By Tony Rinaudo “Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?” “That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.” “I don’t much care where –” “Then it doesn’t matter which way you go.” ― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland Unlike Lewis Carroll’s Alice, most of us…
By Alan Channer There is a Kenyan saying that ‘he who goes to Mombasa may never return’, for the Indian Ocean port has many charms and opportunities. Today the city’s sprawling slums are witness to a more general challenge: rural-urban migration. Much of this is due to environmental degradation and the effects of climate change…
By Alan Channer Kelechi Eleanya is passionate about trees and the environment. As President of the ‘Forestry Students Association’ (aka the ‘Tree Club’) at the University of Ibadan in the 1990s, he was in the vanguard of promoting the value of trees in the environment among his peers. ‘Back then,’ Eleanya recalls, ‘forestry was not…
by Alan Channer ‘Regreening Africa’ is a multi-country project, funded by the European Union, with the goal of scaling up evergreen agriculture to 500,000 farm households, over an area of over one million hectares. Patrick Worms, Senior Science Policy Advisor at the World Agroforestry Centre, worked on the conception of the project. He emphasises that…
A visit to Embu County, Kenya, two years ago has birthed a very promising project to address the challenges emanating from land degradation. While visiting Purity Gachanga, an agroforestry champion, Dr. Roberto Ridolfi, Director for Sustainable Growth and Development at the Directorate General for Development and Cooperation, was impressed by the transformation that trees could…
Two billion people live in the drylands, which cover 41 percent of the world’s land area. Far from being bare and lifeless, these drylands contain trees and forests essential to the lives of people and animals, supplying basic needs such as food, medicine, wood, energy, and fodder for livestock. But every minute, we lose 23…