A little over a month after Kenya adopted the amended Climate Act, the government evicted the residents of Sasimwani, Narok County, from their homes. David Ndaraiya, a leader of the forest-dwelling Ogiek community, recounts the distressing scenes of houses being demolished and set ablaze, during fresh evictions on November 2, 2023.
“Families were forcibly displaced from the only place they called home, leaving them with no alternative shelter even as the country continued to experience heavy rainfall,” says Ndaraiya.
Months later, they are still living in a makeshift camp at a nearby shopping centre.
Their compatriots residing in Kiptunga Forest, Nakuru County, faced a similar fate on 10 December 2023, as their cowsheds were razed by people they say were staff of the Kenya Forest Service (KFS). Their livestock was confiscated and driven to service stations, and they were given a stern warning to vacate the area. Even though subsequent interventions by community leaders, and later, a conservatory court order won by the community halted the evictions, KFS officers continued to seize their cattle and harass them.
Members of the forest-dwelling community have clashed with successive governments over their rights to their ancestral land since 1954 when the Mau Forest was officially gazetted as a national reserve under the Forest Act.
The Ogiek won a significant legal victory in 2017 affirming their rights to their ancestral land in the Mau Forest. A subsequent ruling by the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights in June 2022 directed the Kenyan government to return the land to the community. However, the government has defied these judgments.
Mr Ndaraiya believes that the renewed harassment stems from the government’s interest in benefitting from carbon credits calculated from the forests. These sentiments are shared by Evans Mswahili Ladema, a community paralegal involved in climate justice work. He says that the expulsion of forest-dwelling communities from Kenya’s natural forests is based on the pretext that their presence devalues the potential carbon credits that could be accrued.
What are carbon credits?
Carbon credits are permits allowing companies to emit a specific amount of carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases, with one credit equating to one tonne of emissions. To combat climate change, global agreements like the Paris Agreement aim to limit global warming to below 2°C, ideally 1.5°C, above pre-industrial levels. To meet these goals, companies and countries must reduce emissions to net zero, meaning the amount emitted is balanced by what is naturally absorbed by ecosystems such as forests, soils, and oceans.
Companies can buy or be allocated carbon credits to offset emissions. If a company pollutes less, it can sell unused credits to others, creating a financial incentive to reduce emissions. Companies may also buy credits from projects that prevent emissions or absorb carbon, such as tree planting or renewable energy projects, creating carbon offsets. Kenya is considered carbon-positive, absorbing more carbon than it emits due to its vast forests, grasslands, and wetlands that act as carbon sinks. Kenya emits around 21 million tonnes of carbon dioxide annually from sectors like energy, transportation, and industry. In comparison, richer countries emit significantly more; for example, the United States emits 4.9 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide annually, while the European Union collectively emits around 2.5 billion tonnes. On a per capita basis, Kenya’s emissions are much lower, about 0.4 tonnes per person compared to the US, which emits around 14.2 tonnes per person, and the EU, which emits an average of 7.3 tonnes per person. Although Kenya’s per capita emissions are relatively low due to reliance on clean energy, deforestation, urbanisation, and industrialisation could increase emissions. Sustainable land management and the expansion of renewable energy are critical for maintaining Kenya’s carbon-positive status and addressing climate change.
Trees are a key component of the carbon credit scheme because they absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, through photosynthesis, offsetting carbon emissions. Therefore, companies, individuals and governments can purchase carbon credits to counteract their emissions by paying to plant or protect trees.
If people live in the forest, there’s the assumption that they could cut the trees, thus reducing the capacity of a forest to absorb more carbon dioxide, and consequently, reduce the value of the carbon credits.
Mr Ladema says that Kenya’s natural resource management laws are rooted in a colonial mentality that views citizens as a threat to natural resources, rather than as custodians. Consequently, the indigenous technical knowledge that could be applied to the sustainable utilisation of natural resources is often disregarded.
Foreign influence
Instead, Kenya’s climate policies are largely shaped by foreign influences. Anne Njoroge, an advocate of the High Court and Programme Officer at Natural Justice explains that Article 2, Sections (5) and (6) of the Constitution provides that all the international laws ratified by Kenya become part of our legal framework. This means that Kenya is legally bound to the stipulation of the Paris Agreement. All that is required is for Kenya’s parliament to develop guidelines to domesticate this agreement.
