This story has significance for readers across Kenya and beyond.
In 1992, the world’s governments gathered in Rio de Janeiro for the UN Conference on Environment and Development. It was the largest gathering of Heads of State the planet had ever seen, convened in response to a decade of growing concern over early warnings of global warming, increasing deforestation, and the growing recognition that species were vanishing at a rate scientists were beginning to describe as a “mass extinction”.
Building on the idea of “sustainable development” introduced by the 1987 Brundtland Report, Rio marked a shift from earlier environmental diplomacy by recognising that no single country could solve these crises alone, and that environment and development had to be tackled together rather than as competing agendas. Out of those negotiations came three landmark agreements: the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and, a year later, the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), all built on the understanding that climate change, biodiversity loss and land degradation are three faces of one global crisis requiring a coordinated response.
That understanding was brought home to me two years ago when I attended a Convention on Biological Diversity meeting in Colombia, a relatively small country occupying just 0.22 per cent of the Earth’s surface.
Yet it is home to an estimated 10 per cent of all known species on the planet. It has more bird species than any other country on Earth, more orchids than anywhere else, and some of the richest diversity of plants, amphibians, butterflies and freshwater fish found in any single country. Only Brazil surpasses it in overall biodiversity. But per square kilometre, almost nothing surpasses Colombia.
Protecting the planet
Because of this, biodiversity and the social bioeconomy sit close to the centre of Colombia’s national development policy. Next week, Nairobi will host an intermediary gathering: the 28th meeting of the Subsidiary Body on Scientific, Technical and Technological Advice (SBSTTA). SBSTTA does not carry the theatre of the larger COP gatherings, but this is where the actual architecture is built. The technical body is tasked with translating the ambition embedded in the agreement into indicators and recommendations that countries will act on.
On the table in Nairobi will be the first global review of collective progress on whether the world is on track to meet its headline commitment of protecting 30 per cent of land and sea by 2030.
As Nairobi hosts these meetings, we would do well to remember the spirit in which the Rio Conventions were born more than three decades ago: a hard-won recognition that development and the environment could no longer be treated as competing agendas. It was this insight that the Brundtland Report gave the world in 1987, and that Rio enshrined in treaty form five years later.
I remember my mother, Wangari Maathai, often reminding me that no single country could solve these crises alone, and that the choice between growing an economy and protecting the planet that sustains it was never a choice at all.
It is a lesson worth revisiting after this week’s comments by Kenya’s Forestry Principal Secretary, Gitonga Mugambi, suggesting that development cannot be halted for the sake of conservation. The frustration behind that view is understandable. The pressure on any government to deliver jobs and growth is real and urgent.
Restoring green spaces
But there is no version of development that endures without the environment as its anchor. We know better than ever that healthy forests, rivers and wetlands are not obstacles to progress but its very foundation. They regulate our rainfall, cushion us against floods and hold our soil in place as the climate grows ever less forgiving.
The argument for Climate Resilient Green Growth (CRGG) is not new. No nation has built lasting prosperity by depleting the ecosystems it depends on. Many of the countries we look to as models of development today are investing heavily in restoring the wetlands, forests and green spaces they once cleared. They have learnt, sometimes too late and at great cost, what is lost when the environmental cushion disappears.
Kenya, and Africa more broadly, have the opportunity to learn that lesson without repeating those mistakes. As the World Resources Institute has shown, the new climate economy is no longer a distant aspiration. A green, climate-resilient growth pathway is increasingly the surest route to quality jobs and lasting prosperity, not a barrier to them.
I pray that, as the world descends on Nairobi next week, this gathering will remind us of what Rio understood 33 years ago and what we must recommit to today: that sustainable development is not development slowed by conservation, but development built to last. The path forward for Kenya, and for Africa, lies not in choosing between its forests, parks and waterways and its future, but in recognising that one secures the other.
Ms Mathai is the MD for Africa & Global Partnerships at the World Resources Institute and Chair of Wangari Maathai Foundation
Reporting originally appeared via Nation Africa. Read the full source for additional context.