Impact of Tourism on Environment in Kenya
Discussion Paper No. 19
Abstract
Tourism is a leading economic activity in Kenya, being the third largest foreign exchange earner after tea and horticulture. Since the 1990s, particularly the second half of the decade, Kenya’s tourism industry has faced enormous challenges, including declines in per capita spending, average length of stay, hotel occupancy rates, hotel room rates and service quality. Environmental degradation and deterioration in the quality of tourism products due to mass tourism are some of the factors that have contributed to this decline. Despite the country’s policy advocating spatial distribution of tourists in the country, tourism marketing has continued to focus on the traditional attractions, thereby perpetuating concentration.
This paper looks at how tourism has affected the environment in Kenya and what is being done about it. Using existing literature and results of discussions with 17 industry players, the study found evidence, though most of it qualitative, of environmental impacts. The impacts are most severe in crowded and overdeveloped tourist attractions. At the coast, which accounts for close to 60% of the country’s total bed-nights, beaches have been seriously degraded and polluted, coral reefs and mangrove forests substantially destroyed and marine species adversely affected. Too many hotels and other tourist facilities have been developed without regard to carrying capacity limits. In game parks, which are the prime motivation for 70–80% of all tourists visiting the country, vegetation has been degraded, wildlife behaviour disrupted, pollution increased, and resources have generally been overutilized.
Sections of the Kenyan tourism industry have implemented some of the mitigation recommendations made at the global level, such as using technology to minimize resource use and to treat wastes, recycling wastewater and other wastes, rehabilitating degraded tourist attractions by planting trees and through other measures, and training staff on conservation. Partnership programmes involving the government, the industry and local communities—such as the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) and the Beach Management Programme—are achieving tremendous success.
The majority of the industry’s operators, however, routinely ignore environmental regulations and use ecofriendly jargon as mere commercial mantras. Mitigation efforts in the country are constrained by weak institutions; lack of coordination of institutions dealing with tourism; corruption; mismanagement; inadequate political and administrative capacity; policy failure, including the lack of an effective land-use policy; the persistence of a mining mentality in some of the institutions with responsibility overprotected areas; inadequate incentives (such as secure property and access rights) to stimulate interest of local people in conservation; poor tourism performance since the mid-1990s; poor marketing and inadequacy of marketing resources; physical insecurity and rampant poaching; and the high cost of changing these practices.
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