Greeny News

illegal logging and drought have devastated forests of Kenya and threaten water supplies, now that the government adopted the Green Belt Movement, Wangari Maathai, the planting of 450 trees this year

Wangari Maathai, Nobel Prize founder of Kenya's Green Belt Movement, died in October, but his group, who has worked with communities across Africa to tens of millions of plants, trees, is flourishing.

I met on the outskirts of Nairobi, where he was deputy director of Edward Wagenia two years of planting oak silver and teak trees in degraded forest roads, where loggers N ' Gong illegally stripped large areas. To restore the forest a little something like the density of 200 000 old trees will be planted, but the green belt to work with a local group that helps women to plant trees and timber in return.

Maathai is now a legend in Kenya, despite successive governments barely tolerate. But his message simple as planting trees is a social act that restores the land and communities and climate change and accountants drought is coming. Kenya's forests have been slaughtered without mercy on wood, construction materials and other land uses in the last 30 years, and this has coincided with rising temperatures, increased drought and water crisis.

Kenya is more ambitious. At first embarrassed, then stimulated by Maathai and the Green Belt Movement, last year the official response strategy to climate change spoke of planting one billion trees a year. He wants to mobilize the 35 000 schools, groups of 4300 women, 16,350 youth organizations and many others to create and manage degraded forest nurseries and plants. Last week the government announced the first 450 were planted, which is a good start. In comparison, the UK believes that the Forestry Commission planted 31 million last year.

The impact of Kenyan scientists and farmers have observed are remarkably similar to those in Sudan and elsewhere across Africa. John Michuki, Minister of the Environment, said: "The severe drought occurred in the past four years, the major rivers show a reduced volume, and much of the season completely dry the consequent loss of crops in 2009 was an estimated 10 million Kenyans, or one. in four of the population at risk of malnutrition. "