The Tana River basin supplies Nairobi with 80 per cent of its drinking water. It also provides 70 per cent of the country’s hydropower.
Eight million people live along the river, where tea, coffee, maize and other cash crops are grown for export, and cattle grazing and fishing provide major sources of food for large parts of the country’s population.
The river’s health and long-term ability to provide these and other essential services is increasingly under threat, however, due to poor land use practices, pollution, soil erosion, overgrazing, deforestation and the expansion of agriculture into savannah lands and wetlands.
Several planned dams and diversion schemes are also posing threats to some parts of the river, its ecosystems and local communities, while providing socioeconomic benefits in other stretches. A new report titled The Economics of Ecosystem Services of the Tana River Basin looks at how to strike the right balance between development and conservation in the basin, analysing development scenarios planned for the basin and their benefits and trade-offs for human wellbeing. Reprinted from UNEP Stories.
