By OUR CORRESPONDENT
The Sports Journalists Association of Kenya (SJAK) marked the 2025 World Sports Journalists Day with an enriching theme which is ‘to enhance environmental sustainability in sports”.
Sports scribes in Kenya observed this auspicious occasion in Nairobi on Wednesday during the official launch of the Nairobi City Marathon set for Uhuru Gardens in the Kenyan capital this Sunday.
The global race has so far attracted 15000 participants drawn from 75 countries.
SJAK President James Waindi remarked that journalists across the globe have the responsibility to spread the gospel of “clean air for athletes in sport”.
“Even as we continue to wage the battle against unfair competition through doping and age-cheating, sports journalists must also assume primary responsibility to ensure that our athletes compete in a conducive and healthy environment,” remarked Waindi.
The President of Athletics Kenya (AK) Lt. Gen. (Rtd) Jackson Tuwei, on his part, underscored the need for journalists to be trained on matters environmental sustainability, a campaign he believes will go a long way in ensuring a healthy planet with clean air, water, and resources.
“Air quality plays a critical role in the well-being of athletics, impacting both athlete health and performance. Plans are afoot to organize a media workshop on environmental sustainability in sports, to help journalists understand its dynamics,” highlighted Tuwei.
AK is actively collaborating with the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) to integrate sustainability and environmental conservation into the world of athletics in the county.
Tuwei explained that the UNEP/SEI initiative focuses on addressing air quality issues and indeed promoting climate action within the sports ecosystem.
Dr. Anderson Kehbila, the Programme Leader for Natural Resources and Ecosystems at SEI Africa, underlined how poor air quality directly impacts performance and recovery capacity of athletes.
In Sunday’s marathon, SEI will install ‘air quality sensors’ in designated areas of the Marathon course to monitor air quality and indeed ensure athletes run in a safer and healthier environment.
Among the partners involved in Nairobi City Marathon’s air quality initiative alongside SEI, include Nairobi County (waste management), Roam Electric (sustainable mobility), KMD (heat stress via heat maps) and CIFOR-ICRAF (greening the marathon/tree growing).
“We will be installing air quality sensors along the marathon course to ensure athletes run in a safer environment. Air pollution levels are higher during weekdays, as a result of a higher level of transport along that route, but on Sundays it’s slow because there is less travel along that route,” said Kehbrila.
On 13th August 2021, AK became the first national athletics Federation to join World Athletics as a signatory of the United Nations Climate Change (UNFCCC) UN Sport for Climate Action (S4CA) Framework.
The objective of the initiative is for sports organisations to help implement the Paris Agreement and to accelerate the transformative change needed to reach greenhouse gas neutrality in the second half of the twenty first century.
