{"id":819347,"url":"http://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/819347/?format=json","text_counter":278,"type":"speech","speaker_name":"Tigania West, JP","speaker_title":"Hon. John Mutunga","speaker":{"id":13495,"legal_name":"John Kanyuithia Mutunga","slug":"john-kanyuithia-mutunga"},"content":"of increasing the forest cover. There is an issue that has been alluded to. I do not know whether we understand it very well. That is the issue of carbon credits. I know that there are people who are being paid in Kenya with regard to carbon credits. There are some people who are paid in terms of the number of seedlings that they are planting and nurturing every year. If you follow this clearly, you will realise that the audit is not properly done. Sometimes people are paid for trees they are not planting nor nurturing. So, we need to have serious focus and serious monitoring of this particular process. In terms of carbon credits and payments, there is a lot that we can do upon agreements that have been arrived at through climate change negotiations. I do not know the extent to which this knowledge has permeated to the people. It is important for the relevant State department to unpack this knowledge for Kenyans to understand and make use of. It is an advantage that we are losing as a country as we watch other countries growing through the benefits that have been accorded in this particular process. I want to share my personal experience in terms of tree harvesting. Sometime back, the Government declared that saw millers could harvest trees. I needed some firewood. I went to a certain forest to try and buy firewood but what I found was amazing. Tree harvesting is not logging the trees that are mature. They clear everything including the undergrowth and the bushes. That is not harvesting, that is destruction! Sometimes they even burn it. We need to be very careful on how we manage our forests. Forest is not the tree standing, it is the undergrowth, the amount of vegetation that we have at one particular point in time in terms of forest cover. When we talk about forest sinks in climate change terms, forests are used as sinks for purposes of sequestration. We cannot have sequestration when we have stand-alone trees; it happens where there is a thicket, bush land and a lot of undergrowth. That is what we need to preserve in the first place. I would like to briefly look at what we can do as a people and as leaders in this country to increase forest cover. One of the things we can clearly do is to promote tree planting, realistic tree planting, not just asking people to come to a major occasion to plant trees and that is the end of the story. It involves having a regular calendar of planting trees and having specific numbers that you are delivering every year. If we are not working with numbers, we are joking. We can never get there. We should work with targets. We should know we are going to increase the forest cover by one or 0.5 per cent every year. We should evaluate whether or not we have reached the one per cent or 0.5 per cent. If we determine we have not, we should ask ourselves very serious questions why we did not achieve our target. This needs to be coordinated very carefully. Every effort that goes to the direction of increasing forest cover should be captured in the national map. We should be able to follow this effort seriously."}