REDUCING OUR CARBON FOOTPRINT

The Scope of the Kasigau Wildlife Corridor Reduction in Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD) Project is the 74,490 acres of land known as Rukinga Ranch in the Country of Kenya, Coast Province, Taita Taveta District, Voi Division.

This project will impact CO2 emissions by preventing the release of carbon from an existing indigenous forest, due to unplanned conversion to agricultural use by members of the neighboring communities.

Immediately prior to Wildlife Works taking over management of the land in 1997, the land was a failing cattle ranch, on which wildlife was being poached and slaughtered to protect the cattle, and to remove competition with the cattle for food and water. The surrounding community was aggressively converting the land at the edges of the property to farmland, right under the nose of the owners who were powerless to stop it. Wildlife Works immediately implemented a number of Community based sustainable economic development alternatives to gain the support of the community for restoring the land to health, and preventing any further deforestation. Over the past twelve years we succeeded in returning the ecosystem to health and bringing back the wildlife including threatened and endangered species such as African elephant (Loxidonta africana), Cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus), Lion (Panthera leo), Grevy’s Zebra (Equus grevyi) and African Hunting Dog (Lycaon pictus).

The historical pattern of deforestation in the area is caused by an increasing population who have run out of land in their historic areas, and who are looking for new land on which to practice subsistence agriculture. Unfortunately the land in the Kasigau Wildlife Corridor is right at the frontier of this population expansion, and this land has no permanent water sources and receives extremely low rainfall and is therefore unsuitable for even the most basic agriculture. Unfortunately the people don’t realize this until after they have cleared the native forest and attempted to grow crops. When the crops repeatedly fail, they move on and clear more Forest, hoping they will find the “magic” location on which their crops will grow. The result is rapid desertification as once the forest cover is removed the soil has no protection from the equatorial sun and degrades quickly. This pattern is very obvious on the edges of the Kasigau Wildlife Corridor project, and even occurred on several thousand acres of Rukinga Sanctuary in the years leading up to Wildlife Works taking over management of the land.

This is where Wildlife Works 12 years of experience really comes into play, planning and implementing appropriate sustainable development solutions for the community, that are not in conflict with the land being protected for its carbon and biodiversity values, and in fact that require the community to protect the forest and biodiversity in order to continue to reap the econo0mic benefits that Wildlife Works programs provide. We plan to expand our community development activities in the following three areas;

Manufacture of eco-friendly apparel and accessories
this has been Wildlife Works core activity in the project since 2001, and provides jobs, skills and income to young women from within the community. Our products are exported to the US and Europe and sold online at www.wildlifeworks.com. We would explore creating satellite facilituiues in other villages surrounding the Corridor Project to extend our economic influence further afield, and gain broader support for the corridor project.

Organic greenhouse
Wildlife Works introduced the first organically grown source of citrus and other cash fruit crop trees in Kenya, providing local farmers with subsidized access to commercially accepted varietals of fruit trees grafted onto local hardy rootstock. This project also supplies chili bushes to farmers which can act as a deterrent to elephant raiding the farmer’s crops, and agroforestry species such as Neem and Marabaini, which have medicinal and food value, fast growing trees to provide for the communities fuelwood needs, and indigenous hardwood trees to reforest areas that have been hit hard by the illegal charcoal trade.

Dryland farming project
Wildlife Works has initiated a project with the Kenyan Agricultural Research Institute (KARI) to explore the commercial growing of Jojoba on the farms surrounding the Kasigau Wildlife Corridor. Jojoba is a non-conflict crop in that elephants don’t eat it, nor do any other wild animals, and it is extremely drought tolerant, and the oil that is produced from the seeds is of high value in the cosmetic industry for soaps and lotions.

In addition to providing the community with sustainable development opportunities that outweigh the economic advantage they might gain from conversion of the forest, it is important that we address the forest product needs that neighboring communities have. We have acquired research that indicates that when a rural African community has uncontrolled access to a “free” source of fuelwood they can use up to 5x as much wood as they really need to meet their daily cooking and heating requirements. Therefore the actual amount of fuel required to provide for their needs once illegal access to the “free” resource is removed, is relatively small. We plan to address this need in two ways; firstly we will be providing fast growing fuelwood trees for free from our greenhouse project to members of the community so they can grow their own fuel and building timbers in community or private woodlots. Secondly we will be removing the access to the other illegal sources of fuelwood in the community in Phase II of our project to prevent them from shifting their illegal use pattern to adjacent forest, and encouraging them to make a serious effort to provide for their own fuelwood needs within the community woodlots we will establish.

Wildlife Works is following the California Climate Action Registry’s (CCAR) Carbon Accounting protocol as described in their Forest Project Protocol document Version 2.1. We believe that this is the most robust approach to defining the allowable Greenhouse Gas Emissions for the purposes of Carbon Credit generation existing today, and the VCS has supported this idea by naming the CCAR Protocol as the only approved VCS methodology for Avoided Deforestation or REDD projects.

We have been working with a CCAR approved Forestry Consultancy, Foresters Co-Op to produce our carbon sink accounting. They helped us to develop our plot sampling methodology, a copy of which is available on request. We sampled over 100 plots on Rukinga, identifying and recording over 3000 individual trees. We performed destructive harvest weight vs. diameter at breast height (DBH) analysis of the main tree and shrub species found on Rukinga as the literature for Carbon Forestry was all developed in the US and Europe and as a result no data was available for African dryland tree species such as those found on Rukinga, so we had to create our own data, reviewed by third parties such as the Kenyan Forest Research Institute, and Foresters Co-op for accuracy.

This is a REDD (or Avoided Conversion in CCAR nomenclature) project with the most likely scenario of unplanned deforestation resulting in annual crops, and therefore we are including the following pools;

Estimate Carbon in Trees from Sample Plots - INCLUDED
Estimate Carbon Standing Dead Biomass from Sample Plots - INCLUDED
Estimate Carbon in Lying Dead Wood - INCLUDED
Estimate Carbon in Wood Products – EXCLUDED - No wood products have been or will be removed from the forest under baseline or project scenarios
Estimate Carbon in Shrubs and Herbaceous Understory from Sample Plots – INCLUDED
Estimate of Carbon in Litter and Duff – EXCLUDED – insignificant due to dry climate
and tree species
Estimate of Carbon Tons in Soil – INCLUDED