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Letter from Chair of Board of Trustees

Dear Friends of the Kenya Wildlife Trust,

2020 was said to be a critical year for the world’s nations to commit to preserving
and restoring biodiversity, with China scheduled to host the 15th meeting of the
Conference of the Parties (COP15) to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity
in Kunming. 2020 was also supposed to provide an opportunity to ramp up the
start of the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration (2021 – 2030), intended to
massively scale up the restoration of degraded and destroyed ecosystems to
fight the climate crisis and enhance food security, water supply and biodiversity.
World Environment Day this year was scheduled to be hosted by Colombia, in
partnership with Germany, with a focus on biodiversity.

Sadly, as we know, humans as a species are themselves struggling to survive in a
deadly war with Covid-19. Nothing since the outbreak of “Spanish Flu” in 1918,
after the end of World War 1, has threatened to destroy human lives and the
global economy in such a devastating scale as Covid-19. Ironically, some pluses
for the environment are already being noticed, like reduced carbon emissions
and cleaner air, but these gains are likely to be short-lived without the collective
will of nations to use the breathing space provided by the Corona virus crisis,
to create a new blueprint to reverse Climate Change. At the same time as the
planet is experiencing a pause in its exploitation, Covid-19 is threatening to
unleash a new wave of destruction of the Earth’s biodiversity, as people across
the world look to wildlife poaching for food and commercial gain, illegal logging
and charcoal burning, to provide them with the means to fend off starvation.

4 KENYA WILDLIFE TRUST ANNUAL REPORT 2019 KENYA WILDLIFE TRUST ANNUAL REPORT 2019