Kenyan Rangeland Restoration

With community-run conservancies and the NGO Natural State, I am co-developing a scalable biodiversity assessment program to support the evaluation of several broad-scale restoration efforts. Natural State works with local partners, like the Lewa Wildlife Conservancy, to connect quantifiable outcomes of i) carbon sequestration, ii) biodiversity conservation, and iii) human well-being to financial markets to provide funding for sustainable management of social-ecological systems.

Accessing novel conservation finance mechanisms, notably conservation bonds, requires rigorous outcome assessment structures, ideally with transferable metrics like population growth of a target species. For this reason, our early stage work is focusing on relatively controllable contexts, like assessing the effects of elephant exclosure fencing on bird diversity and carbon sequestration via tree regrowth.