Balancing development and conservation in Kenya’s largest freshwater wetland

Step 4: Planning the full assessment The toolkit user needs to take into consideration the results of the rapid appraisal, the objective of the assessment, the available resources (including manpower), to plan data collection. [...] The area of rice cultivation/commercial farming increases from the south to meet the southern edge of village fields and westwards to the furthest extent of disturbance, sandbar and settlements. [...] The vast majority of the climate warming emissions from the swamp under all scenarios are due to the drainage of organic swamp soils, releasing large amounts of CO2 to the atmosphere as the result of aerobic soil decomposition. [...] 4.1 Methods To estimate the net value of measured services offered by the swamp, we have taken the values of marketable services (cultivated and wild harvested goods and recreation and tourism services) and combined these with estimates of the value of (or cost of) the emissions of GHGs from the swamp under each scenario. [...] Using the solely market price of carbon of around $4, the increase in cost of emissions at the swamp under the development scenario is more than compensated for by the increased income of the agricultural production, a land use that arguably is the cause of most of the increase in emissions.