A scheme that sets down strict grazing plans to benefit the environment and generate revenue for local people was highlighted at Cop27 as a future model.
“Our people didn’t know what carbon was,” says Dokhole. “There is no word for carbon in our local language, not even in Swahili, the national language. Yet the success of the project depended on the pastoralists understanding how the concept works and how it would affect their daily activities.”

Dokhole had done his research. He understood all the nuances of carbon sequestration – the capturing, removal and storage of greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2) – so he settled on some vivid illustrations to reach people.

“In one forum I asked them, ‘Why do you expel bad gas from your body?’ They said the foul air was not good for the body. I then asked a motorcycle rider in the meeting to rev his bike until black smoke came out of the exhaust. I told them those exhaust fumes were similar to unwanted gases warming the world resulting in more droughts and livestock deaths.

“Now they were interested in the subject because the ‘bad’ air was affecting their livelihoods. But they still wanted to know how possible it was to remove it from the atmosphere. I came with a seedling and covered it with plastic for some time until it died. I told them the plant would have survived had it sucked in enough carbon from the atmosphere and stored it in the soil. The idea sank in,” he says.

To date, these herders in the drought-stricken region have helped rehabilitate 1.9m hectares (4.7 million acres) of land through rotational grazing practices, thus increasing ground cover, in a move that will sequester 50m tons of carbon dioxide over 30 years, equivalent to the annual emissions from more than 10m cars.

In what Kenyan president William Ruto told an audience at Cop27 was an “exemplary project”, the Northern Kenya Rangelands Carbon Project is the world’s first large-scale grasslands soil carbon removal project reliant on modified livestock grazing practices, and the first to work with pastoralists who use communal land resources. READ further from the source above..