The Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) has joined the growing club of Kenyan organisations seeking a slice of the lucrative carbon credit billions.
The State agency is already recruiting an expert to guide preparatory work for the development of a carbon project —an initiative the agency hopes will unlock a new revenue stream and provide a long-term alternative to traditional tourism-based funding.
Carbon credits are permits that allow owners to emit a certain amount of carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases. One credit permits the emission of one tonne of carbon dioxide or the equivalent in other greenhouse gases.
The KWS noted that protected areas in Kenya face several climate-change risks, including habitat degradation, droughts and floods, heightened risks of wildfires, shifts in species distribution, and rising pressure on ecosystem services.
This tends to drive up management costs for agencies like the KWS as they work to maintain ecological integrity and connectivity.
However, it noted that these protected areas also present opportunities for climate mitigation and resilience.
"The feasibility study will consider these ecosystem-service dimensions primarily as co-benefits of potential carbon and blue-carbon interventions, rather than as stand-alone payment for ecosystem services schemes," said KWS in a tender call for a consultant to an environmental and social impact study on the targeted carbon project.
KWS's interest in carbon credits is coming at a time when the State disagreed with clean-energy start-up Koko Networks over its plan to sell its Article 6 permits into the compliance market, leading to its shutdown.
Article 6.2 refers to a provision of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change under the Paris Agreement that allows countries to trade carbon emission reductions directly with each other through bilateral agreements. A compliance market is a government-regulated scheme for trading carbon credits.
Carbon trade is the buying and selling of credits that permit a company or other entity to emit a certain amount of carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases
Trade Cabinet Secretary Lee Kinyanjui said Koko Networks wanted to sell more credits, leaving little for other players, as the firm's request would have exhausted Kenya's entire global quota.
Kenya’s first $832.76 million (Sh107.3 billion) green fertiliser project that is backed by State-run Kenya Electricity Generating Company (KenGen) and China’s Kaishan Group, also targets to sell carbon credits in the compliance market.
In a regulatory filing on the green fertiliser project and its associated geothermal power plant, the backers of the project sought to demonstrate that the project will help Kenya avoid about 600,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent annually.
