Earthacre

Problem: The majority of grasslands in Kenya lie outside of nationally protected areas, and are primarily owned by indigenous communities. However, due to existing vulnerability, these communities rely on degrading practices to make ends meet, such as charcoal burning or livestock. The result is that the rangelands are increasingly overgrazed, degraded or sold, which in turn creates further poverty and vulnerability. 

Solution: Earthacre’s mission is to break the cycle of vulnerability by generating carbon and biodiversity credits for frontline communities. Earthacre will do this by partnering with communities to restore their degraded lands via the protection of biodiversity, and then use scalable technology to track, monitor and monetize the resulting gains in carbon and biodiversity.

Scale: All across the globe, millions of people live on degraded lands with few income opportunities. Earthacre aims to increase their resilience and livelihoods by enabling payments for the restoration of their land.

The majority of grasslands in Kenya lie outside of nationally protected areas, and are primarily owned by indigenous communities. Despite these lands hosting 70% of Kenya’s wildlife, these communities have largely not benefited from traditional revenue streams, eg traditional tourism. As a direct result of this, there is a dependency on cattle, as well as on extractive practices such as sand harvesting or charcoal burning in order to make ends meet. Unfortunately, these all have degrading effects on the land, and the result is that much of the rangelands in Kenya, and indeed Africa, are increasingly overgrazed and degraded. 

As the land gets degraded, communities are left even more vulnerable, and eventually, individual members end up selling their land. Once their land is sold, they live on the margins or migrate to urban slums, and the buyers often have little interest in indegenous livelihoods or biodiversity protection. The lands are fragmented, fences are erected, and migratory corridors are blocked. In 2021, the journal Science published a report on precisely this problem, highlighting how wildebeest populations have crashed by >70% since the 1970’s as a function  of land fragmentation and fencing on ungulate populations.

Earthacre aims to increase resiliency of frontline communities by partnering with them to create novel, sustainable and diversified revenue streams that can increase land retention and break the cycle of vulnerability. 

Earthacre will partner with communities to restore degraded lands by enabling the regeneration of biodiversity and integrating indigenous models of natural resource management. 

As the wildlife comes back, they distribute nutrients with their dung and topple woody trees. This liberates nutrients for dung beetles and termites to draw into the ground on the scale of thousands of tons per day. This acts as a giant fertilizer, which, combined with rotational grazing practices, will enable grasses and other vegetation to take root, regrow and flourish. As this happens, soil carbon will increase. Earthacre will use scalable remote sensing technology, as developed by Boomitra, a technology start-up based in California, and the Davies Lab at Harvard University, to track the incremental gains in carbon and biodiversity over a baseline, and sell these as carbon and biodiversity credits.

Our solution is geared towards serving frontline and indigenous communities in Kenya. We are piloting this solution in partnership with the Eselenkei community in the Amboseli region, Southern Kenya. Gamewatchers, our parent organization, has a 30 year history with the Eselenkei community, and so there is a strong mutual understanding and trust. In 1997, Gamewatchers and the Eselenkei community created the first community-based wildlife protection area in Africa, called a “conservancy”. This entailed working with hundreds of community members to restore 12,000 acres of highly degraded lands by protecting biodiversity and reducing human-wildlife conflict. Wildlife numbers rebounded as a function of these efforts— elephant populations went from 0 to 400 in less than 20 years — in doing so transforming the landscape and making it ideal for tourism. Community members were then upskilled into tour-guides, cooks, camp managers, rangers and more in order to create world-class eco-camps, and revenue from the camps shared between the community and Gamewatchers. With the success of this project, the community-based conservancy model took off. Gamewatchers has since restored over 120,000 acres around the country and created some of the highest individual incomes in Africa from open land and biodiversity. Moreover, the framework itself now covers 11% of Kenya's land mass, and is organized by the Kenya Wildlife Conservancies Association (KWCA), which represents 700,000 households.

Unfortunately, with the COVID-19 pandemic shutting off tourism for over a year, this model is currently on the verge of collapse. Camps are shut, and revenues have plunged 95% year over year. Community-based conservancies are different from national parks in that they are not protected areas by law: without income, communities have little choice but to revert back to degrading practices to make ends meet, or sell their land. On the Eselenkei Group Ranch, sales have already started on land surrounding the regenerated area, with individuals selling their allotted 47 acres for as little as $100 an acre. The key wildlife corridors that allow animals to move into and out of the regenerated area are at extremely high risk of being sold and fenced. 

