Tera workers inspect plots where biochar-blended fertilizer is applied to boost soil health and trap carbon. Credit: Chemtai Kirui/IPS

By Chemtai Kirui
KISUMU, Kenya, Jul 22 2025 (IPS)

In June 2025, Kenyan climate-tech firm Tera became the first African project developer to have its carbon removal initiative independently validated and registered under Riverse, a European standard for engineered climate solutions.

The validation confirms that Tera’s project design and digital monitoring framework meet Riverse’s strict scientific criteria—making it eligible to issue carbon credits once verified.

The project is now listed on Riverse’s public-facing Rainbow Registry, which provides transparent documentation of validated projects and will track credits through issuance and retirement.

Tera collects bagasse—the dry, fibrous material left after sugarcane is crushed—from mills around Kisumu, Kenya’s third-largest city in the Lake Victoria basin, known for its sugarcane farms and factories.

At its pilot facility, the sugarcane waste is fed into a pyrolysis unit, a specialized machine that heats the material in the absence of oxygen to produce biochar, a porous, carbon-rich substance.

When applied to soil, biochar helps the ground retain water and nutrients, boosting crop health while locking carbon in place so it cannot escape back into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide (CO₂), according to Dr. Eng. Erick Kiplangat Ronoh, a biosystems and environmental engineering expert at Kenya’s Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology.

“Unlike ordinary plant waste that decomposes and releases carbon, biochar stabilizes it in a form that can remain in soils for extended periods,” Ronoh said.

It is often described as turning agricultural residues into a ‘sponge’ that improves water retention, soil fertility, and long-term carbon storage.

Tera blends biochar into organic fertilizer sold to farmers across the region, aiming to improve harvests and restore degraded soils while creating the basis for carbon credit generation.

“We are bringing the soil back to life,” said Rob Palmer, Tera’s CEO. “Biochar improves yields, reduces dependence on inorganic fertilizers, and boosts drought resilience. But for us to scale up, we needed to prove the science—which is what validation under Riverse provides.”

Palmer described the validation as “a crucial step,” enabled by Tera’s tracking system, which monitors every stage from bagasse collection to biochar application.

Tera did not work alone. To ensure carbon savings are measurable and verifiable, it partnered with another Kenyan company, CYNK—a technology firm that builds digital systems for environmental data tracking—to design a custom Measurement, Reporting, and Verification (MRV) system that tracks and documents carbon removal data at every stage.

CYNK’s system uses internet-of-things (IoT) sensors and real-time dashboards to create an auditable, tamper-resistant record of the entire process—from weighing biomass to monitoring pyrolysis temperatures and mapping where biochar is applied.

“That level of detail is essential for full traceability,” said Kelvin Gitahi, CYNK’s head of technology.

Gitahi said traditional carbon credit systems often relied on paperwork and spreadsheets to prove the credits they claimed, making auditing difficult.

“Registries typically want evidence of what you produced and where it was applied,” he said. “Historically, it meant assembling files manually. That lack of automation made trust hard to build.”

By contrast, CYNK’s automated system converts sensor readings and spatial data into quantifiable carbon removal estimates, minimizing human error and enabling independent audits.

“It’s designed to be tamper-proof,” Gitahi said. “From the weighbridge measuring truckloads of bagasse to the exact kilos of biochar applied, everything is logged automatically.”

It’s evidence-based and traceable—“so there’s no cooking the books,” as he put it.

Such rigorous monitoring is essential under Article 6 of the Paris Agreement, which requires transparent, robust MRV to prevent double-counting in international carbon markets.

Riverse, one of 13 global standards endorsed by ICROA, the voluntary carbon market’s main accreditation body, said Tera is the first project it has certified that can scientifically demonstrate its biochar will keep carbon stable for many years.

“Tera had to meet twelve criteria,” said Samara Vantil, Riverse’s certification operations lead. “That included demonstrating full traceability, using only waste biomass, and proving the project was financially additional.”

Each year, more than 20 data points are reviewed to confirm ongoing compliance.

Validation under Riverse generally takes two to three months, with projects subject to annual audits for at least five years and periodic reassessment to remain listed.

Riverse also operates a public platform disclosing project-level data—from feedstock sourcing to credit issuance—in an effort to address transparency concerns in the voluntary carbon market (VCM), where companies and organizations purchase credits to offset emissions outside regulated compliance schemes.

Such scrutiny is seen as vital as Europe looks to source more carbon removals from Africa

A recent European Union proposal includes possible allowances for member states to use “high-quality international credits” to offset hard-to-abate emissions starting in the mid-2030s. If adopted, it could significantly boost demand for rigorously verified projects like Tera’s, which remain rare on the continent.

