Helen Byron is just back from a trip to Tana River Delta - here's her guest blog, and if you want to catch up with the story, here's a previous post.
Just before Easter I went to Kenya to get involved with the work on the Tana River Delta land use plan/strategic environmental assessment (SEA). These activities are being funded by DFID (UK Aid) and led by our partner Nature Kenya.
It was a hectic and varied trip, ranging from meetings in the Office of the Kenya Prime Minister (OPM) in Nairobi, to meetings with local community members in 36C humid heat in the Delta!
Community members meet to discuss the Delta's future. Photo Roel Slootweg
At OPM I met with members of the Tana Delta Land Use Plan and SEA working groups established to lead the processes. I was travelling with the international planning consultant who is providing support to these two groups.
One of the highlights was attending a training session for the Local Planning Advisory Committee (PAC). This body consists of 21 representatives from different communities in the Delta (including the pastoral, farming, fishing and conservation communities) plus 4 local government representatives. Its role is to feed in local views into the planning and SEA processes.
The PAC also met with a team from the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Commission, who are providing expert advice to the Kenyan Government on the Tana SEA process and had come to Kenya for a site visit. Kenya has two rainy seasons – a short rainy season in November and a longer one which usually lasts from the end of March to May. This year the start of the long rains was late and the Delta incredibly dry during my visit. In the PAC discussions there was a real feeling from the locals that control of livestock coming in to the Delta from outside is now needed as droughts are becoming more frequent. So this will be one of the issues the plan/SEA will need to examine.
Hippo Lake has dried as rains are late forcing them to find other areas Photo Roel Slootweg
I was really impressed with the eloquence of the PAC members and how well members were working together given all the disparate interests.
Another fantastic highlight was a boat trip into the Delta to see the condition of the grazing land (dry, although the cattle generally looked really healthy). Nature Kenya colleagues were surprised to see the wetland known as Hippo Lake almost entirely dry and looking like a mud flat – the first time any of them had seen the area so dry. When I was there in 2009 the wetland was alive with snorting hippos but this time round the hippos were elsewhere including higher up in the Delta bathing in borrow pits at the side of the newly improved road!
We had lunch at Mulikani a small community run eco-lodge high in the forest overlooking the dunes and the Indian Ocean on one side and Ozi forest on the other. It really is a beautiful spot – a shame more people don’t yet know its there its really got amazing potential. And the lunch including a local Pokomo speciality fish and bananas was delicious. Walking back to the boat we saw buffalo and elephant tracks. On the water the birds were breath-taking – great white pelican, yellow-billed stork, spur-winged plover, goliath heron, purple heron to name just a few!
The river, people, cattle and wildlife await the rains. Photo Roel Slootweg
Overall it was impressive to see the progress so far with the planning and SEA processes – there is a lot of work to do and collating as much existing baseline data as possible is the immediate next step – but it was good to see the enthusiasm and commitment of the PAC and support of the Tana Delta District Commissioner. I’ll look forward to telling you more as the plan and SEA progress.
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