Fauna and Flora International

I'm loving their It's In Our Hands initiative, raising awareness of the plight of endangered species. As Laikipia residents we are particularly in line with their cause. Laikipia, an unprotected area of community and private ranchland, has higher numbers of wildlife than anywhere in Kenya except the Maasai Mara. Wildlife numbers are increasing in Laikipia, whereas they are decreasing in the rest of East Africa.

Eastern Black Rhino in Laikipia

Laikipia is home to Kenya's highest populations of endangered species (large mammals) including half of Kenya's rhino population and 37% of all Eastern Black Rhinos in Africa. 70% of the global population (a mere 3000) of grevy's zebra live in Laikipia (including on the Ol Lentille Conservancy) as do similar numbers of reticulated giraffe.

Reticulated giraffe in Lentille Conservancy, April 2011

We frequently have packs of African Wild Dog denning at Lentille, and Laikipia has the 6th largest population of this highly endangered animal worldwide. Jackson's Hartebeest, Patas monkey...I could go on. Laikipia is a hugely important ecosystem to so many threatened species so I wanted to highlight this World Environment Day (yesterday) campaign by FFI to bring this issue to the forefront of conservation discourse.

FFI have asked people to upload images of themselves holding a piece of paper with the name of an endangered species on it to their online library:

"As the library of images grow, so too will global awareness not only of the futures of thousands of species on the brink of extinction, but also of human involvement in it – from both negative and positive angles. These images will create a link from the people championing them, directly back to the species they’ve written on their paper sign"

Here is my contribution:

Ol Lentille Conservancy part 5: the future is global

We now have a community with diversified livelihoods, less dependent on livestock, which are so vulnerable to the massive problem of climate change. The land is improving, lessening the impact of climate change, the potential for abundant grazing is around the corner; and there is the prospect of carbon income.

So how does the community perceive these changes? In the (in)famous words of Bill Clinton (no not those words ;)):

This community has so far sacrificed 20,000 acres of their land for conservation. They could have used the grazing, or they could have rented it out. They could have put 2000 cattle onto that land for 6 months of the year. And they could have had an income from it of $30,000 per year. Instead, total economic input from all sources generated by the Project has averaged $400,000 a year for the past 5 years.

In itself this is a community development challenge: a large and sudden increase in income and wealth is something most people do not deal with very well. Look at lottery winners- no different here! The temptation for a corrupt elite to pocket the dosh is huge. So here, much (though not all) of the income goes into infrastructure projects like new and improved schools, additional clinic nurses, a mobile clinic. Decisions on what projects to undertake are taken jointly by community members (teachers, elders, ranch officials, ranch members etc) and Regenesis directors and staff.

Nkiloriti Nursery School in 2006

Inside new classroom number 2 at Nkiloriti, 2010

Under the agreement with Regenesis the approximately $50,000 a year which is free cash, deposited into the ranch bank account, has to be used “transparently and equitably for the benefit of the entire community”, and is audited. AWF has supported the setting up of a village microfinance bank, and community leaders including women (traditionally marginalized in this society) are getting financial and business training and advice.

Women of Lentille community, with visiting teacher from UK

This blog was supposed to be about our conservation strategy. For those disappointed that there are not lots of wildlife stories, I apologise. But conservation is not about wildlife. It is about people. (Though we do still get extremely excited when we spot the endangered African Wild Dog hunting in front of the lodge, and happily watch elephants ‘playing’ at destroying things for hours)

African Wild Dog in Sinyai lagha, Ol Lentille Conservancy

The biggest question of all though, is can conservation pay? The answer is yes. However, if the world wants to conserve the wildlife and ways of life of East Africa, it is the world which will have to pay. Rural East Africans can successfully be in the business of selling to a world market so-called “ecosystem services”, but the international community and its Earth Summits and the plethora of well-meaning but for 50 years wholly ineffective NGOs will have to wake up.

The Tanzanian government (the same one that wants to drive a highway through the Serengeti National Park), wants to put a soda factory on Lake Natron. Soda is an essential commodity chemical crucial to the lives of all who live in the “Western” world, manufactured in ugly and habitat-destroying factories. Lake Natron is at the heart of a vital ecosystem, and one of the world’s most stunningly beautiful places. Conservationists want to stop the soda factory. It’s my view that in that case the world community must pay Tanzania for the income lost. Don’t make Africa pay for your lifestyle!

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