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...

How one African nation is building the architecture to unlock billions in green investment and why getting it right matters for the whole continent. By Brian Onali Nduw The math is stark. Keeping global warming within manageable limits requires somewhere in the range of USD 900 billion in clean energy investment every single year through 2030. Developing nations alone need between USD 70 and USD 100 billion annually just to adapt to climate impacts they are already living with, rising seas, erratic rainfall, prolonged droughts, before even touching the question of reducing their own emissions. The money, at least in theory, exists. Global climate finance flows have grown substantially over the past decade. The problem is where it ends up. Sub-Saharan Africa, home to some of the world’s most climate-vulnerable populations, captures only around 3% of total global climate investment. Meanwhile, East Asia and the Pacific attract roughly a third of all flows, and Western Europe take...

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...