At the Kenya Water Towers Agency where I serve as chairperson, we fancy ourselves as guardian angels of Kenya’s 25 water towers. Since these water towers often have their origins in forests like Mau and Mt Kenya, we recently undertook an unprecedented exercise of mapping out forest covers in each of our 47 counties. Nyeri County came out tops with a forest cover of 126,883 hectares, which constitutes 38 per cent of the total county area.
Our counties forest cover report was greatly enriched by a state-of-the-art infrastructure of digital tools that included unconventional ones like drones. We have fully embraced Geographic Information System (GIS) and Global Positioning System (GPS) technology in monitoring of degradation activities in the water towers.