Ol Lentille Conservancy part 3: Conservation for development

Seeing the very visible and dramatic changes in the health of this land, and also the tourism and community development benefits (such as education and healthcare programmes) the area was receiving, neighbouring communities asked to participate in the conservation programme. So the Ol Lentille Conservancy is now 20,000 acres belonging to 4 communities. This year we are set to go to close to 30,000 acres as a fifth community comes on board.

Now we know we can save degraded land and bring it back into good health, we have started scientific monitoring of plants and soil quality. We work with Kenyan environmental consultants Wajibu MS to do this. We have trained local monitoring staff and had Speedbird satellite imagery done to enable this. The International Livestock Research Institute whose global headquarters is in Nairobi has provided innovative, easily learned, monitoring methodologies to us. The science of course is interesting, but it’s what we can do with it to benefit the community landowners that makes it worthwhile. And that is the prospect of carbon trading!

Ngabolo School children on a day out in the Ol Lentille Conservancy

The 'carbon credits' phenomenon has been accused of a. not working to combat climate change and b. encouraging exploitation of developing countries. This may well be true at some levels. Of course the trading has to be done right, like all development programmes- the 'how' matters. Wangari Maathai, Nobel Peace Laureate, has endorsed the involvement of tree-farming in her Green Belt Movement in the Carbon market, knowing that if done right, carbon trading has true potential. Conservation here is about people, and finding a way to allow communities to sustain their way of life by improving their environment. Carbon trading can do that for this community. It provides an incentive to conserve land, bringing wildlife back into the area and retaining an ancient ecosystem. Income from carbon could provide potentially massive social development through funding education and healthcare programmes. 

Elephant in Ol Lentille Conservancy, Jan 2011. There are now almost too many
elephants in the area; there were none 6 years ago.

It is little appreciated that the quantity of soil organic carbon (SOC) on Planet Earth far exceeds the carbon “sequestered” in the attention-grabbing rainforests. Now don’t get me wrong – the rainforests must certainly be saved. But with the exception of ILRI, little scientific attention is being paid to SOC, and no scientific methodologies for determining it and monitoring it have been so far approved for carbon-trading purposes. With the inadequacy of Earth Summits, especially the Copenhagen failure, we cannot see when this will be resolved. But resolved it must be.

The Ol Lentille Conservancy beneficiary communities could, we conservatively estimate, have an income of many hundreds of thousands of dollars over a 15 year period from 2015 by trading their carbon rights. This would be a major addition to their portfolio of income generating activities.

Tourism- one of the Lentille community's major income-generating activities

You may have concluded that we can improve SOC levels just by resting land. You would be right in the short term. However, in the long term land can be over-rested. If grasses are insufficiently grazed they eventually become rank and moribund, and cease to replenish the soil organic matter and nutrients especially in a semi-arid climate like ours.

Of course, wildlife is the first to benefit in the Conservancy from improved grass and plant cover. However, when you have as much grass as we have you need a large number of big bulk grazers like zebra and buffalo, and it is only this year that zebra have returned to this area after long absence. And the three buffalo who visited us last August have long since disappeared. On a sidenote, we are very excited that our new zebra population consists of both the common Burchell’s zebra, and also the highly endangered Grevy’s zebra (less than 1500 left on earth).

The endangered Grevy's zebra- the
Laikipia-Samburu ecosystem is their last major stronghold

So what to do? We are planning to put cattle back in the Conservancy! Read on next week to find out why and how we have gone full-circle.

Allowing cattle into the conservancy would benefit both conservation
and the cattle for whom there is not much food elsewhere: a
double benefit for the community members