A new research facility in Kenya will more cost-effectively measure precise greenhouse gas emissions and deliver this information to policy makers.

An article on the Forests News blog of the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) reports that the Mazingira Centre in Nairobi (named for the Kiswahili word for environment) is the first of it kind of Africa and could lay the groundwork for similar centres in other parts of Africa.

Until now, Kenya, like most developing countries, has had to rely on generic data about emissions provided by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The country did not have the equipment needed to measure actual greenhouse gas emissions from different land uses and in different scenarios, and had to pay consultants to perform these calculations for its greenhouse gas inventory.

The Mazingira lab has so far been shown to be providing more accurate measurements and is able to measure emissions from a full range of sources in Kenya, including livestock; manure management systems; smallholder farms; and land uses such as forests, tea and timber plantations.

The Mazingira Centre is supported in part by the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) and forms part of the CGIAR Research Program on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry. It is hoped that it will eventually become a central hub for environmental excellence in Africa, with a network of smaller satellite climate change laboratories across the continent.

Read the full story: In an important first for Africa, climate data ‘Made in Kenya’