Environmentalist

By Brian Onali Nduw Walk through a coastal neighbourhood at high tide, and you’ll find it: nuisance flooding that creeps up driveways. Lingers in streets. And has become less an anomaly than a calendar event. It is no longer a question of  if  the water will rise, but  when . And how often. This is not speculation. It is the leading edge of sea-level rise, lapping at the foundations of communities that were never designed to be tidal. Inland, the signs are just as unmistakable. The air carries a chemical weight. What falls from the sky is not always water anymore. It is acid. Fed by emissions that have accumulated in the atmosphere for decades. Beneath that sky, once-hardy plants brown and wilt. Some species are vanishing entirely. Not dramatically, but silently, slipping into extinction before most of us ever learn their names. The future, by these measures, ain’t exciting. A crisis measured in degrees and breaths The language of climate science is often abstract: parts ...

Understanding the real tools of forest fire management - and why the debate keeps getting muddled As drought conditions grip vast stretches of land and fire crews brace for another demanding season, conversations about how best to protect forests and communities from catastrophic wildfires are heating up alongside the temperatures. But amid the urgency, a persistent misconception continues to cloud public discourse: the idea that the timber industry is quietly rebranding commercial logging as a fire prevention strategy. The truth is more nuanced. And worth unpacking carefully. So, what does fire prevention actually look like? Fire ecologists widely agree that decades of aggressive fire suppression have left many forests dangerously overgrown. Without the natural housekeeping that low-intensity fires once provided, dead wood, dense brush, and tightly packed tree canopies have accumulated, creating conditions where a single spark can escalate into an inferno. Addressing this requir...

By Brian Onali Nduw There is something profoundly humbling about standing before a room full of young people and telling them the truth about their planet. Not a softened, palatable version. The full truth. The kind that lives in peer-reviewed reports, that is argued over in Swiss conference rooms, and that eventually washes up, quite literally, on the shores of countries like Malawi, in the form of cyclones, droughts, and flooded roads. I am Kenyan. I came to Malawi to study, chasing knowledge across borders the way the climate crisis itself crosses them. Indifferent to where you were born or what your country emits. When the Head of the Department of Forestry and Environmental Management at Mzuzu University identified me as someone with grounding in climate finance topics and asked me to stand alongside Mr. Luke Mwakuluni, a Forest Extension Officer with the Co-operative Development Foundation of Canada, I felt both the honour and the gravity of what we were being asked to do....

Distinguished Professor Makau Mutua in one of the recent columns-local daily, shamed the no-ugali restaurants. The ‘high-end’ restaurant in Nairobi, Kenya, and in the African continent incapacitated the Prof’s big appetite for sirloin, sukuma-wiki, and ugali . He drove home for a delicious lunch of matoke. As a good student, I got the assignment - the subject: Decolonization of the Black African mind. Africans’ confinement to think within the box, proves detrimental. Our heroes thought outside. We’ve got no name to the box owner we are confined to think within or the one we’re urged to think out of. Throwing away that box - start plain thinking and self-introspection, is the surest way. Things have changed and keep on changing. Static thinking within and around the box makes us not creative with no vision as others adjust and embrace changes before our naked eyes. Education, religion, and politics affect our thinking—agents of thought formatting. Yes, our education system emp...

Photo: File ASSIGNMENT: The regard to the recent Presidential declaration on lifting the 2018 ban on forest logging. The President of Kenya said we can no longer keep old mature trees rotting in the forest while locals suffer due to lack of timber. His move is meant to increase timber production and create jobs for the youths. Only when money is exchanged for products and services, is the transaction recognized as having economic worth in the value system inherent in the sort of economics our society has chosen. The tree only acquires value when it enters our economy by generating revenue. As an Environmentalist, I am not in support of this statement. My perspective: That one tree was a tiny element of a community of species that had evolved over thousands of years. That community is made up of trees, a minuscule percentage of the forest’s life forms. Tens of thousands of kinds of microorganisms-viruses, bacteria, fungi, protozoa-as well as bigger nematodes, worms, insects, and m...

While on my recent school tour and speaking about Environment/Climate to passionate and unpassionate innocent pupils, I got so many questions. Questions challenging my thoughts and exciting my research notes. These questions, make me think on my feet and sometimes send me to the books for in-depth knowledge and technical know-how. Let the questions come my way! I believe I am not stupid and excuse myself to going back to my notes and recheck what I was taught in class but use my expertise and experience to respond.   “My name is Natasha and I am in Grade 4. I am passionate about Environmental management and have one question: What is this about Climate Change-Adaptation, Loss and Damage?   Hello, young environmental enthusiast! I'm here to talk to you about climate change, a big problem that affects our planet. Climate change occurs because humans release greenhouse gases into the air, which trap heat from the sun and make the Earth warmer. This warming causes many...