Payments for Ecosystem Services (such as carbon sequestration and biodiversity enhancement credits exchanged on global markets) have significant potential to fund sustainable land management in ways that can benefit people and environments. However, many land management and community groups across Africa who could potentially benefit from these payments struggle to access these revenue streams because of significant barriers to access, including data availability, costs of monitoring, complex reporting and auditing processes, and poor governance. OPALS enables research and knowledge exchange activities between academia and our conservation partners to strengthen understanding of the potential role of payments for ecosystem services science and frameworks, and we continue to engage with other conservation entities to identify opportunities where we can make appropriate and constructive contributions.
Example Activities
Oppenheimer Impact Scholar Milcah Kirinyet worked with Sustain East Africa and the Northern Mara Conservancies of Enonkishu, Olchoro Oirouwa, and Mbokishi to co-develop more robust frameworks for ensuring that the community share the benefits from ecologically and financially more sustainable land management practices. Her work established a new Open Access repository of data and information about the avian and floral biodiversity in the 13,000 ha area. By co-creating auditable wildlife and ecosystem health data structures to leverage biodiversity credits, we enhance conservancies’ financial resilience. By reducing dependency on tourism and diversifying revenue streams, we help landowners see the long-term value in conservation over other ventures. This holistic approach not only preserves critical ecosystems but also empowers communities.
Masters student Amy Shaw assisted the Manda Island Conservation Project in Kenya in exploring how the mangrove habitats that they manage could potentially yield carbon credits worth ca. USD $17,000 per annum. This helped that conservation initiative learn about options for diversifying their revenue streams to increase the fiscal stability of their activities conserving threatened coastal habitats.
Oppenheimer Impact Scholar in Conservation Governance Isaac Mureithi will work in close partnership the African Wildlife Foundation, bringing actuarial skills to bear on developing better models of sustainable landscape conservation that integrate African perspectives and social justice into finance flows linked with carbon and biodiversity credits.
Oppenheimer Programme in African Landscape Systems (OPALS) 