Kenya's Rangelands Store Carbon and Feed Millions — and Are Being Lost

A UN assessment of Kenya's rangelands — arid and semi-arid grasslands that cover roughly 80% of the country's land area — warns that they are degrading faster than restoration efforts can compensate. These landscapes support an estimated 10 million pastoralists and agropastoralists, provide dry-season water sources, and sequester carbon in both vegetation and soil. The report emphasises that rangelands are routinely undervalued in national accounting because they generate diffuse, non-market value — carbon storage, biodiversity, and pastoral livelihoods — rather than the concentrated, taxable output of crop agriculture.

The core tension is a classic land-use competition problem amplified by climate change. As rainfall becomes less predictable, pastoralists need larger, more flexible migration corridors — but those same corridors are being fenced off for commercial agriculture and real estate development, often with state backing. The land that looks 'empty' and 'unproductive' to planners is precisely the land that pastoral systems require to function. Privatising it destroys a commons that no individual owner has an incentive to maintain.

The policy lever that matters most here is whether Kenya's devolved county governments — who now control land-use decisions under the 2010 constitution — will develop community land rights frameworks that recognise pastoral mobility as a legitimate and legally protected land use. Several counties have piloted such frameworks under the Community Land Act 2016; whether those pilots scale before degradation crosses irreversible thresholds is the open question.