Kenya holds the first-ever Wildlife Scientific Conference

Naivasha,

Wednesday, September 27, 2023,

KNA by Mabel Keya – Shikuku

Kenya urgently needs an integrated conservation policy bringing together the water, Wildlife, and fisheries sectors to lead the way in coming up with a common strategy from which all sectors in natural resource management can borrow in a bid to have a collaborative effort in conserving our natural resources.

Principal Secretary (PS) in the State Department for Wildlife; Ministry of Tourism, Wildlife, and Heritage, Ms. Silvia Museiya said despite many years of conservation efforts around the world, we are losing our biodiversity and revealed that we have lost up to 70 percent of our natural resources since 1977.

“We have lost 7.3 percent of our forests, our rivers and lakes are drying, up and lots of flora and fauna have become extinct,” the PS said.

To this end, she said there was a need to find what is wrong in our current system of conservation and involve science in decision-making hence; the need to bring together everybody in finding the solution to our conservation efforts.

The PS was speaking in Naivasha on Wednesday during the first-ever, Wildlife Scientific conference themed; Use of Wildlife Science for Enhanced Biodiversity Conservation and Improved Livelihood which has brought together over 500 participants from Kenya and other countries. 

It brings together Scientists, wildlife managers, decision -makers and policy implementers in the natural resource sector in order to help them make decisions on a point of knowledge backed by science and data.

The conference also seeks to provide solutions to various challenges facing wildlife including declining populations, increased habitat loss and degradation, increased diseases, and climate change among others. 

Museiya said the Government was keen to use science and data in decision-making in matters of conservation because there is a disconnect between decisions being made and the outcome due to various existing gaps in law and policy.

She gave an example of Mount Kenya National Park which Museiya said was both a gazetted Forest Reserve and a wildlife sanctuary thus bringing in a lacuna on how to manage the two natural resources because of the different bodies involved and hence ending up losing many species of flora and fauna.

“Our quick fix for this problem is that we have formed a task force on conservation involving all natural resource sectors based institutions to be gazetted by the President by Friday this week. This will give overriding principles on which all these sectors operate,” the PS said adding that the sectors need to work together through an ecosystem approach for this to approach and have also launched a Kenya specialist group involving Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS), Kenya Forest Service, Kenya Wildlife Research Training Institute in Naivasha and Museums of Kenya to lead the way.

The PS also noted that we have serious scholars in the country on matters of natural resources but their publications never come to be used in decision-making and added that there was a lot of research information out there in libraries, which has never been used in decision-making, only being used by learners.

She noted that Kenya anticipates going to the 28th session of the Conference of the Parties on Climate Change (COP28) in November this year, with an integrated mechanism system on which we conserve our natural resources.

“Our problem is governance structure in terms of intuitions and laws but if we use science it will help in this because governance of natural resources is right but we need to see how to synchronize the law and structure and we expect the Sector- governance and all sub-sectors are individually going amend their mother law,” Museiya said.

In 2023, the 28th session of the Conference of the Parties on Climate Change (COP28) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) will be held at Expo City, Dubai in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

Courtesy; KNA