Bionic Planet: Reversing Climate Change by Restoring Nature

Zimbabwean entrepreneur Chiyedza Heri runs the Ubuntu Alliance, a company that's helping farmers leverage carbon finance to shift to more sustainable forms of agriculture.

She's one of more than a dozen young Africans I met at year-end climate talks in Dubai (COP 28) -- a new breed of entrepreneur that the late Ghanian economist George Ayittey calls "cheetahs" because they're nimble, quick, and hungry.

Green Cheetahs pursue activities that are pro-nature as well as pro-growth, and today's guest certainly fits that bill.

With just one full day of negotiations remaining, Pedro Venzon and Andrea Bonzanni of the International Emissions Trading Association summarize the remaining issues under Article 6

Article 6 negotiations, which focus on international carbon markets, remain stalled in Dubai. Kelley Hamrick Malvar of The Nature Conservancy offers a look into the current state of play and the road ahead.

Kenyan agronomist George Thumbi is helping farmers in the region between Tsavo East and Tsavo West improve their yields and their soil by shifting to agroforestry and other forms of sustainable agriculture.

This piece, adapted from a piece that first ran in 2016, serves as the fourth installment in our continuing series on carbon finance in Kenya. Today, we look at how carbon finance supports Sustainable Agriculture Land Management (SALM), which has doubled the average income of more than 30,000 Kenyan family farmers while pulling more than 1 million tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by increasing the carbon content of soils.

In part three of our continuing series from Kenya, we hear how the Chyulu Hills REDD+ Project helped people switch from burning trees for charcoal to conserving forests -- the their benefit and the benefit of us all.

Evans Maneno is Makueni County Ecosystem Conservator for the Kenya Forestry Service. He walks us through a tree nursery in the Chyulu Hills and explains how the Chyulu Hills REDD+ Project has reversed deforestation by helping people develop sustainable livelihoods -- reviving in the process a threatened river that provides water for people hundreds of miles away.

Second in a series

A decade ago, the cloud forests of Kenya's Chyulu Hills were on the brink of collapse, threatening water supplies for the Tsavo and Amboseli Plains — and for the coastal City of Mombasa, 250 kilometers away.

Then the Kenya Forestry and Wildlife Services teamed up with the Maasai Wilderness Conservation Trust, the Big Life Foundation, the Sheldrake Wildlife Trust, Conservation International, and, most importantly, grazing collectives, called "community group ranches" to launch the Chyulu Hills REDD+ Project — a thirty-year private-public partnership designed to save the hills by overhauling the rural economy.

First in a series focused on ecological restoration in southern and central Kenya.

Ghana's cocoa economy is second only to Côte d'Ivoire's, but climate change threatens to decimate it. Today's guest, Roselyn Fosuah Adjei of the Ghana Forestry Commission, is charged with leveraging carbon finance -- and specifically REDD+ -- to avert that disaster.