Kenya shares with other East African countries the problem of having small, fragmented areas of forest under pressure from encroachment and exploitation. It has been suggested that the forest cover in East Africa was more extensive several centuries ago. The decrease in the area of natural forest was partly due to taking land from forest reserves and converting it into commercial farms by white settlers. The clearing of forested land has a long history in Kenya and started in 1897 when forested land was cleared by European settlers for commercial farming and some areas were cleared to support the supply...

Climate change is being increasingly recognized as a developmental and environmental issue. We need information about the likely impacts of climate change on human society, the options for responding to climate change, and the trade-offs between policy choices and their effectiveness, benefits, risks and costs (Dessler and Parson 2009). Climate change mitigation and adaptation need to be mainstreamed into all development policies, programs and activities, and funding decisions to achieve sustainable development (Agarwal and Perrin 2008). The first step in mainstreaming climate change is to understand how it is linked to the development challenges of the particular sector under consideration...

This review covered the policies and legislation in Kenya that are relevant to climate change adaptation and mitigation. It indicates that there are multiple pieces of legislation, regulations and draft policies that directly or indirectly address issues of climate change. At the moment, there is no clear national policy on climate change except the national climate change strategy and national climate change action plan (2013–2017). However, the new climate change policy is in the process of being developed.

The various policies and institutional frameworks have led to weak coordination in basic approaches to addressing the challenges that the nation...