Snow-Capped Mt. Kenya Loses Ice

THE world's famous mountain, Mt. Kenya has lost almost its entire ice mass and may soon lose its tourist status if attempts are not made to reverse the trend.

According to an official based at Kenya's leading environmental group - Green Belt Movement - the snow-capped mountain has lost 92 per cent of its ice within the last one century.

Mr. Fredrick Njau, the chief project coordinator at the movement, says the Lewis glacier on top of the mountain could disappear in just a few years time.

The Green Belt Movement is the brainchild of 2005 Nobel Peace Prize Winner Wangari Maathai who is also a Memebr of Parliament in Kenya's National Assembly representing her rural Tetu constituency.

In this respect, the movement has started a Kshs150 million project to save the Mt. Kenya.

The mountain is a major tourist attraction in the world and has seen dignitaries from as far as Britain, New Zealand, and Australia visit Kenya to give the beautiful mountain a look and perharps spend a night or two at the prestigious Mt. Kenya Safari Club which borrows its identity from the mountain.

Mt. Kenya is significant to the locals as it epitomizes the culture, traditions and roots of the Agikuyu, Ameru and Aembu tribes that live around the mountain. In the olden days before the dawn of civilization, the locals would wake up in the morning and offer prayers and supplications to God while facing it with belief and conviction that their supreme deity - Ngai - lived there.

The new project which is aimed at reducing the amount of carbon dioxide is set to be launched in two-water towers of Aberdare and Mount Kenya forests.

Funded by World Bank, the project will embark on deliberate plans to reduce the effects of pressure from firewood and charcoal which, Njau said had degraded the forest.

"The impacts of rising carbon dioxide concentrations and temperature are already visible," he said.

He said the glaciers at the scenic snow-covered mountain were shrinking fast, threatening water supply for millions of people. The movement plans to launch a fund, Biocarbon Fund, which will see trees planted in more than 4,000 hectares of the Aberdares and Mt Kenya forests.

The project is expected to have conserved about 800,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide in the next 10 years covering Nyeri, Meru, Kiambu and Nyandarua districts.

Maathai and the Green Belt movement has for the last two decades brushed the shoulders with the powers that be over her frequent opposition to defforestation by politically-connected personalities who would grab public land in gazzetted forests with a view to put up palatial homes or state-of-the-art shopping malls. Though she has done her best to fight for the rights of Kenyans, she remains unpopular in her own political home-tuff and pundits have time and again said she could be one her way out of Parliament.