Earthacre will build on the 30 year relationship between Gamewatchers, the Eselenkei community and KWCA to create a solution that meet the needs of community members in a post-pandemic world and enable them to keep their land. For example, in many parts of Kenya, much community land has been turned into ecological deserts having been colonized by ipomoea kituensis, a toxic invasive weed that is unable to be eaten by anything, including sheep and goats. Most carbon developers care purely about maximizing carbon sequestration, and so to them it makes sense to keep the toxic weeds because they are sequestering carbon. However, we know that these weeds are greatly reducing forage for the livestock of the community and the wildlife, and so we will also create a biodiversity credit that will pay for holistic habitat restoration, including the pulling out and weeding of ipomoea kituensis. While this may not lead to short-term carbon benefits, in the long-term it will result in healthier ecosystems and more resilient communities. 

Lastly, we have seen how important it is to put money directly into community members' pockets in order to reduce corruption and give people the choice to spend their money in the way that makes the most sense to them. Therefore, payments from credit sales will be made via direct cash transfers, versus via sub-committees, which is how most carbon developers pay communities today. Although this brings in logistical challenges, through Gamewatchers we have the infrastructure and systems in place to make this happen cost-effectively.

Our solution is being built from the ground up to ensure that communities do not have to sell their land, and instead be compensated for their stewardship of it. We aim to create a product that fully meets the needs of frontline communities, and puts them at the center of the solution. Our plan is to pilot this on the Eselenkei Group Ranch, before scaling it through the 700,000 households under KWCA.

Dimension three: Earthacre's mission is to improve livelihoods for local communities by creating sustainable revenue streams through the regeneration of their land, such as through carbon and biodiversity credits.

Dimension one: In order to create the carbon and biodiversity credits, Earthacre needs to be able to provide scalable monitoring. Through our partnership with Boomitra, we will use satellite data to produce orders of magnitude more data than traditional carbon developers, and through the Davies Lab at Harvard, we will pioneer the development of a satellite based metric for ecosystem health that can be monetizable as a biodiversity credit.  

Pilot stage: Earthacre has been spun out of a partnership between Gamewatchers, a company that has worked for 30 years with the Eselenkei community in Southern Kenya, Boomitra, a technology company in the US, and the Davies Lab, a research group at Harvard University. Earthacre will implement the pilot on 50,000 acres of Eselenkei community land, resulting in direct cash payments to around 1000 families. Restoration work to generate the credits is being implemented by Gamewatchers. The satellite based technology to issue the carbon credits has been developed by Boomitra, and we are on track to issue the first credits by November 2021. Through the Davies Lab at Harvard, which already uses remote sensing to understand how biodiversity affects ecosystem change and above-ground carbon levels, we will adapt remote-sensing techniques to create a metric of ecosystem health which we can take to market as a biodiversity credit.

Virtually all grassland carbon projects and methodologies today view biodiversity as simply a co-benefit at best, relying on agricultural-based interventions to increase soil carbon. In contrast, Earthacre will fully integrate biodiversity with improved grazing, such that biodiversity is the engine that powers our carbon sequestration. Moreover, by making biodiversity regeneration central to our interventions, we aim to open up alternative revenue streams, such as biodiversity credits, that can correct for some of the perverse incentives we see in carbon markets today.

For example, many community lands are colonized by toxic invasive weeds that are inedible by anything, creating barren ecological deserts. Yet these weeds still sequester carbon, and so from a carbon-only perspective, it makes sense to keep them despite their damaging effects on wildlife and community resilience. Earthacre will use remote-sensing techniques to generate a scalable, novel and innovative metric to quantify ecosystem health, in addition to soil carbon. This will form the basis of a stand-alone biodiversity credit, of which the proceeds will be used to enable holistic regeneration of habitat, even if it may not result in short-term carbon gains (eg weeding of the invasive plants). 

At a time when the world is increasingly beginning to acknowledge the biodiversity collapse occurring, with multiple international agreements forming such as through COP15, One Planet Business for Biodiversity, and the Finance for Biodiversity pledge, we aim to compensate communities for their role not just in carbon sequestration, but in biodiversity stewardship too.

