Imenti south district NEMA officer, Damaris Maina decried laxity among those entrusted with the implementation of development projects in having updated Environmental Impact Assessments carried out before commencing the actual activities.
Speaking to the media at Nkubu, Maina reiterated that an Environmental Impact Assessment report was a mandatory requirement for every development project to be given a clean bill of health to safeguard life and property at the end of the day.
She pointed out that NEMA as a regulatory entity should not be seen to be working against any development project since it was only striving to regulate such activities to ensure no project was a potential disaster on completion.
The NEMA officer also noted that in the absence of an Environmental Impact Assessment report for any project, those entrusted with the responsibility of implementing such a project should be ready to answer an audit query.
She also cited the need to have funds allocated for the mandatory exercise in the initial budgets of all development projects since lack of such funds had emerged as a major challenge for those entrusted with project implementation.
Maina observed that the district had many quarry sites posing a lot of damage to the environment but the main challenge was most of the quarry sites were located in privately owned land whereby the owners were very adamant towards protecting the environment.
She however appealed for support from the provincial administration and other relevant players in ensuring quarry activities were suspended especially at this time when the area was receiving heavy downpours to avoid possible land slides in the already degraded areas.
The environment officer further cited the need to mobilize and sensitize quarry land owners on the importance of harvesting the flood water and store the same for future utilization instead of having it flood into the galleys created by quarry activities.
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