NAIROBI — The water supply for Nairobi’s five million people — and four million others besides — depends on the Tana river, which flows for 1,000 km from the Aberdare mountains to the Indian Ocean. The decades-long spread of agriculture in the upper reaches of the Tana’s catchment area has stripped hillsides of trees, prompting erosion that’s compromised both the farmland and the quality of the water that Kenya’s capital depends on. Now rainstorms are rapidly washing soil into the river, decreasing the farmland’s productivity and clogging water and power generation infrastructure with silt. The river runs roughly west to east for 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) from its headwaters in the Aberdare Mountains, across the plains and hillsides of Garissa county — where pastoralists have mastered livestock rearing in an arid landscape shared with threatened gáránúug antelopes (Litocranius walleri) and endangered Rothschild’s giraffes (Giraffa camelopardalis) — and through more forested zones until it reaches the swamps and coastal habitats of a sprawling delta at Ungwana Bay. The problems caused by forest loss extend well beyond the Tana watershed. With an unreliable water supply to their homes, many people in Nairobi, Kenya’s capital and largest city, are forced to buy water in jerricans to drink, cook and wash. Industrial and commercial users also have to make backup arrangements. And as the city’s population continues to rise and climate change causes increasingly unpredictable rainfall, ensuring water security will only get harder. “If our freshwater ecosystems are not healthy, they can’t provide that…This article was originally published on Mongabay
Article by:
This story first appeared on Mongabay
South Africa Today – Environment
This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
You may republish this article, so long as you credit the authors and Mongabay, and do not change the text. Please include a link back to the original article.
