By Wayne Visser*

Last week, I was hosted by Ufadhili Trust to deliver a 2 day workshop on CSR in Nairobi, Kenya. As I was last in Kenya 20 years ago when I attended an AIESEC African Leadership Development Seminar, it was wonderful to return and compare my impressions.

The biggest changes have been political. In 1990, Daniel Arap Moi was still president (from 1978 to 2002) and ruled a one-party state with an iron hand. My impression back then was of relative stability, but no great sense of prosperity or advancement.

I recall that the hotel we stayed at on the coast in Mombasa had a water-cut and the security guard carried a bow and arrow. Also, it took 9 hours to drive the 440 km of pot-hole ridden road between Nairobi and Mombasa.

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By Naomi Antony

Spending more on climate change research could put hundreds of thousands of lives at risk by stripping away precious global health funding, Bill Gates has said.

In his 2010 Annual Letter — the second of its kind, released last week by the Bill &Melinda Gates Foundation — the philanthropist warned that aid budgets may shrink not only because of recession-related shortfalls but because of a shift towards research targeted at dealing with climate change.

He highlighted the climate accord of last year’s Copenhagen conference, in which rich countries pledged to give developing countries US$10 billion annually over the next three years, and as much as US$100 billion per year by 2020.

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By Nnaemeka Meribe

If nothing is done soon to combat climate change, the number of armed conflicts raging in Africa is likely to increase, and this may swell the number of deaths from war, according to a new report.

Climate change, according to Wikipaedia, is a change in the statistical distribution of weather over periods of time that range from decades to millions of years.

It can be a change in the average weather or a change in the distribution of weather events around an average (for example, greater or fewer extreme weather events). Climate change may be limited to a specific region, or may occur across the whole Earth.

In the study, the researchers from the University of California, United States, first combined historical data on civil wars in sub-Saharan Africa with rainfall and temperature records across the continent.

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Africa’s cement industry will for two days this April gather in one of the continent’s biggest environmental and sustainable built environment events.

The inaugural Environmental Cement Africa Conference in Cape Town, South Africa will identify and deliberate on issues around the environment from the African cement producers’ perspective, Demsas Faloppa, CEO of Prescon Ltd, the event’s organiser, said.

The conference, to be held on 20 and 21 April, has some ambitious objectives with key speakers from Lafarge, PPC, Afrisam, UNEP, Suez Cement Company, Eritrean Government, MVW Lechtenberg, Trilogy Partners and WBCSD.

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By David Njagi

Kenya’s planned development path will more than double its carbon emissions unless efforts are taken to pursue low carbon development, according to an environmental think tank.

Yet the country has high potential for mitigating climate change because it has significant opportunities to use renewable energy, says a report released by the Stockholm Environmental Institute (SEI).

Kenya emits relatively low levels of carbon because it has an electricity generation system based on renewable energy and widespread use of biomass for household energy generation, the report says.

But its Vision 2030 plan — which could see a ten per cent rise in economic growth each year and a doubled population by 2030 — would increase carbon emissions from 42 megatonnes of carbon dioxide in 2005 to 91 in 2030.

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