The second session of the United Nations Habitat Assembly on urban agenda began on Monday in Gigiri, Nairobi, with President William Ruto formally welcoming the more than 5,000 UN representatives who will be attending the five-day gathering.
The Head of State emphasized the need to improve UN-Habitat’s ability to assist member countries in advancing the agenda of sustainable urbanization.
“Urban centres have always held the most intense concentrations of both the best and the worst human possibilities: wealth and poverty, well-being and suffering, dignity and misery,” President Ruto said.
“.As a result, they are also the theatres of the starkest inequalities in human opportunities and outcomes.,”
By 2050, half of Kenya’s population is expected to reside in urban areas, according to President Ruto, so it is important to strike a balance between economic growth and environmental sustainability.
The Head of State stated that Kenya has included universal housing as a crucial pillar of the national bottom-up economic transformation agenda to address some of these issues.
“We have further mainstreamed sustainable urban practices of green building, green spaces, adoption of low-carbon energy use, including low-carbon transport solutions, as well as urban agriculture and effective waste management,” he added.
At the same time, he claimed that Kenya had started to restore damaged ecosystems and landscapes as part of the Urban Resilience Programme.
This, he continued, includes raising Kenya’s tree cover from its current level of 12.13 percent to 30 percent by planting 15 billion trees over the course of the next ten years.
The second session comes just ahead of the inaugural Africa Climate Summit, which will be held from September 4 to 6 in Nairobi in preparation for COP28.
