Low renewable energy consumption in Kenya’s cooling action plan callous

Humans don’t always do well with change. They can stay fixed in their thinking in the face of new challenges for decades, dying as a result.

In which context, how depressing is the new ‘action plan’ issued by our ministry responsible for climate change?

For let’s remember what is, so far, on its climate change agenda: a rise in our temperatures of at least 2 degrees, a surge in the number of heat spikes, droughts, flooding, cholera outbreaks, accelerated mosquito breeding and, thus, rising malaria, and, as a study from John Hopkins university showed six years ago, slum areas that are killing thousands from the scorching heat.

Up to 60 percent of the 3.1 million people living in Nairobi at the time were living in Kibera, Mukuru and Mathare, where temperatures were found to be 5 to 10 degrees higher than elsewhere in the city, and frequently, inside tin-roofed homes, at over 40°C.

Heat above 35°C kills. Indeed, studies have found that temperatures at 40°C increase the deaths of young and old by more than 20 percent, which is a catastrophe, as the heat triggers heat strokes that can damage the brain and internal organs, and increases deaths from heart conditions, strokes and breathing difficulties.

So, with over a million of our capital city’s residents literally gasping their last breaths from heat (although not in August), how welcome to see a Kenya National Cooling Action Plan.

Except, no. For it turns out this 77-page report from the ministry charged with responsibility for climate change, paid for by three German organisations at the behest of the German parliament, is not a plan for cooling anything or anyone in Kenya.

It is dedicated to getting Kenya’s fridges and cooling systems off creating 0.0001 percent, or 1/9650 th, of global emissions and, bizarrely, off using 7-13 percent of our renewable energy.

How callous is that? We have thousands dying across every city and in tin-roofed homes nationwide, and our ministry is being co-opted to deploy its time and energy making huge plans to reduce our renewable energy consumption.

That said, on page 49, there is one paragraph and a short table about other ways of cooling Kenyans, in a chapter called ‘Planning for Future Additions to the National Cooling Action Plan’, — so six years onwards — the ministry has managed exactly 100 words on the prospect, one day, of an action plan planting trees in urban areas, and planning for insulation, shade, and cooling surfaces.

So, keep dying from heat: the ministry may organise a plan for you by 2050. And that’s our government’s own climate agenda as we fight at global summits to get attention for adaptation.

The writer is a development communication specialist.