A few days after the inaugural Africa Climate Summit in September 2023, President Ruto assented to the Climate Change (Amendment) Bill 2023 that integrated carbon markets into the Climate Change Act of 2016 to establish a framework for Kenya to tap into the global carbon markets. Ms Njoroge explains that the amendments were in response to the Africa Carbon Markets Initiative launched in 2022 during the 27th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP27) held in Egypt.
The initiative identified 13 programmes to support the growth of voluntary carbon markets across Africa. These programmes aim to produce 300 million carbon credits annually by 2030, generating US$6 billion in revenue, and 1.5 billion credits annually by 2050, providing US$120 billion in revenue. For Africa to produce 300 million carbon credits annually, several critical steps and measures would need to be taken across various sectors. These include investments in renewable energy such as solar, wind, hydroelectric, and geothermal projects. African countries, such as Kenya have to implement large-scale tree planting and forest restoration, adopt climate-smart farming practices and start using energy-saving technologies in industries, buildings, and transport.
For this to happen, African governments need to access global climate funds and investments from development banks and attract private investments through public-private partnerships. They also need to enact policies promoting renewable energy, sustainable land use, energy efficiency, and establish and join regional and international carbon markets.
Kenya’s inclusion in the initiative called for a law that would govern carbon markets, hence the rush to amend the Climate Act to include a framework on carbon markets. Further, debt and aid influence local environmental policy. Before the Financing Locally-led Climate Action (FLLoCA) programme developed with the support of the World Bank and the governments of Denmark and Sweden, only eight counties in Kenya had a climate change fund. To benefit from the programme and receive funding, the other 39 counties had to establish a County Climate Change Fund, which involves setting aside at least 2 per cent of their development budget towards climate-related issues.
Counties created the fund by reducing allocations for other existing but underfunded development projects. Counties also set up climate change committees, including Ward Climate Change Councils.
Copy-pasted policies
Ms Njoroge notes that the effects of the rush to align policy with particular funding opportunities meant that counties didn’t take time to adapt their policies to their local contexts and unique challenges. Natural Justice research on climate change governance structures found a lot of copy-pasting of structures across counties. Ms Njoroge also points out that while, ideally, a law should be in place to inform regulations, some counties formulated regulations before passing the anchoring law.
Local needs are sacrificed at the altar of foreign interests. For instance, the eviction of forest-dwelling communities and the amendment of the Climate Act to remove the requirement for the National Climate Change Council to include a representative with indigenous knowledge from a marginalised community indicates a lack of emphasis on incorporating indigenous knowledge into national climate policies. The need for climate adaptation is also overlooked.
What is climate adaptation?
Climate adaptation involves taking actions that help communities respond to the effects of climate change. Initiatives such as planting drought-resistant crops, agroforestry, water harvesting and irrigation (climate-smart agriculture), and implementing early warning systems for addressing natural disasters are all forms of adaptation. It also includes building more resilient infrastructure that can withstand extreme weather, such as the recent widespread flooding after torrential rain in Kenya. Such measures would help save lives, reduce damage to property and increase community resilience to climate-related disasters by boosting their ability to respond and bounce back from extreme weather events.
Without adaptation, climate change poses a severe threat to Kenya’s economy, which is heavily reliant on rain-fed agriculture, natural resources, and tourism – all of which are vulnerable to climate variability and extreme weather events. The World Bank projects a potential loss of up to 7.25 per cent of GDP by 2050 if concrete measures are not implemented to adapt and mitigate these effects. This emphasises the urgency for Kenya to enact robust and tailored climate policies that are not only effective but also locally driven and aligned with the country’s unique environmental needs.
The most affected countries in the Global South – like Kenya – need support for adaptation as they reel under the effects of climate change. However, Ms Lynn Modesta who works with the Kenya Climate Change Working Group (KCCWG), says adaptation “has no profit margin, hence no gain for developed countries”.
