Tag: hazards

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Comments on Kenya’s Wildlife Bill 2025

While in Kenya for our workshop on Integrated Fire Management in Tsavo, we discussed the draft of the Wildlife Conservation and Management Bill 2025 [pdf]. We realised that wildfire or landscape fire was mentioned only very briefly (restricted to a single statement in one clause) and not in way that seemed to meet with the principles and values laid out in the Preliminary section of the Bill (namely adoption of the use of emerging science and indigenous (traditional) knowledge, participatory and inclusive management and an ecosystem approach). Given that these were topics of discussion in our workshop, and that public consultation on the Bill was ongoing, we felt that we could offer some comments on how the Bill might be improved to better reflect those values (as well as our own).

Below are our comments that we submitted via the Ministry of Tourism and Wildlife’s public participation feedback tool.

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Scoping Urban Hazards in Kenya and Malawi

Technically I had been to Nairobi before our last trip last month, so I replied yes when people there asked. But then I told them it was when I was two years old and they laughed about how that didn’t count – partly because I can’t remember a thing from that time and partly because the city has changed so much. Back in 1982, the population of the city was around 900,000 but today it is over 3 million, and possibly up nearer 4 million during the day as people come into the city to work.

I was in Nairobi with colleagues Bruce Malamud and Faith Taylor on an initial research trip for our work on the physical dimensions of hazards in urban areas of Africa. During a meeting on the trip at Mzuzu University near another of our study sites – Karonga in Malawi – someone asked why we were focusing on hazards in urban areas particularly. The answer is partly because of the growth exemplified by Nairobi; Africa is urbanising rapidly and estimates are that 56% of the population of African will be urban by the middle of the century.

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