Laikipia Water Strategy
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National Museums of Kenya 5th Science EXPO 2014
The National Museums of Kenya (NMK) is hosting its 5th edition of the Science Expo from the 24th to 25th October 2014 under the theme " Kenya's Heritage- Diversifying Tourism". The Expo is being held at the NMK courtyard.
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Should we build more large dams?
“The actual costs of hydropower megaproject developmentâ€
Ever since the World Commission on Dams (WCD) report in 2000, the environmental and social impacts of dams, and especially large storage dams for hydropower production have been under close scrutiny and its recommendations were largely integrated by the multilateral funding agencies which basically led to a “drought†in dam construction in Africa.
However, with the economic boom in emerging nations in Asia and South America, dam building started again but with different sources of funding, in its most extreme version the so-called “boot†dams (build-own-operate-transfer) on, for example, the Mekong.
The mechanism is simple: private funding (in this case based on the electricity demand of air conditioning offices and middle class housing in cities like Bangkok) signs a deal with a poor country (e.g. Laos) builds the dam and sells the electricity for a number of decades, reimbursing itself with a handsome profit. The dam is then transferred to the country (but of course its useful life time has expired, it is full of sediment, etc.). The thing is that this kind of money is not subjected to any environmental or social criteria (or these can be negotiated downward with the receiving country, possibly with some personal incentives for those who sign). The dam-building epidemic has now spread to Africa, often with new bilateral donors who have also not signed up to the recommendations of the WCD.
Many of the most damaging aspects of dams can be reduced by making them either run-of-the-river i.e. without storage and only producing power during good river flows (and interlinking power grids – it always rains somewhere in Africa) or, if storage is unavoidable, design and operate for managed flood releases that can keep the downstream ecosystems and sociosystems operating or even improve on them.
As can be seen from the picture of Masinga dam (the biggest storage dam on the Tana River) during a recent drought in Kenya, planning for a dam with rainfall and run-off data most often from the 1960s does not guarantee that they will actually have water in the 21st century.
Bent Flyvbjerg and his team have been writing about cost overruns in various types of megaprojects for many years now but this one on dams is a real eye-opener showing that it, in general, they also do not make economic sense.
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by Atif Ansar, Bent Flyvbjerg, Alexander Budzier and Daniel Lunn
The paper can be downloaded at
http://ssrn.com/abstract=2406852
The Future of Large Dams
Anthropologist Ted (Thayer) Scudder has spent most of his life studying displaced people, including by large dams. He was one of the key authors on the, now all too easily ignored, World Commission on Dams report. It is strange how little the suffering of the people affected by dams, both upstream and downstream, gets into our hearts and minds.
Click here to download a review on the book
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The Freshwater Fishes of Kenya book launched at National Museums
On Wednesday 4th December, there was a special event at the National Museums of Kenya (NMK) as the Guest of Honour Prof. Micheni Japhet Ntiba, Principal Secretary of the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Fisheries but also a scientist known for his pivotal work on the reproductive cycle of the Siganidae (Rabbitfishes, some of the most important food fishers for Kenyan coastal populations) unveiled the long-awaited “Guide to the Common Freshwater Fishes of Kenya†written by our very own KENWEB coordinator Wanja Dorothy Nyingi. There were wonderful speeches by the Principal Secretary, by the Director of NMK Dr. Idle Farah, by David Muita CEO of Moran Publishers and of course by Dr.Nyingi herself, who prudently described what has probably been one of the longest gestation histories of any popular fishes guidebook with ups and downs, reversals, blockages, changes of editorial policies, etc. but finally produced by local publisher Moran http://www.moranpublishers.co.ke/ and wonderfully so.Â
Dedicated to the memory of the founder of the ichthyology (fish) department of the National Museums Dr. Luc De Vos, who left us all much too soon and very much orphaned, the book generally illustrates and describes about 200 of the most common fish species to be found in Kenya’s main rivers, lakes and swamps.Â
More precisely the book contains:
Morphological descriptions of the most important features of the various fish species
Colour photos and illustrations to enable visual recognition of fish
The distribution ranges of the fish species
The names of the fish in local languages and in English
The ecology and behaviour of these fish, including their food preferences, reproductive behaviour and preferred habitat
Information on the importance of the fish or common uses such as subsistence or artisanal fishing, commercial fishing, aquaculture, aquarium trade or sports fishing
The book is a great thing to take into the field and hopefully a stimulus for many more people to go out and understand what is moving under the surface of our many wonderful wetlands and to contribute to their conservation and restoration.