Population dynamics are also not left out on this thorny issue of the environment and poverty. Reproductive health happens to be at the core of population growth and stability.

In their paper “Population, Poverty and the Environment” the United Nations Fund for Population Awareness (UNFPA) contends: “The world population numbered 6.3 billion in 2000 and is currently growing by a net increase of some 77 million per year. By 2050, the United Nations Population Division, in its 2002 Revision of the world’s population prospects, estimates that total world population will be 8.9 billion. The impact of this growth will be focused mainly in less developed countries, where currently some 1.2 billion people the majority of whom are women and children are living in extreme poverty… The challenge is to increase standards of living without destroying the environment.”

That is not all.
“The majority of the rural poor have increasingly become clustered on low-potential land. This outcome has resulted from a combination of factors, which vary in importance from one country to another. These factors include land expropriation, demographic pressures, intergenerational land fragmentation, privatization of common lands and consolidation and expansion of commercial agriculture with reduced labour inputs. Demographic pressures in particular continue to lay an inexorable underlying role in the geographical, economic and social marginalization of the poor in most countries where there is a high incidence of poverty. Because the poor have been pushed or squeezed out of high-potential land, the rural poor often have no choice but to over-exploit the marginal resources available to them through low input, low-productivity agricultural practices such as overgrazing, soil-mining and deforestation, with consequent land degradation. Not that land degradation has been primarily instigated by poor farmers with substantial, favourable concessions. Soil erosion, water logging and salinization, which have resulted in desertification in many parts of the world, have commonly been caused by wealthy landowners with considerable financial resources.
“Long-term poverty reduction and sustainable economic growth can be undermined by the degradation of the natural resource base, lack of access to, and increasing scarcity of water, and air pollution that directly affect people’s health and livelihoods. Opportunity declines when poor people who depend on natural resources for their livelihoods can no longer support themselves because natural resources have been damaged and they lack alternative livelihood opportunities.
“Real and lasting reduction in poverty can be achieved by enhancing environmental quality and protecting human health from the adverse effects of pollution; maintaining ecosystems and improving natural resource management; securing people’s access to resources; reducing people’s vulnerability to environmental risks such as natural disasters; and empowering the poor by giving them a voice in decision making.”

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) is also not left behind. In a joint endeavour with the European Commission titled UNDP-EC Poverty and Environment Initiative the two agencies note: “Poverty and environment are linked in a ‘downward spiral’ in which poor people, forced to overuse environmental resources for their daily survival, are further impoverished by the degradation of these resources. Population growth and economic change are also seen to contribute o this process. In addition, many of the environmental problems that have been identified in the international arena as the world’s most pressing are not those that affect poor people in developing countries most severely. For example lack of sanitation and clean water – rather than issues that preoccupy the North, such as ozone depletion and global warming – are arguably the South’s worst environmental problems.”

According to the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS): “Rapid population growth, burgeoning resource consumption and changing land use are destroying habitats and exterminating biodiversity worldwide. East Africa is no exception. Kenya’s parks and reserves comprise a tenth of its total land area, yet much of the country’s rich diversity of life exists outside protected areas, where it is poorly documented and highly threatened by humanity.”

Four years, ago the World Conservation Congress in Amman, Jordan, during its 2nd Session, came up with Resolution 2.36 on ‘Poverty Reduction and Conservation of Environment’ which declared : “Noting that Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Carribean are experiencing rapid depletion of their natural resources in addition to high incidences of poverty; acknowledging that the majority of poor people live in areas that are described as environmentally vulnerable, where minor changes in climate water quantity or land use can have a dramatic, sometimes disastrous effect on the quality of the local environment and its ability to support the local populations; recognizing that poverty is a deprivation of essential assets and opportunities to which every human is entitled, such as education, health care, nutrition, water and sanitation, as well as income, employment and wages; noting that the environment constitutes the natural conditions such as land, air and water in which people, animals and plants live; accepting that poverty due to a multiplicity of factors, including population growth, results in resource depletion, which further exacerbates the incidences of poverty showing that both are interlinked; and concerned that the Asian, African, Latin American and Caribbean countries cannot address environmental issues without linking it to poverty alleviation; The World Conservation Congress recommends that IUCN and IUCN members (Kenya included) address poverty simultaneously with environmental rehabilitation; design projects so as to reflect both environmental rehabilitation and poverty alleviation simultaneously; and adopt the above as part of their policy.”

For lack of clear guidelines and policy on land use Kenya is today faced by the threat of severe environmental catastrophe. Thanks to a booming population. During last year’s International Day for the Eradication of Poverty (17th October) Prof Peter Anyang Nyong’o, the Minister for Planning and National Development, said: “It is estimated that nationally only 44% of the population had access to safe water compared to 90% in urban areas. This situation if not corrected, Kenya’s vision of halving the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe water by 2015 will be elusive.”