In a significant push for a healthier planet, calls are mounting for enhanced trans-disciplinary collaborations between the health sector and other sectors such as the environment, industry, and education. The goal is to collectively formulate robust policies and guidelines that will drive environmental sustainability initiatives within the health sector.
According to Dr. Wambeti twahir a lecturer from the Faculty of Health Sciences Department of Dental Sciences, one of the major barriers towards realizing environmental sustainability is the clinicians and members of environmental protection organizations nature of working in silos instead of collaboratively so as to come up with legislations and policies and guidelines to address complex environmental challenges.
“We don’t have that cohesiveness that one would expect in something as crosscutting as this area,” she added speaking during a webinar hosted by Faculty of Health Sciences (FHS) Environmental Sustainability Committee to sensitize staff and students on environmental sustainability on 15th April 2026.
She further added that the clinical practice is riddled with a staggering waste generation problem especially from single use plastics mainly due to the direct conflict between waste management and infection prevention. This therefore, calls for the need to involve players in the environmental sector to partner with medical and training institutions to come up with policies on how to carry out waste management sustainably.
“Environmental sustainability is more than just switching off taps, using water and conservatively and tree planting, we should think about how we use and dispose the waste from the sterile equipments we use and also think about how to reduce patient visits to reduce carbon footprint,” she added.
Her sentiments were echoed by Dr. Mary Kinoti a member of FHS Environmental Sustainability Committee who faulted poor waste management of medical waste for air pollution, she pointed to the harmful fumes released from the Kenyatta National Hospital incinerator as a major cause for environmental degradation.
Dr. Kinoti suggested creation of a task force with members drawn from environmental sustainability organizations, KNH and UoN to address how to curb environmental degradation caused by KNH and UoN FHS.
Also speaking at the webinar was Dr. Bessy Kathambi, a lecturer in Environmental management and Governance at Wangari Mathai Institute, University of Nairobi, who emphasized on the need for holistic environmental sustainability.
Dr. Kathambi defined environmental sustainability as the ability to maintain ecological balance over time ensuring that the needs of the present generation are met without jeopardizing the capacity of future generations to fulfill their own need.
She further linked environmental sustainability to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). According to her, the SDGs are mutually exclusive to each other and in order to have an ideal sustainable environment the different SDGs must work together.
“We cannot talk about energy without talking about environment, all these SDGs are interrelated and they build on each other, for example for SDG 6, if we don’t have access to clean water, we will always be sick that means the SDG 3 of good health will not be achieved.”
She further added that sustainable development is dependent on sufficient economy, a viable natural environment and a nurturing community
“If we want to have sustainable development then society and the environment and economics must work together, all these SDGs are geared on these 3 aspects they cannot work without each other,” she additionally stated.
Dr. Kathambi encouraged uptake of environmental sustainability practices like using of renewable energy like solar to replace fossil fuels, adopting green building, waste management for example, recycling plastic into usable products, industries adopting circular economy in their production.
She further encouraged urban forestry and sustainable agriculture, organic farming, crop rotation and precision irrigation.
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