Kenya Promara Opportunities to Integrate Climate Change Activities

The USAID/Kenya ProMara Program provides a solid programming platform to build readiness for forest carbon emissions reduction by adjusting existing activities to contribute to the enabling conditions required to participate in the forest carbon market (see Section 2 for details) or by adding activities (see Appendix D). All forest carbon activities would have to be implemented within the current project program budget. At the time of writing this report, it was not known how much of the project budget is from global climate change (GCC) funding sources, making it difficult to propose an appropriate scope and scale of activities or to formulate a ProMara climate change action plan. The delivery of financing based on GHG emission reductions will likely not be possible within the two-year time frame of the project, but important contributions to readiness for carbon financing can be made. In addition to forest-related mitigation activities, a climate change vulnerability and adaptation assessment could be conducted for the ProMara Program in rapid appraisal fashion, in the expectation that key adaptive strategies could be quickly identified and implemented. Even without this assessment, it would be possible to include climate change vulnerability as a selection criterion for livelihood interventions and include climate change in the communications strategy.