Every country that ratified the Paris agreement are mandated to develop national Greenhouse Gases inventories that are guided by principles laid down by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) including transparency, consistency, comparability, completeness and accuracy for Measurement, Reporting and Verification (MRV) programmes. One of the critical inputs is land use land cover maps and countries need to clearly document their processes. This forms the basis of developing a technical manual to guide land use land cover mapping for Kenya.
In early October, 2019, our Remote Sensing expert Tom Kiptenai joined partners from government and academic institutions in Naivasha for a whole week of work to finalize on the country’s Technical Manual for Land Use Land Cover maps, a crucial document for enhancing sustainable management of the country’s land and estimating carbon emissions from the land & forestry sector for reporting to the United Nations Framework Convenction on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
The Technical manual is envisaged to help the country to: (1) Provide consistent, complete, and time-series land cover change information; (2) allow integration of data and information appropriate for Kenyan applications; (3) provide transparency; objectivity and verification of the process used for both national and international reporting requirements (4) Provide basis for a continuous improvement of GHGs estimation based on new technologies coming up from time to time.
Partners included: Kenya Forest Service, Kenya Forestry Research Institute, Directorate of Resource Surveys and Remote Sensing, Ministry of Environment & Forestry, RCMRD, Discover JKUAT, Dedan Kimathi University of Technology, and Survey of Kenya.