“In most scenarios, the funding coming to us is for mitigation. That includes the carbon markets which are about reducing emissions by trading these reductions as carbon credits to other countries,” says Ms Modesta.
While adaptation is about building resilience, mitigation focuses on reducing emissions and enhancing carbon sinks, for instance, by increasing tree cover.
Ms Njoroge of Natural Justice adds that in signing international treaties, the government aligns itself to receive more funding for our climate change needs, compelling us to create regulations based on what some developed countries want.
“For instance, we recently changed our climate change laws because there was a lot of funding coming into the country for carbon markets, and the interest in investment in those markets from both the private sector and governments of developed countries,” she explains.
Developed countries, which are responsible for 79 per cent of global emissions, promised US$100 billion per year for climate action in developing countries, and analysis of financial data by the Center for Global Development (CGD) indicates that they met their goal of raising the promised funds for climate aid in 2022, two years past the original deadline. However, they achieved this by relabelling existing aid, contrary to widespread expectations that developed countries should provide new climate finance in addition to existing aid. The analysis suggests that while 66 per cent of climate finance was newly added, the remaining 34 per cent was repurposed or rebranded from existing development funds.
In this imperfect system, there are still glimmers of hope. For instance, although counties set up climate structures to adhere to FLLoCA programme conditions and attract funding, they now have climate change frameworks. This has grown local institutional capacity which is part of FLLoCA’s mandate.
Local interests also triumphed in the case challenging the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) licence issued to Amu Power for the Lamu Coal-fired Power Plant by the National Environment Management Authority. Kenya’s development of a National Action Plan (NAP) on Business and Human Rights in 2016 for the implementation of the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights was key to the success of this case.
Ms Njoroge of Natural Justice, which was part of that case, explains that one of the advocacy strategies used was targeting financiers of the project by looking at their business policies and climate commitments and pointing out the flaws in that particular project. The court nullified the licence due to a lack of effective public participation, and the omission of the environmental impact assessment. As a result, the financiers pulled out.
Environmental advocates call for the government to ensure that the international treaties and agreements it signs contribute positively to the country’s climate policies without compromising its sovereignty or local interests.
Mr Ladema recommends implementing stronger environmental governance systems and structures that prioritise policies informed by our lived experiences and aspirations as citizens. Ms Njoroge recommends that, instead of the outside-in approach, where domestic climate policies are largely informed by commitments at the international level, our policies should be informed by our needs. This can be achieved through meaningful public participation forums, where communities can learn about and discuss proposed changes in the frameworks in their local languages, enabling them to give input on the suggested changes. Ms Njoroge adds that indebtedness and aid dependency affect sovereignty and self-determination to the extent that we have less bargaining power to negotiate for and implement interventions that are good for us.
The influence of foreign actors on Kenya’s climate policies has unfolded a complex interplay between global engagements and local imperatives. While international collaboration and aid have offered crucial assistance, they have also prompted concerns regarding national sovereignty and the alignment of agendas. For Kenya to forge sustainable climate strategies, it is crucial to navigate these dynamics, ensuring that external contributions complement rather than dictate its environmental objectives.
“Our interventions are largely dependent on the entity funding them,” she says. The trajectory of Kenya’s climate policies hinges on embracing a balanced approach that leverages global expertise and resources while steadfastly safeguarding Kenya’s autonomy and asserting its agenda. Achieving this equilibrium is pivotal in shaping climate policies that will pave the way towards a resilient and sustainable future amidst the challenges posed by climate change.
“Kenya needs a long-term strategic plan for climate change adaptation and mitigation that is native to us, and that will be our template for future points of engagement and collaboration with external actors,” she adds.
Balancing foreign influence and local needs in Kenya’s climate policies requires a strategic approach. International partnerships should support, not dictate, Kenya’s agenda. By involving local communities, using indigenous knowledge, and focusing on sustainable development, Kenya can become a leader in climate action. A long-term, locally driven strategy will enhance resilience and set an example for other countries.
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This article was produced as part of the Aftershocks Data Fellowship (22–23) with support from the Africa Women’s Journalism Project (AWJP) in partnership with The ONE Campaign and the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ).
