Expert: Kenya’s untapped resources key in solving economic issues
Kenya’s vast untapped natural resources are becoming increasingly significant in efforts to tackle critical economic social and challenges facing the country.
Natural resources’ contribution to Kenya’s national development was extensively discussed during the recent Geo-East African Conference and Expo organized jointly by the Geological Society of Kenya (GSK) and the Geological Registration Board. “Geologists play a big role in the exploration, exploitation and development of the Earth’s resources including minerals, water, geothermal, oil and gas, and the housing and infrastructure sectors,” said GSK President Joseph Kuria (pictured).
Geologists are therefore gaining even more significance as Kenya strives to develop its mining, oil and gas, and geothermal sectors as key drivers of the economy.
Yet geologists also find themselves in the crossfire of the heated debate on the extraction of natural resources amid global warming fueling the climate crisis and the imperative of the energy transition. Geologists have been plunged right into the depths of the Earth’s battle for survival.
Last Thursday, the World Meteorological Organisation announced that July 2023 was the hottest month ever recorded in the past 120,000 years. The announcement prompted United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to ominously declare: “The era of global warming has ended; the era of global boiling has arrived.”
The climate crisis and the energy transition debate have attracted great interest in geosciences, the study of the Earth – its oceans, atmosphere, rivers and lakes, ice sheets and glaciers, its complex surface, rocky interior and metallic core (natural resources), and education in this multidisciplinary science.
Geoscience includes many aspects of how living things, including humans, interact with the Earth. It has many tools and practices of its own but is intimately linked with the biological, chemical and physical sciences.
Education in geosciences featured prominently during the geologists’ conference with a keynote address on ‘The Future of Geosciences’ delivered by Prof Daniel Olago, the chair of the Geological Registration Board, whose mandate is to register professional and graduate geologists and regulate their conduct.
Debate on the extraction of natural resources climaxed at the United Nations Climate
