Economic value of the Mau forest complex, Cherangany hills and Mt. Elgon water towers in Kenya

Abstract

The Water Towers of Kenya play a critical role in supplying ecosystems services. These services, mostly provisioning and regulating including water supply, timber and timber products, water, air and climate regulating. The five main Water Towers (Mt Elgon, Mau, Cherangany Hills, Aberdares and Mt. Kenya) provide approximately 75% of Kenya and the major hydropower stations in the country are on rivers that originate in these ecosystems. However, despite their importance, there has been widespread degradation and deforestation in the Water Towers, in part driven by the communities’ livelihood needs, and climate change impacts. Support to strategic planning to strengthen and enhance the climate change adaptive capacity and resilience of Kenya’s Water Tower ecosystems requires in depth quantitative understanding of the values (both economic and non-economic) that these Water Towers supply to communities living around these ecosystems and even further beyond, on a landscape scale. The Ecosystem Services Valuation (ESV) study, undertaken by the Kenya Forestry Research Institute (KEFRI) with funding and technical support from US Forest Service-International Programs and USAID Kenya, aimed to highlight the significance of the Kenya Water Towers ecosystems through quantitative assessment of the benefits derived from these ecosystems. An important tenet of the study was that understanding the economic value of the ecosystems will support science - and data-driven decision making and investments for sustainable and adaptive management of these critical ecosystems. The ESV study focused on three of the five main Water Towers—Mau, Cherangany Hills, and Mt. Elgon—and used internationally recognized methodologies, such as the total economic value approach, and assessments, such as those used in the Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) study. Disaggregated data show that the Mau, Cherangany, and Mt. Elgon ecosystems contribute an estimated KES 197 billion (USD 1.97 billion), KES 46 billion (USD 461 million) and KES 114 billion (USD 1.15 billion) respectively. Aggregated data (Figure 1) show the dominance of regulating services from the three Water Tower ecosystems with 82 percent, 66 percent, and 95 percent (of TEV) respectively in xii the Mau, Cherangany, and Mt. Elgon ecosystems, underscoring the importance of indirect-use values in forest ecosystems. The provisioning services contributed 16 percent, 30 percent, and 4 percent of TEV for Mau, Cherangany, and Mt. Elgon, respectively. It is important to note that these estimates are conservative because they do not encompass all monetary values of ES, due to limitations in data and the difficulty in estimating, for example, the right to exist; bequest and recreation; and research and education.