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BIODIVERSITY CONSERVATION

          

                                                   

Biodiversity conservation refers to the protection, preservation, and management of ecosystems and natural habitats and ensuring that they are healthy and functional or to protect and preserve diversity species and ecosystems. Just sit down today and imagine the Earth without plants, animals, air and water, do you think life is going to be easy? Definitely not or life will not be even there at all. the presence of them makes the lives of human beings successful and comfortable unfortunately a good number of the population in the world haven’t realize the importance of the four components until when they are lost since you will never know the importance of what you have until you lose it. Approximately 1.6 billion people worldwide rely on forests for their livelihoods, especially the rural poor biodiversity loss increases risks of disease and poor nutrition. Environmental sectors, like forestry and fisheries, are important entry points for women’s economic empowerment. Biodiversity keeps soils fertile, agricultural pests in check, and supports pollinators that sustain and improve food security through increased agricultural productivity. Fighting environmental crime and corruption in rural communities improves safety and opportunities for legal livelihoods. Majority of the people who suffer the most the impacts of destruction of biodiversity are the indigenous people since most of the rural areas are occupied by them. In Transmara in Narok county for example the indigenous people largely practice pastoralism and agriculture for survival and before land demarcation they were free to graze their animals everywhere on the land and there was plenty of pasture for their animals but after the demarcation is where the limitations where everyone was restricted to graze only at his portion of land. The forest cover was very high hence wild animal’s habitats were very secure and human-wild conflicts were very minimized because they had adequate place to live and graze and therefore they couldn’t come and destroy the plants and eat the domestic animals. Herdsmen could enjoy honey from the forest and even the herbal medicine which could make them fit and some are even were used to treat animal diseases in addition the soil was very fertile and the soil was never polluted with artificial fertilizer like today. In short life was cheap and interesting. With increase in population, forests were destroyed to create space for settlement and farming. Indigenous trees were mostly endangered since they were well known for producing quality charcoals, the Wild animal’s corridors also suffered forcing them to move away its believed some even migrated permanently to Tanzania and they are no longer found in Kenya.Maasai are well known for their culture and when the forest was present there were some rituals and occasion that they used to celebrate in the forest  a good example male circumcision was done there and other rituals like irpuli and olkiteng lolbaa and at this juncture there were very special trees which they believed to be pure and non-poisonous that were specifically used. A traditional manyatta was also built in a forested place to make it easy to construct using trees and leaves and also firewood for cooking and meat roasting. All this practices mentioned above are lost as a result of biodiversity destruction. Frequent droughts are also experienced since the rain pattern also changed. Indigenous people aren’t sitting down watching this happening but they are taking the initiatives planting trees giving the indigenous trees a priority and protecting the water sources catchment areas.