COP26: Sustainable Irrigation Key To Kenya’s Climate Change Response
The 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference (UNCCC), also known as COP26, is currently underway in Glasgow, Scotland. Key on the agenda is accelerated action on global warming and ways to strengthen countries’ ability to deal with the impacts of climate change.
The climate crisis has had far-reaching adverse impact on food production and security mainly through extreme, unpredictable weather patterns that are disruptive to agriculture. The implications for countries like Kenya that rely heavily on rain-fed agriculture are profound hence the need to develop strategies towards mitigating the harsh impact of the global climate crisis on food production. This includes investing in sustainable irrigation and water harvesting projects.
Irrigation is simply the process of watering crops in a controlled manner using pipes, canals, pumps and other systems. Human beings have practised this kind of farming for over 5,000 years since the ancient civilizations in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Persia and India. Some communities in Kenya have engaged in irrigation for centuries.
Today, adoption of this mode of agriculture has been shown to significantly boost agricultural productivity especially in the arid and semi-arid lands while enhancing food sufficiency and sustainability of agricultural livelihoods. About one billion acres of land around the world are under some form of irrigation.
According to the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), climate change has led to changes in rainfall patterns, decline in water availability and reduction in agricultural productivity in many countries including Kenya which is exposed to climate-related weather shocks including prolonged droughts.
“Kenya is characterized by low and declining crop productivity, and like many other developing countries, is particularly susceptible to climate change due to its over-reliance on rain-fed agriculture, aridity, inadequate water supply and degradation of many of its natural resources,” says IPCC.
This makes irrigation so key to Kenya’s climate change response. It is also at the heart of the Big 4 Agenda food security pillar on boosting large scale food production, nutrition, small-holder productivity and reducing the cost of food. With eighty per cent of the total land mass being arid or semi-arid, sustainable agriculture can only be achieved through modern irrigation.
This also partly explains why irrigation is integral to the Agriculture Sector Transformation and Growth Sector (ASTGS), a 10-year roadmap to achieving food security in Kenya. ASTGS prioritizes construction of dams, rainwater harvesting among other measures to increase farmland under irrigation with greater emphasis on improving resilience of small-scale irrigation systems to climate-related shocks.
