Planned road across Kenyan park creates split between environmental costs and financial gains

In a dense layer of green thousands of feet above sea level, cedar, podo and hegeina trees pattern the landscape, thick moss hanging from their branches and feathery lichen attached to their barks. Numerous streams and rivers flow between them, plunging over steep waterfalls. Buffaloes, bushbucks and monkeys roam in search of pastures.

This is the Aberdare Range, a forest and mountain range in central Kenya that’s one of the country’s main water sources and a key wildlife habitat.

But it may not remain the same.

The government wants to build a 32-mile tarmac road to connect two counties, and the country’s environmental agency, the National Environment Management Authority, issued an environmental impact assessment license for the project last month. The project would cut through 15 miles of closed