SYSTEM FOR LAND-BASED EMISSIONS ESTIMATION IN KENYA(SLEEK) AND LAND-SECTOR CARBON ACCOUNTING IN KENYA: EVIDENCE FROM EMISSIONS AND REMOVALS ACCOUNTING, 1990-2015

Developing countries face persistent constraints in producing transparent, consistent and nationally owned greenhouse-gas inventories for the land sector. Kenya responded through the System for Land-based Emissions Estimation in Kenya (SLEEK), a national programme designed to integrate activity data, country-specific parameters, spatial modelling, reporting tools and institutional capacity. This paper examines SLEEK’s contribution to emissions and removals accounting from Kenya’s land sector using documentary analysis of programme records, technical manuals, national reporting material and carbon-accounting spreadsheets for 1990-2015. The evidence shows that SLEEK supported complete land representation across six IPCC land-use classes, generated wall-to-wall land-cover and land-use change datasets for 17 epochs, enabled emission-factor development for forest strata and supplied land-sector activity data used in FOLU accounting. The accounting spreadsheets estimate cumulative net CO2 emissions of 858.66 Mt CO2 over 1990-2015, equivalent to an average of 34.35 Mt CO2 yr-1. Montane and Western rainforest strata accounted for 72.83% of cumulative forest-stratum emissions, while land converted to grassland and cropland were the dominant source categories. SLEEK’s major contribution was therefore both technical and institutional: it converted fragmented datasets into an auditable national accounting chain while building domestic expertise for transparency reporting.