Kenya

Kenya is facing multiple sustainability challenges, revolving around modern energy access, health, nutrition, clean water, etc. Sustainability efforts need to be intensified. However, ahead of its National Climate Change Action Plan update, the country lacks appropriate modelling capacities.

Within IAM COMPACT, we will study, together with national stakeholders and six diverse coast-side counties, the clean energy - clean water - food - health nexus, co-developing a model for multi-SDG analysis.

Overall, as a small contributor to GHG emissions, Kenya has the potential to make a positive contribution to the global climate change mitigation effort, by maintaining its current low carbon emissions policies in power production and introducing similar policies for all sectors (World Bank Group, 2023). Without further action, Kenya's emissions from the energy sector could rise from around 20 Mt CO2e in 2021 to around 130 Mt in 2050. Under ‘Business As Usual’ (BAU), most of the increase in emissions will come from transport and industries, driven by population growth, and economic growth (Ministry of Energy & Petroleum, 2023).

Kenya has set itself targets for reducing its GHG emissions: The country submitted an updated NDC under the Paris Agreement in December 2020 that includes mitigation and adaptation contributions and an emission reduction of 32% below BAU by 2030 (including LULUCF) (Climate Action Tracker, 2022), compared to 30% in the initial one (Updated NDC).

It addresses the severe socio-economic losses resulting from extreme weather events and climate change impacts on the country's economy. Recognising its dependence on climate-sensitive natural resources, Kenya aims to pursue a low-carbon, climate-resilient development pathway through this contribution. While the first NDC foresaw a conditional target, with the updated NDC the country commits to mobilise 13% of the needed budget no longer by international resources but by itself (Ministry of Environment and Forestry, 2020). However, the updated NDC does not contain sectoral mitigation targets.

On the sectoral initiatives, Kenya has not signed the Global Methane (https://www.globalmethanepledge.org/) and the Coal Exit Pledges.

More information can be found in D6.6 – Report on drivers, barriers, and policy analysis (DOI 10.5281/zenodo.13643213)

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