Date
20 Apr 2023
Using soil and land health monitoring tools to combat degradation
Kenya loses 2–2.4 percent of its gross domestic product annually due to the effects of climate change, such as drought and floods according to according to a 2018 Kenya National Bureau of Statistics study. Droughts alone cost the country 8 percent of GDP every five years. Arid and semi-arid rangelands (ASALs) occupy over 80 percent of Kenya’s landscape, and are home to about 36 percent of the total human population, and seventy per cent of the nation’s livestock and 90% of wildlife. Livestock's contributions account for 80 percent of household incomes in arid lands, and 65 percent in semi-arid lands.
In this context, the Centre for International Forestry Research and World Agroforestry (CIFOR-ICRAF) recently conducted systematic assessments of soil and land health across three ASAL landscapes in Kenya to better target and track rangeland restoration interventions. In addition, CIFOR-ICRAF led a demonstration training on the Land Degradation Surveillance Framework (LDSF) – a systematic landscape-level assessment of soil and ecosystem health – and a tour of CIFOR-ICRAF’s state-of-the-art Soil and Land Health Laboratory in Nairobi for project stakeholders.
The work is part of the Towards Ending Drought Emergencies: Ecosystem Based Adaptation in Kenya’s Arid and Semi-Arid Rangelands (TWENDE) project, which was launched in 2021 and aims to help reduce the cost of climate change-induced drought. Funded by the Green Climate Fund (GCF), and led by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the project is working with a myriad of implementing partners and service providers to positively impact 620,000 people in 11 counties and restore over 500,000 hectares of degraded rangelands in Kenya.
“In the livestock sector, the rangelands and general pastoral livelihoods, this project is contributing to improved adaptation to climate change of Kenya’s national policy of Ending Drought Emergencies, as outlined in Kenya Vision 2030,” expounds Blaise Okinyi, an official from Kenya’s Ministry of Agriculture Livestock Fisheries and Cooperatives - State Department of Livestock and TWENDE’s project coordinator. “This will strengthen climate change adaptation in Kenya’s arid and semi-arid lands which will in turn benefit 104,000 households spread over a landscape of 2.5 million hectares.
Over the past three years, Kenya has experienced its worst drought in 40 years. This is significant as the project’s target landscapes are dry season grazing areas: critical resource zones that provide refuge during periods of drought. Their existence depends on the availability of permanent water, which makes them hotspots for resource competition and land use change. They are used seasonally by large numbers of livestock keepers, often from multiple ethnic groups, following customary governance practices. Customary institutions have become weakened, leading to breakdowns in natural resource governance, degradation of resources, and escalating conflict.
In this critical context, TWENDE offers “an excellent opportunity to collaborate with multiple partners to restore rangelands across Kenya,” said Leigh Ann Winowiecki, Global Research Lead of Soil and Land Health at CIFOR-ICRAF. The 5-year project is divided into three components: climate-change-adapted planning for drought resilience, restoration of rangeland landscapes for ecosystem-based adaptation, and climate-change-resilient ecosystem management for investment.
The fourteen participants in the tour and training hailed from four of the project’s implementing partners – namely the Kenya Water Towers Agency (KWTA), Kenya’s State Department for Livestock (SDL), the National Drought Management Authority (NDMA), and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
Owing to CIFOR-ICRAF’s expertise and capacity in conducting large-scale land and soil health assessment studies across multiple contexts, including ASALs, the organisation was sub-contracted by the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Fisheries through the State Department of Livestock, as well as National Drought Management Authority (NDMA), to carry out the assessment. CIFOR-ICRAF’s mandate is to implement priority community-based rangeland restoration activities such as: (i) landscape-level stakeholder workshops to assess land degradation, (ii) collect data and soil samples using the LDSF, and (iii) perform data analytics including remote sensing, development of prediction models, production of maps, and database development to prioritize and track restoration activities overtime.
So far, two multi-stakeholder workshops have been organized and executed. Soil and land health sampling has been carried out in three counties using the LDSF – Marsabit, Kajiado, and Tana-river – and over two thousand soil samples have been analysed at CIFOR-ICRAF’s Nairobi laboratory. The LDSF training gave the project partners a glimpse of the comprehensive landscape mapping being carried out by CIFOR-ICRAF. The demonstration and intensive laboratory tour also gave them an opportunity to both understand the resulting data and also plan effectively for the remaining project phases for maximum impact.
Edith Bikeri, the Deputy Director for Ecosystem Research and Monitoring at KWTA, said that the training will be pivotal to KWTA in improving its research methodologies in the various functions it undertakes, including determining and mapping of degraded areas in water towers, land use and land cover analysis, obtaining socio-economic data for undertaking community resource assessments, developing ecosystem conservation plans, and carrying out total economic valuations for water towers.
“The resultant actions will lead to sustainable management of the Rangelands and ASALs through prioritizing areas with immediate need of conservation actions,” she said. “It will also inform policy in sustainable management and conservation of rangelands and ASALs, especially with regards to climate change mitigation and adaptation initiatives.”
CIFOR-ICRAF is now in the process of data analytics linking LDSF field data with the soil data, which will then be used to produce predictive maps and engage stakeholders with the generated evidence.
Learn More:
First-hand learning of the Land Degradation Surveillance Framework