 Peter Ndunda GIS Specialist Green Belt Movement, Kenya Email: pndunda@greenbeltmovement.org  The Green Belt Movement (GBM) was founded by Dr Wangari Maathai in 1977 as a development and community empowerment grassroots social movement comprised and led mainly by women. GBM empowers people and builds their capacity to restore the environment, promote good governance and develop sustainable livelihoods. The organisation supports more than 600 community networks across Kenya that care for over 4000 tree nurseries. So far, more than 40 million trees have been planted in private and public land, protected reserves, sites of cultural significance and in urban centers by the GBM-supported communities since 1977. The past three years have seen many organisational, technical, data acquisition and analysis advances in GBM. GBM has established a state-of-the-art GIS lab that has allowed the organisation to cope with the increasing demand for reliable data for decision making to support its tree planting, conservation and community development projects in Kenya. Kenya has suffered enormous forest loss. Originally the country had about 30% of its surface covered by closed canopy forest. Today, it is down to less than 2%. The United Nations recommends that a nation should have a minimum of about 10% forest cover to deliver the vital ecosystem services these forests supply to support sustainable development– such as fresh water for its people, agriculture and wildlife. The reforesting needed to achieve 10% cover in Kenya is enormous. To scale up to this level required GBM to develop a landscape scale approach to planning, monitoring and analysis. The application of GIS in GBM introduced a new way of thinking, planning, project monitoring and creating solutions for sustainable development. GIS has brought the ability to answer the questions ‘where’, ‘how’, ‘what’ and ‘why’ in GBM. For example, now GBM staff and communities have the ability to know ‘what’ kind of tree species to plant and ‘where’ to plant them, ‘what’ is the extent of deforestation in the five major mountainous forests in the country, ‘why’ some areas are more critical than others [highly threatened ecosystems such as the watersheds] and ‘how’ these projects are making a difference and changing the lives of hundreds of thousands of households in the country. 
Climate ChangeGBM has been actively engaged in the conservation of Kenya’s five forested mountains namely Mount Kenya, Aberdares, Mau Forest, Mount Elgon, Cherengani Hills. Through mobilizing the grassroots communities to plant trees and protect the standing forests, GBM has been actively engaging with the communities to reduce emissions of green house gases and enhance carbon sinks. GIS provides the highly needed capacity to monitor and measure the amount of carbon stocks in these community projects in Kenya. GBM is working with World Bank on a BioCarbon Fund Project to rehabilitate 1,800 hectares of degraded forest land in the Aberdares and Mt. Kenya region as part of the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) programme under the Kyoto Protocol and Marrakech Accords. Based on the maps and information from the mapping exercises and baseline surveys, GBM has been engaging the community groups living around these ecosystems to establish tree nurseries and plant trees in the identified sites. GBM is now using GIS to validate and monitor the status of these BioCarbon projects in Aberdares and Mt. Kenya. Improved efficiency and effectiveness in project implementation GIS has enabled the development of extremely valuable tools that are making it easier for field staff to capture and analyse data describing the location of tree planting sites, tree species, status of the young trees in the forest and other critical data. Before the introduction of GIS in GBM, field data collection was carried out using booking- sheets, sketches and notes on paper maps. The results had been that the data had often not been current or as accurate as it should have been. However, now GBM has trained more than 100 staff who are posted in various regions in the country to work with the communities, on how to use handheld GPS devices and various techniques of data collection in the field, project site mapping, baseline survey procedures, community participatory mapping and project monitoring. These new skills are tremendously improving the accuracy and quality of data received from the field to support the implementation and management of community projects. In addition, GBM recently introduced the use of high-end GPSes from Trimble to improve efficiency and effectiveness in project monitoring and reporting. The introduction of these mobile GIS technologies has enabled the monitoring and evaluation team to take project information and conservation targets into the field as digital and interactive maps providing field access to vital records for project monitoring. Related applications that are currently being developed at GBM will add near real-time field information related to each tree planting site and tree nursery to GBM’s database and speed up analysis and decision making by using up-to-date and accurate spatial data. Enhanced analytical capacity ESRI’s ENVI and Leica’s software have added a whole new layer of analytical sophistication to GBM work by automating the process of change detection, which is critical for understanding what’s happening with Kenya’s forests. With the added capabilities, GBM has initiated a project to map and identify forest cover change over time, identify high priority tree planting areas in the country, and monitor the growth and survival of the planted trees in the forest. GBM staff are now able to accurately keep track of detailed vegetation changes in the tree planting sites and plan for periodic field visits to respond to any detected unfavorable changes. With the ability to visualize individual tree crowns and a more accurate portrait of the forest cover in parts of the five ‘water towers’, GBM has tremendously increased its effectiveness and efficiency in planning and monitoring tree planting projects. Supporting environmental advocacy The GIS capacity has provided GBM and Professor Maathai with a powerful environmental advocacy tool. Using both ESRI software and Google Earth, GBM started developing valuable tools for visualising and communicating environmental issues in Kenya. KMLs and ArcGIS ArcGlobe movie files developed from field data have provided powerful 3D digital maps that are being used to educate and visually inform local communities, government leaders, and the international community about the status of forests, the devastating effects of forest change in critical watersheds and to visualise GBM tree nurseries and tree planting sites on the globe. |