scientist and mangrove ecologist at the Kenya Marine and Fisheries Research Institute, says that when sedimentation occurs, the mangroves can form a new cable rooting system and migrate when there is space on land. However, due to human influence, global temperatures continue to rise, causing frequent and sporadic weather-related events. When such events occur, they lead to sudden and frequent sedimentation, and the mangroves can get fatigued, resulting in massive dieback ..read more

Today we meet a Kenyan community saving the coral reefs along the Kenyan coast. Coral reefs along the Lamu-Kiunga area in Lamu County, a small archipelago north of Mombasa in Kenya, have degraded over the years. Pate Island, the largest island in the Lamu Archipelago, lies between the towns of Lamu and Kiunga, which depend on fishing. However, fishery productivity depends on healthy corals. How did the coral degradation impact these communities’ livelihoods? What degraded these corals? What are these communities doing about it?  ..read more

Women in Olailamutia, a town in Kenya's Narok County, have had problems with diarrhoea, stomachaches, and skin rashes for many years. Having access to clean drinking water from a spring is helping to get rid of these problems. Families here got water to drink from a river where they also took baths. The river in question has been contaminated due to chemical use, upstream intensive irrigation, and the discharge of untreated sewage into which they bathed their children. In a town that only gets its food from outside sources, having access to water also makes it possible to grow food. Narok Coun ..read more

In today's episode, we meet Isaac Macharia, a Kenyan social entrepreneur who makes cabins out of plastic to keep Kenya’s Masai Mara clean. In 2015, Macharia was on his usual tour-guiding routine at the Masai Mara in Kenya. It bothered him. He decided to construct cabins using not only plastic bottles, but also stashing and hiding every non-biodegradable waste you can think of—straws, broken glass bottles, clothes, beer cans, to name just a few—right in there during construction. To harden and convert the plastic bottle into a smaller brick ..read more

Picture this. It’s a lovely evening. You and your loved one are seated somewhere, enjoying some juice or beer from a glass made out of liquor bottles collected from a dumping site. How does that sound? On today’s episode, meet a young Kenyan lady – Mary Njoki, repurposing waste glass at Masai Mara ..read more