We need to increase efforts to reduce effects of climate change

Residents of Mathare trying to salvage their belongings with their houses submerged by the floods on April 24, 2024. [Robert Tomno, Standard]

As it continues to rain heavily across the country, floods are beginning to emerge as a threat to the nation. Across several regions, severe flooding is occurring, leading not only to a disruption in daily activities but also in the death of both humans and animals. Recently, the flooding of the Mathare River and the subsequent loss of dozens of lives in Mathare have placed a spotlight on just how dire the situation is.

On the one hand, it makes sense to blame the county government leadership for failing to act, even with full and longstanding knowledge that the rains would be particularly heavy this year. If anything, floods have become a perennial threat in the country, altered only by the extreme of drought, with little reprieve in between.

Rather than lean on conventional knowledge and seek to solve the problem long-term, namely by creating drainage systems across the country that can accommodate the storm water, county and national governments have resorted to short-term solutions and sycophancy. Just last year, it was reported that boats had been purchased by the Nairobi County Government to transport people caught in the floods.

The administration has also insinuated its religious ability to control the rain, even with the meteorological department dispatching warnings well ahead of time. Years of heavy rainfall in the county and across the country should easily point to a greater structural and planning problem that the leadership refuses to address.

But even with these administrative problems in mind, we need to factor in the role that climate change has in the extreme rainfall and flooding that we are witnessing.

The situation across the world is dire, and currently floods are being witnessed in Kenya, the DRC, Tanzania, Mozambique, Russia, the United Arab Emirates, and China, to name just a few countries. Instead of dealing with the problem of climate change related flooding, however, governments in the developing world are choosing to sell off their biodiversity to corporations that purport to care about the future of the planet.

Kenya is among the leading countries in the world that sells carbon credits to big corporations, coming in at second in 2022. The idea behind carbon credits is that corporations that emit high quantities of carbon dioxide can buy them, with plans to reduce the amount of carbon that they emit by creating mitigation efforts elsewhere.

These are known as carbon offsets. On paper, this seems like a good idea. But upon further examination of the carbon credit schemes, one finds that the future benefits do not in fact mitigate the current threats.

By being at the forefront of allowing international corporations to sell off their carbon emission guilt, Kenya provides a lenient loophole where the problem of climate change is not addressed in the present, and is instead pushed into the future.

This is done with the promise – often broken – that corporations will reduce their emissions as the years go by. Meanwhile, the devastating effects of climate change are a very present and real problem for Kenyans.

And, as always, it is the poorest and most disadvantaged who bear the brunt of these high-level agreements, as the situation in Mathare proves.

It is impossible to mitigate the future effects of climate change when hundreds are already dead and millions displaced.

The fact that multiple countries are currently being affected should alert us to the fact that flooding is no longer an isolated act of God that occurs rarely.

It is becoming systemic, and we need to work harder than ever to reduce the effect of climate change.

Creating avenues for corporations to continue to destroy the planet in exchange for a few trees planted and dollars exchanged will not solve the problem.

Kenya needs to redirect its climate mitigation projects in a way that places the onus on the corporations most responsible for these floods, as those least responsible are needlessly losing their lives.

Ms Gitahi is a researcher and PhD candidate