Launch of an interactive online forestry and climate change decision-support tool for Kenya

Background

Forest and tree resources in Kenya play an important role in the provision of goods and services. Specifically, they are a source of biomass energy to over 80% of the rural dwellers; and income, employment and livelihood. They also serve as safety nets when agricultural production systems fail to address the global hunger of over 800 million malnourished people and the increasing demand for a balanced diet for the ever-burgeoning human population. Further, forests are a habitat for wildlife and a home for biodiversity.

Kenya is a party to United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and therefore is obligated to provide updates on progress towards emission reduction. In this regard, the country provides updates on forest cover change with the latest one showing that Kenya is on a positive trajectory where in 2013, the forest cover was at 6.99% which increased to 8.83% in 2021. This is slightly below the 10% recommended forest cover by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. The country also took the first tree cover assessment and established 12.13% tree cover, which is slightly above the 10% constitutional requirements. This has provided new impetus to the country to keep the improvement of forest and tree cover to meet Kenya’s development agenda. In this regard, the government of Kenya has revised its new ambitions to increase tree cover to at least 30% by 2032 by planting 15 billion trees and improving forest cover to at least 10% by 2030. To achieve this, the country has developed relevant strategies and policies to aid the realization of the new targets which require public-private partnership.

Despite this significant progress, the country is still experiencing the serious impact of climate change across various sectors of social and economic development. The forest sector is expected to contribute to an emission reduction of 20.1 MtCO₂e by 2030. This will be realized through afforestation, reforestation, rehabilitation of degraded forest landscapes and addressing drivers of deforestation and forest degradation in addition to massive tree planting on farmlands. This is buttressed by the fact that forest and tree-based resources play a significant role in climate change mitigation through carbon sequestration and restoration of degraded landscapes. They also enhance resilience to climate change by providing various alternatives to cope with the impacts of climate change and climate variability. This way, forest and tree resources provide both mitigation and adaptation benefits as evident in their inclusion in Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs).

However, the success of forest-based climate mitigation and adaptation will strongly depend on the available data to guide decision-making. It is in this regard that institutions are investing in tools and methodologies to guide planning for afforestation and reforestation programmes considering various scenarios of climate change.

Goals and Objectives 

• To support Kenyan decision-making by providing spatial information related to forestry and climate change over the 21st century;
• To provide an easy-to-use, publicly available web application that conveys data on how forests could change under various climate change scenarios; and
• To train and disseminate this tool to relevant Kenyan stakeholders via an in-person workshop.

Deliverables from the workshop

• A web application for exploring climate change and forestry-related decision support that is co-developed by SEI Africa, the CSU team and KEFRI;
• A set of forest cover and climate change scenarios that are directly relevant to Kenyan forestry-related decision-making, as well as Sustainable Development Goals; and
• A set of web-based guidance (text and video) for how to use the Web application.