Meet a Kenyan community saving the coral reefs.

Mangroves are versatile and flexible forests that can cope with enormous disturbances. Dr. Judith Okello, a senior research scientist and mangrove ecologist at the Kenya Marine and Fisheries Research Institute, says that when sedimentation occurs, the mangroves can form a new cable rooting system and migrate when there is space on land. However, due to human influence, global temperatures continue to rise, causing frequent and sporadic weather-related events. When such events occur, they lead to sudden and frequent sedimentation, and the mangroves can get fatigued, resulting in massive diebacks.To help the mangroves cope, communities have been encouraged to plant. Instead of planting these mangroves, Dr. Okello advocates for a holistic ecological approach that solves the challenges facing mangrove forests. But how did we get here? Why is planting mangroves not the solution to restoring the degraded ecosystems?

Featured today are a group of ladies who are establishing a livelihood by planting mangroves. About sixty kilometres south of Mombasa in Kwale County, in the small fishing town of Msambweni, a group of fifteen women from the Munje village joined together during the COVID-19 outbreak. A community-based organisation with 30 members has developed out of them after around four years. They are planting mangrove propagules along the southern coast of Kenya, around Vanga-Funzi Bay, to preserve a portion of mangrove forest. Additionally, the women are enhancing their livelihoods through activities such as beekeeping, eco-tourism, waste management, conservation education, and basket weaving. Approximately 400,000 propagules had been planted in nurseries by the end of last year by the women.

Today we meet a Kenyan community saving the coral reefs along the Kenyan coast. Coral reefs along the Lamu-Kiunga area in Lamu County, a small archipelago north of Mombasa in Kenya, have degraded over the years. Pate Island, the largest island in the Lamu Archipelago, lies between the towns of Lamu and Kiunga, which depend on fishing. However, fishery productivity depends on healthy corals. How did the coral degradation impact these communities’ livelihoods? What degraded these corals? What are these communities doing about it? 

Women in Olailamutia, a town in Kenya's Narok County, have had problems with diarrhoea, stomachaches, and skin rashes for many years. Having access to clean drinking water from a spring is helping to get rid of these problems. Families here got water to drink from a river where they also took baths. The river in question has been contaminated due to chemical use, upstream intensive irrigation, and the discharge of untreated sewage into which they bathed their children. In a town that only gets its food from outside sources, having access to water also makes it possible to grow food.Narok County is one of 21 dry or semi-arid counties in Kenya. It is home to the beautiful Masai Mara. Extreme weather events like storms and droughts have also become more common and stronger. 

In today's episode, we meet Isaac Macharia, a Kenyan social entrepreneur who makes cabins out of plastic to keep Kenya’s Masai Mara clean. In 2015, Macharia was on his usual tour-guiding routine at the Masai Mara in Kenya. It bothered him. He decided to construct cabins using not only plastic bottles, but also stashing and hiding every non-biodegradable waste you can think of—straws, broken glass bottles, clothes, beer cans, to name just a few—right in there during construction. To harden and convert the plastic bottle into a smaller brick, they add dry sand. The contractors used plastic to make the cabin roof. Contracted local women collect these bottles and fill them with sand or paper.

Picture this. It’s a lovely evening. You and your loved one are seated somewhere, enjoying some juice or beer from a glass made out of liquor bottles collected from a dumping site.How does that sound? On today’s episode, meet a young Kenyan lady – Mary Njoki, repurposing waste glass at Masai Mara.

For effective climate action in Africa to take shape, the African Group of negotiators lead negotiator on finance, Ambassador Mohamed Nasr, told the Africa Climate Conversations that the continent must self-assess and work on its own modalities to achieve climate action. Among the things the continent should work on is creating an Africa-specific platform outlining specific projects and programs for climate action that will collect and present all climate projects from the continent as a package.Nasr says specific projects and programs with clear needs presented to the negotiators will be easily supported “compared to what we have now which is more generic,” he added.At COP28, nations embarked on the Global Stocktake (GST) to assess collective progress towards achieving the long-term goals set under the Paris agreement. The GST is assessing mitigation, adaptation, and means of implementation, considering equity and the best available science as well as loss and damage. With the GST being party-driven, there is a need for the continent to be specific on their needs and strategic to push for that means of implementation critical for climate action nationally and locally.

The climate finance needs of developing countries have risen way beyond the 100 billion USD promised by developed countries 15 years ago. The recent UN 2023 adaptation gap report estimates the cost of adaptation at US$215 billion per year this decade.Access to finance, including means of implementation that are technology and capacity, is a catalyst not just for development but also for adapting to climate change, averting loss and damage, mitigating further climate impacts, and building trust among developed and developing countries. But finance under the climate negotiation process had had a long process. So, on this episode with Ambassador Mohamed Nasr, who is the Africa lead negotiator on finance and COP27 lead negotiator, as the globe embarks on negotiating a New Collective Quantified Goal on Finance, we discuss how Africa can solve the climate finance access challenge, among other key issues such as global taxation and political impacts on negotiation outcomes.

COP28 takes place against the backdrop of increased financial needs to address climate change adaptation, mitigation, as well as loss and damage.Just to mention, the 2023 UNEP adaptation gap report estimates the cost of adaptation in developing countries at US$215 billion per year this decade. For Africa, the continent requires at least $56 billion annually for adaptation alone by 2030. Between 2020 and 2030, African countries will require an estimated $2.8 trillion in funding to fund the continent's conditional climate plans, or NDCs. In his speech, COP28 president Sultan Al Jaber committed to doing his part to ensure COP28 unlocks climate finance for developing nations. On loss and damage, the Presidency gave the first major milestone of COP28, delivering a historic agreement to operationalize the Fund—though the World Bank is yet to review and agree to the technical commitment conditionalities—with the UAE announcing it would commit $100 million to the Fund.

A 24-member transitional committee on loss and damage issued a proposal for a new loss and damage fund ahead of the 28th UN Climate Summit (COP28) taking place in Dubai this November.According to Alpha Oumar Kaloga, the African group's lead negotiator on loss and damage, the final decision was made in a tense atmosphere; thus, there is a need to understand the status of the final decision, as the United States had objected at the last moment.Kaloga told the Africa Climate Conversations podcast that developing countries have made compromises because “we cannot abandon our people. We cannot wait any longer, and we recognise that we are in a multilateral process and must make compromises. We accepted the World Bank (a red line) as the financial intermediary fund, but only under conditions."Developing countries have been pushing for a loss and damage fund since 1991, when the Alliance of Small Island States proposed creating an international insurance pool to compensate for loss and damage.The fund is intended to help developing nations recover from losses and harm caused by climate change. It is anchored on the UNFCCC’s principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities, which underlines that the global challenge of tackling climate change should be met in a fair and equitable manner."We want justice; we want loans to safeguard our progress, but it only takes one dramatic occurrence to undermine what has taken decades to establish." Says Kaloga.However, according to Kaloga, as part of the Paris agreement package, the world community agreed during COP21 in Paris that there would be no compensation and no culpability for loss or damage."The devil is in the details; people only see the Paris agreement, but the operational decisions, and particularly paragraph 54, speak about no liability, no compensation”.However, though Article 8 of the Paris Agreement does not provide a basis for any liability or compensation, it specifies some areas of cooperation and facilitation to enhance understanding of and action to address loss and damage, such as irreversible loss and damage, slow onset processes, early warning systems, and risk management.Will the transitional committee proposal sail through at COP28, or is it likely to be a bomb? Have a listen.