“Livelihoods, Forests, Livestock and Climate Change,” GBM’s “side event” (or panel) at COP 15, held with
Brighter Green, and the participation of the
Nobel Women’s Initiative, was packed—literally. There must have been more than 200 people filling the rows of seats, standing in the aisles, sitting on the floor and a number of cameras (video and still) occupied the front seats, trained, mostly, on Prof, who introduced the session and moderated. The Green Belt Movement, she said, wanted to share its experience of reforestation and afforestation at the community level, and in the context of the growing clamor over carbon finance (a loud debate on both sides is taking place here in Copenhagen). The discussion was very good, ranging over forest protection, reafforestation, the challenges of community-based carbon finance, and the role of livestock in climate change...and climate change's role in challenging the livelihoods of pastoral communities.
GBM’s Carbon Finance Officer, Frederick Njau, provided an overview of the lessons GBM has learned about reafforestation efforts in the Aberdares and Mt. Kenya ecosystems. Along with some arresting images—graphic maps of the forest cover and photos—Njau offered some cautions: carbon projects have high preparation, implementation and monitoring costs; that it’s difficult to prove “additionality” (that is, would this project have taken place without the carbon financing?); people’s use of the forests, for example, for agriculture and livestock grazing, can undermine the very carbon capture that’s being funded. Communities also have high expectations for these projects, and many capacity needs, most of which still go unmet.
Mia MacDonald, Brighter Green’s Executive Director, gave the big picture of the livestock-climate connection and the role of the intensification of animal agriculture poses in land use changes, deforestation, desertification, risks to food security and the seemingly inexorable growth in GHGs. Sixty billion farm animals are raised and consumed as food each year; by 2050, if current trajectories persist, that number will be an astonishing 120 billion. At the same time, it’s small-scale pastoralists and farmers whose livelihoods are disappearing as the effects of global warming are increasingly felt. This issue, she concluded needs to be fully on the climate agenda—where it isn’t right now—as well as other critical global agendas (development, economics, public health, ethics).
Then Samwel Naikada of Transmara, Kenya, gave a rich small-scale picture of what drought, desertification and overstocking of animals mean to his community, and the ways it's responding. (Bee-keeping has taken off, as has development of a market for women's beadwork; community members are offering nature walks and working to develop ecotourism around a standing indigenous forest. In describing efforts for forest protection, he commented: "Prevention is better than the cure."
Communities like his lack information on climate change, even as they feel its effects. This extends to the livestock-climate connection. When he first heard, very recently, that cows are significant emitters of GHGs, Samwel said his reaction and that of others, could be described as: no, why, really, how? Yet they'd seen the grass disappear and cows, goats and sheep die from drought. They'd seen milk production levels decline. They'd seen, too, wildlife exhibiting behaviors never seen before: baboons leaving the forest for grasslands and preying on young goats and sheep, due to lack of other food; zebras and gazelles grazing in the forest, unable to find other forage. To community elders, the world has turned upside down. The most common phrase he hears, Samwel says, when people talk about their environment today is this: "It used to be."
And so it was: a well-spent 90 minutes…and just one of many events on the schedule that day. Scroll down here
for an article on the side event in the Earth Negotiations Bulletin (which is tracking the conference session by session), and a photo. Not long after, Prof., Njau and GBM’s Peter Ndunda were seen hunched over laptops in a conference center lounge drafting a statement about the climate conference’s proceedings so far. Forests, justice, REDD+ and Congo Basin. Much more to come from Copenhagen.