Current number of people directly affected by Earthacre: 0 (although Gamewatchers currently serves 350 people in Eselenkei through lease payments on 12,000 acres)

One year: 1000 (number of people who own the 50,000 acres of the Eselenkei pilot area)

Five years: 700,000 (number of people registered under Kenya Wildlife Conservancies Association, who own 15 million acres of open community land)

1. Acres under lease protection— Since 1997, Gamewatchers, our parent organization, has been working with the Eselenkei community to protect 12,000 acres of land. Acres under lease protection can also be used to gauge land retention for the community, because once under lease and earning income, land sales do not happen.
2. Revenue generated for the landowning community— By protecting and regenerating this land, Gamewatchers has been able to disburse around $200,000 a year in lease payments, equating to $16/ acre/ year over 12,000 acres. Through carbon and biodiversity credits, we hope to increase this to $1 million in the first year, covering 50,000 acres at a minimum of $20/ acre/ year.
3. Revenue generated from biodiversity credit sales— Biodiversity credit markets today are nascent, and therefore we see the need to have an impact metric 100% focused on growing both the market, and the revenue we are able to derive from this market.
4. Tons of carbon sequestered— through Boomitra technology, we will be able to track year over year changes in carbon in the soils over the full pilot area, helping to build trust in carbon markets by offering genuine carbon removal credits.

• 1 full-time
• 4 part-time
• 3 highly engaged advisors.

Viraj Sikand. Viraj is a Kenyan— USA dual citizen. Viraj is the founder of Kulisha, an environmental technology startup that raised $250,000 to create a sustainable protein, and worked at Optoro, a technology company that raised $240M to keep waste out of landfills. Sitting firmly at the intersection of environment, community, and technology, Viraj is driven towards finding scalable solutions to environmental problems, like Earthacre. 

Dr Mohanjeet Brar. Mohanjeet is the CEO of Gamewatchers, and has served as Chairman of the Board of Directors of Ecotourism Kenya amongst others. Mohanjeet has worked for over 30 years developing innovative solutions for communities and biodiversity in Kenya, and is leading our implementation through his organization, Gamewatchers. 

Patita Nkamunu. Patita has been championing the rights of pastoralists and indigenous communities in Kenya for 20 years. Patita is from the community where we are piloting our solution, and is leading our community-first approach. She is on the Government of Kenya taskforce for wildlife corridors, and is a board member on the Indigenous Women’s Council of Kenya.

Peter B Boucher. Peter is the Postdoctoral Fellow at the Davies Lab, Harvard University. Peter works at the intersection of ecology and remote sensing, and will lead efforts on developing the technology to power our biodiversity credits.

Aadith Moorthy. Aadith is a Knight-Hennessy Scholar & MS from Stanford University. He is the CEO of Boomitra, which uses satellite imagery and AI to quantify soil carbon. Aadith will lead Earthacre’s carbon credits Go-To-Market strategy and implementation.

Traditional conservation has a long history of colonialism and exclusion, often entailing displacing indigenous communities off of their land and fencing it to create national parks. While tourism in Kenya has been one of the largest sources of foreign exchange in the country, most indigenous communities have not benefited from this. 

30 years ago, Gamewatchers, Earthacre’s parent organization, pioneered a new model of conservation with the Eselenkei community, known as community-based conservancies, that was firmly rooted in diversity, equity and inclusion. Today, Gamewatchers has contributed to creating some of the highest individual incomes from open land and biodiversity in Africa, and has won numerous awards for their efforts, including “Africa’s Responsible Tourism Award” in the World Travel Awards and recognized as Kenya’s “Tour Operator of the Year”.

Shaped by that experience, Earthacre is similarly being built with strong foundations in diversity, equity, and inclusion. Our team lead, Viraj Sikand, in 2014 was selected out of 400+ applicants to be an inaugural Doris Duke Conservation Scholar, focused on creating a more equitable and diverse conservation community. We are being guided by Nkamunu Patita, a recognized champion of indigenous and women’s rights who is a member of the community we are working with, and our team is majority people of color and underrepresented groups. We fully recognize indigenous communities as the stewards of our land and biodiversity, and we are building an organization to ensure it remains that way in perpetuity.

We are applying to SOLVE first and foremost because it is one of the preeminent competitions seeking solutions to power more resilient and equitable ecosystems around the planet, and that resonates strongly with us.

We believe that the selected cohort created from such a competition will create an ideal community with which to challenge us and grow us to become a better organization, both to the populations we serve and the ecosystems we are looking to safeguard and restore. Developing solutions to create more resilient ecosystems will not be easy, and will require working across sectors and geographies. Earthacre looks forward to rich opportunities that can lead to collaboration and the building of a network for scale across the planet. 

Moreover, a core focus of Earthacre is building out the nascent biodiversity credit market, something we fully recognize as a current barrier to our growth and to biodiversity protection efforts today. We would welcome the mentorship, business model advice, access to funding and media exposure that SOLVE could provide to help us achieve this, as we recognize we will need as much feedback and support as possible in order to do this effectively.

