The National Land Commission in collaboration with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, together with partnering institutions launched the Kenya Natural Resource Atlas and Geoportal at the Regional Centre for Mapping of Resources for Development (RCMRD)
The atlas promotes good governance and stewardship of Kenya’s natural capital and is critical in advancing the oversight responsibility of the Commission. This includes provision of statues reports, advisories, guidelines, rules and regulations, and ensuring effective management.
Specifically, the atlas seeks to: Identify, map and document all natural resources in Kenya, provide access to information to the general public and decision makers to support integrated and landscape-scale natural resource management in Kenya, provide a basis for review, updating and formulation of natural resource’s strategies, policies, plans and programmes, enhance the capacity of regulatory and enforcement agencies including ministries, departments, and agencies and County Governments on management of natural resources in Kenya.
Additionally, the atlas provides a framework for valuing services derived from natural resources, and promote the use of incentive-based instruments that perpetuate the continued delivery of environmental services and foster trans- boundary natural resource management in the interest of national, regional and international conservation and development goals.
“Today we are launching an extremely important document: the Kenya Country Natural Resources Atlas alongside its Geoportal. Though our beloved country has often boasted of being endowed with a lot of natural resources, information about the same has for years remained scattered and sometimes only known held by a few who hoard them,” NLC CEO Kabale Tache stated.
The judicious management of natural resources is based on the premise that an equitable and sustainable relationship between human and natural capitals exist. This Atlas provides an inventory of all land-based resources in Kenya with a view to creating necessary data bases for information sharing, decision making, planning and sustainable management of these resources.
In his speech, NLC Chairman Gershom Otachi emphasized on the Commission’s commitment towards ensuring that the information contained in the atlas is disseminated to the relevant stakeholders; and will execute follow-up measures to ensure that the intervening policy measures proposed in the atlas are implemented.
“I congratulate and sincerely thank the various institutions that participated and contributed in the development of this atlas. This demonstrates the critical role of partnership and coalition in service delivery for the Kenyan citizens. This is quite exemplary and should be emulated across the entire Government”, stated the Deputy Chief of Staff and Chief Guest, Hon. Josphat Nanok.
“In addition, I want call upon the County Governments to use the information in the atlas as baseline for setting the tone for county specific natural resources atlases that uniquely depict and positions their natural wealth for revenue generation, socio-economic development and resilience,”Nanok added.
The launch was graced by the Deputy Chief of Staff, Hon. Josphat Nanok who was the Chief Guest, joined by; Culture and Heritage Principal Secretary Ummi Bashir, Mohamed Liban, Principal Secretary State Department for Petroleum, Principal Secretary Mining, Elijah Mwangi, EU representative, Myra Benardi, FAO Country Director, Carla Mucavi, RCMRD, Director General RCMRD, Emmanuel Nkurunziza, Husna Mbarak, Head of Land Governance Programme, FAO among others.
