There is a world somewhere between reality and fiction. Although ignored by many, it is very real and so are those living in it. This forum is about the natural world. Here, wild animals will be heard and respected. The forum offers a glimpse into an unknown world as well as a room with a view on the present and the future. Anyone able to speak on behalf of those living in the emerald forest and the deep blue sea is invited to join.
Whatever the offset’s climate benefits, Survival International says there’s another, more immediate problem with the project. For it to work, Indigenous communities in the conservancies need to agree to bring their herding practices under a new form of management, with the ultimate goal being to convert them into a monetizable carbon credit. That means that older systems of livestock management that already existed in those communities are giving way to that new system. Not everyone is pleased with the change.
“It’s already automatic that we look after our vegetation and environment so that we can keep our livestock there,” said Abdullahi Gonjobe, chairman of the Borana Council of Elders, in a phone interview with Mongabay. “It’s not something that we are supposed to be told. We are born with it, it’s Indigenous knowledge that we have.”
But NRT says the changes aren’t just good for the environment, they’re good for the communities themselves. While most of the revenue from the sale of the carbon credits either goes to the consultancy firm that markets the credits and helped set up the project, or direct operating costs for the conservancies, around a quarter of the proceeds end up in a “carbon community fund” that can be used to finance drought relief, scholarships and other local priorities.
Some researchers say those funds, and the bodies set up to administer them, can themselves be a source of division within pastoralist communities at times, though.
“With these conservancies, for communities there are pros and cons,” said Tahira Shariff, an anthropologist who studies pastoralism in Kenya. “There are a few members of the communities who support the conservancies because of the benefits, but for the majority of the population, especially in the pastoral areas where I come from, it has brought about a lot of division because of feelings of exclusion and that only a minority is involved in decision-making.”
NRT and its technical experts say they don’t agree that the new conservancy grazing councils are a major departure from preexisting systems. The grazing plans that form the basis of the offset are collaboratively written with the community’s leaders, they say, and then implemented directly by local conservancy managers, not outsiders.
“At no time in the project have we ever told people, this is where you should go and this is how many animals you should have,” Ritchie said. “The only thing the project has ever done is say that in order to regenerate your rangeland you need the following two rules of thumb: you never graze in any one area longer than a month, and when the grass gets shorter than a certain height, you leave.”
Describing the changes as a radical shift from centuries-old Indigenous practices is misleading, Ritchie told Mongabay. Those practices already changed after independence, when previously nomadic communities began to build more permanent settlements in areas where they could access government services, creating new pressures on local ecosystems and leading to unsustainable grazing.
“All of the decisions about where the herders go are still totally made by the communities,” he added. “They’re not made by the project at all.”
But Shariff bristled at the idea that herders need an external intervention to help them manage a landscape that’s been their home since long before Kenya was a state at all.
“I think one major problem that pastoralists have is these assumptions and this narrative that they’ve been doing things wrongly and need to be guided the right way,” she said. “For example, the Borana pastoralists that I’ve been researching for the last four years have a very sophisticated and organized way of managing grazing patterns.”
While Indigenous groups in the region are less nomadic than they used to be, the meager presence of government services in a few areas is only part of the explanation for why they’ve stopped moving around as much as they used to. The presence of infrastructure and conservation projects surrounding them on all sides is a bigger factor, Shariff said, not lack of knowledge or care about their ecosystem.
“I really disagree with the idea that pastoralists are grazing in an unplanned manner and now they need to be governed,” she said. “Actually it will bring lots of complication and competition among them.”
There’s also a cruel irony under the surface of the offset’s relationship with the conservancies. While emissions-heavy corporations in the U.S. purchase carbon credits generated by it, allowing them to claim progress toward their net-zero climate goals, the pastoralists who produce those credits are suffering some of climate change’s most devastating impacts. This year’s drought in Kenya is so bad that President Ruto has been urged to declare it a national disaster.
“Today, due to the prolonged drought, the livestock has perished,” said Gonjobe, the Borana elder. “Ninety percent of our livestock is gone. We are poor now.”
In the long run, the question of whether Netflix can confidently tell its customers that some of the emissions caused by their weekend streaming binge are being cleansed by Kenya’s soil may be moot — at least for those who’ve been walking on it for the past few thousand years.
“This drought is actually exacerbated by these land pressures, whereby people have to compete with development infrastructure, conservancies and farming groups,” Shariff said. “And pastoralists are dying squeezed in between them.”
