KIRINYAGA, Kenya (PAMACC News) - The agriculture sector suffers some of the worst impacts of climate change. That is a statement you hear all the time, and that Africa – being a developing region – is quite vulnerable.

In fact, the Food and Agricultre Organisation reports that droughts and floods are the biggest natural disasters that Africa faces, resulting in trillions of shillings in loss and damage. Between 2003 and 2013 for instance, droughts affected 27 countries in Sub- Saharan Africa, destabilising the lives of nearly 150 million people.

These droughts cost the region an estimated 23.6 billion dollars, which translates to about 2.2 trillion shillings. This is according to a report on the impact of natural disasters on global economies, which reveals that the agriculture sector is the most impacted.

But what you don’t hear often is that although the sector is the most vulnerable, the agriculture sector is a key contributor to climate change, accounting for 17% of total emissions directly through agricultural activities and an additional 14% through land use changes.

“Climate change is going to reduce crop production by up to 40% if global warming continues. But you see the agriculture sector is plagues with inefficiencies that lead to ecological degradation,” says Dr. Richard Munang, the head of the climate change unit at the United Nations Environment Programme.

When the Paris Agreement was adopted in November 2015, it gave countries the option to decide the steps they would take to reduce their carbon footprint. Most countries, including Kenya, provided a plan that put agriculture in the centre of emission reduction, through adoption of eco-friendly farming methods. While there have been several campaigns calling for farmers to adopt climate smart agriculture, some farmers are going a step further and seeking access to the carbon market.

“Our environment is destroyed. The soil is not fertile anymore. So we as the farmers in this village of Togonye have decided to fix that by growing more trees,” Albert Mureithi says.

Togonye in Mwea, Kirinyaga County, is one of the catchment areas for the Mwea rice farms. But years of environmental degradation have destroyed the catchment, and eucalyptus trees have replaced most indigenous trees. The trees were cut down for fuel and also make room for agricultural land. The farmers have now come together to start a project they call Kirinyaga Carbons, through which they will rehabilitate their environment to improve their yields and earn carbon credits.

“There are several components of the project and also the climate smart agriculture. For instance there is integrated pest management, soil fertility management, water management and crop rotation,” says  Edward Ngare, the designer of the Kirinyaga Carbons project.

The farmers in Togonya grow mostly coffee and horticultural produce and rely heavily on irrigation - drawing their water from River Kiie. But the degradation around the catchment area and the current drought has made irrigation extremely difficult.

Water levels have run dangerously low, leading to frequent conflicts among the communities that depend on that water. The river empties into River Nyamindi, which is one of the two rivers that feed the Mwea Irrigation Scheme. But the drought has seen Nyamindi’s flow drop to just one cubic litres per second, compared to a normal flow of six cubic litres.

As part of this rehabilitation project, each farmer in the group is required to plant trees on at least 10% of the land, as well as a fodder crop that will provide some ground cover for the soil.

They work together with some scientists from the Kenya Agricultural and Livestock Research Organisation, who say that it will take about 4 years to fully rehabilitate the area. But once that is done, they have set their eyes on the European market for their horticultural produce, where they hope to earn carbon credits at the rate of five dollars per tonne of carbon dioxide.

“For the consumer in Europe to get the produce from here, it has to be air lifted. So in that airlifting, there is carbon that is emitted by the plane. When the consumer is preparing the food, the energy they use to cook also emits some carbon. And in total, the emissions from Europe are higher compared to here. So what we want is, instead of the airline and the consumer offsetting their emissions with other projects in other countries, why don't they offset with us instead since they bought the produce from us?” Edward says.

A carbon credit is a permit that allows a country to emit a certain amount of greenhouse gases, and then if the emissions are below the set quota, they can sell the excess to a big emitting country. Kenya is a very low carbon emitter and developed a policy on carbon trading in 2013.

In 2014, agriculture became the first sector to benefit from carbon trading in Kenya, when a project involving 60,000 farmers in Western Kenya earned the world's first carbon credits on sustainable agricultural land management. The project involved increasing organic soil matter, thereby cutting emissions by 24,788 metric tons of carbon dioxide, which is equivalent to emissions from 5,164 vehicles in a year. Farmers' yields also increased by 20%.

Two communities in Mombasa are also earning carbon credits by protecting Mangrove forests, which provide breeding grounds for a lot of fish species. The two communities have managed to plant at least 6,500 seedlings, cutting emissions by at least 3000 tonnes annually, earning one million shillings from the credits.

The carbon market globally is worth an estimated 144 billion dollars, but Africa only gets 3% of that market.  Kenya’s carbon emissions about 21.47 metric tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent, representing just 0.06% of global emissions.