We would welcome advice and partnership in any of these areas:

1. Legal — advice on crafting legal agreements between buyers and sellers of credits

2. Web Development — advice/ partnerships on building a platform to connect buyers and sellers of carbon and biodiversity credits, having interactivity of the data and direct digital cash transfers for community members. 

3. Business Model — we recognize that both carbon and biodiversity markets are still largely voluntary, and still evolving rapidly. Earthacre would welcome advice and feedback on product-market fit as we help to shape both markets.

The top three organizations/ people we would like to partner with are:

1. Space Enabled and the MIT Media Lab— Space Enabled uses space technology, such as satellites, to advance justice on Earth. Earthacre is aiming to use satellite technology to create novel sources of revenue and increase resilience in frontline communities through the scalable quantification of carbon and biodiversity gains. We believe that as we increase resilience and land retention, migration and displacement levels should drop significantly. We think this could be a rich area of research collaboration with Space Enabled.

2. Green Keeper Africa— Selected Solver winner for coastal communities. Green Keeper Africa has created a solution to take an invasive weed, Hyacinth, and turn it into a commercial product. Huge areas across Africa have been colonized and rendered ecological deserts by invasives, such as on our pilot land in Eselenkei. Learning from Green Keeper Africa how to create value out of these invasives could play a big role in increasing income for communities from their active removal.

3. Tavneet Suri— Associate Professor of Applied Economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management, whose expertise is in the role of technology in Sub-Saharan Africa. Professor Suri is also the CoChair of the Agricultural Technology Adoption Initiative at J-PAL. Given that Earthacre will be working with frontline communities to integrate improved grazing practices with biodiversity regeneration and then use technology to monitor the gains produced, Professor Suri would likely have tremendous experience relevant to this and could help develop our impact metrics.

It is becoming increasingly clear that climate change is not only creating gradual and pervasive environmental change throughout Sub-Saharan Africa, but is also contributing to frequent and large natural disasters. Both of these environmental changes are resulting in mass displacement of people, primarily indigenous communities that tend to be reliant on the land. Slow-onset environmental degradation, reduction in soil fertility, colonization of land by invasive species and desertification are reducing the resilience in these communities. Combined with increasingly intense drought and flood cycles, studies are predicting over 1 billion climate refugees by 2050.

Earthacre aims to empower frontline communities so that they can make sustainable incomes from the regeneration and stewardship of their open land and biodiversity, in doing so greatly increasing resilience and reducing displacement rates and refugee creation. We will pilot our solution on 50,000 acres on Eselenkei land in Southern Kenya, a place with increasing levels of displacement and largely degraded lands. Earthacre will work with the community to restore the land via biodiversity and managed grazing practices, and then convert the gains in biodiversity and carbon into biodiversity and carbon credits. By diversifying and stabilizing revenue streams, Earthacre not only aims to increase ecosystem resilience, but also community livelihoods in order to promote their self-reliance. One of our core impact metrics is land retention of frontline communities, and we have seen that advancing the economic and political inclusion of frontline communities is one of the best means to combat climate change and biodiversity collapse.

Earthacre's solution is focused on scaling up the carbon removal work already being done by frontline communities— the communities most impacted by climate change. 

Traditional carbon projects rely on soil sampling to quantify gains in soil carbon. This is extremely expensive and labor intensive, so soil sampling tends to happen every 5 to 10 years, and the carbon credits generated in between are issued via mathematical models, as dictated by the methodology. This not only reduces trust in the market due to the limited data produced (ie only getting carbon removal data when the soil samples are taken again on the 5th or 10th year), but creates complexity, costs, and bureaucracy that make carbon solutions inaccessible to many communities.  

In contrast, Earthacre will use satellite technology to quickly and cost-effectively generate orders of magnitude more soil carbon data. Not only can soil carbon data be quantified monthly (and retroactively), it can be measured spatially across thousands of acres; far greater than the 20cm diameter of a soil sample. Moreover, it can connect and aggregate the carbon removal of different communities, even when the communities are not in the same geographical region. This solution not only builds greater trust with buyers, but also with communities due to its simplicity, affordability, and quick implementation.

Earthacre will use the ServiceNow prize money to generate and issue the first carbon (and biodiversity) credits in Sub-Saharan Africa verified via satellite technology, and create a marketplace rooted in frontline communities to sell these highly differentiated credits.