“Kenya is an emerging hotspot for carbon removal in Africa,” said Ludovic Chatoux, co-founder and CEO of Riverse. “Its renewable electricity mix, reliable feedstock supply, and supportive policies make it attractive for engineered carbon removal.”

That policy environment includes Kenya’s Carbon Credit Trading and Benefit Sharing Bill, which establishes a body to manage carbon trading and benefit-sharing, and the Climate Change Act, which provides a legal framework for carbon markets.

The Climate Change (Carbon Markets) Regulations, 2024, further detail the mechanics of registration, certification, and the creation of a National Carbon Registry.

Diagram showing how the DMRV system developed by Kenyan firm CYNK tracks Tera’s biochar production from bagasse to farm application.

Chatoux said Riverse is also assessing projects in Nigeria and Ghana, reflecting what he called a “bullish outlook” for the region.

He added that Riverse’s goal is to channel financing into projects that demonstrably remove or avoid CO₂, arguing that greater transparency is needed to counter greenwashing in the voluntary market.

Globally, engineered carbon removal credits—such as biochar or direct air capture—command significantly higher prices than most nature-based offsets.

Data from tracking platforms CDR.fyi and Puro.earth show that in 2024, engineered removals averaged around USD 320 per tonne, with biochar trading at roughly USD 140 by mid-2025.

By contrast, even high-quality forestry credits typically fetched USD 8 to USD 15.

This price gap reflects the greater durability and auditability of engineered removals,” said Dr. Ronoh.

Unlike trees, which can lose stored carbon to fires, pests, or logging, biochar locks carbon in soils and is designed to keep it stable for hundreds to thousands of years.

Still, he cautioned that although biochar is widely regarded as a promising climate solution, its benefits depend on strict quality controls and sustainable production.

“If the biomass is contaminated, it can introduce heavy metals or toxins into the soil,” Dr. Ronoh said. “And if it’s applied in excess or made without standardized methods, biochar can harm soil structure and nutrient uptake.”

Despite global efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions, atmospheric concentrations continue to rise—especially carbon dioxide, the primary driver of human-induced climate change.

According to the World Meteorological Organization, CO₂ levels are now more than 50% above pre-industrial concentrations, setting yet another record high. This has heightened calls for permanent carbon removal to complement emissions cuts.

Agricultural carbon removal strategies, once considered marginal in climate policy, are gaining recognition as essential complements to emissions reductions, especially in sectors that are hard to decarbonize.

This shift is underscored in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) AR6 Working Group III report (2022) and analysis by Carbon Direct, which emphasize that achieving the 1.5°C target will require not only deep emissions cuts but also large-scale deployment of carbon dioxide removal (CDR), including land-based approaches like biochar.

In Kenya and the wider region, there is growing momentum to help farmers both adapt to climate change through climate-smart practices and mitigate it through carbon farming techniques.

Peter Wachira, regional advisor for carbon projects at Vi Agroforestry—a nonprofit that promotes sustainable land use through initiatives like the Kenya Agricultural Carbon Project (KACP)—said these approaches offer significant climate and economic benefits.

“By adopting sustainable techniques such as composting, agroforestry, and agricultural waste recycling, farmers can sequester carbon, improve food security, and raise household incomes,” Wachira said.

But he cautioned that carbon credit schemes must be designed to serve those doing the work.

“The carbon market must first and foremost improve farmers’ livelihoods,” he said. “And we cannot forget—emissions reductions must remain the responsibility of the Global North. Communities here are paying the price for a crisis they didn’t create.”

Kenya’s carbon market debates have also evolved—from initial resistance over fears of enabling continued pollution to ongoing discussions about ensuring transparency, robust credit verification, and equitable benefit-sharing with local communities.

Gitahi said Kenya has demonstrated it can deliver the kind of credible, transparent systems the world is demanding.

“Kenya is offering what the global market needs. It’s proof that projects here can be validated to global standards,” he said. “Our digital transparency shows the strength of local technological capacity, the local expertise, and how communities are willing to engage and give feedback.”

He added that it is rare to see all these players—from governments creating policies to communities shaping projects and investors showing trust—working together.

“It just shows Kenya is now ready for this,” he said.

For Tera, the challenge is now building on that readiness and scaling its model across the continent.

“There’s not a rulebook for America and a different rulebook for Africa,” said Palmer. “What we have proven is that an African carbon project can meet the same global standards. Now that we have a way to prove our model works—that it’s not limited by feedstock, site, or demand—we just need the capital to scale it.”

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Water woes hit Zimbabwean cities as the country battles to overcome the impact of drought attributed to the El Niño climate pattern. Credit: Jeffrey Moyo/IPS

By Jeffrey Moyo
BULAWAYO, Zimbabwe, Dec 11 2024 (IPS)

At a borehole not far from Mpopoma High School in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe’s second largest city, 48-year-old Sakhile Mulawuzi balances a white 25-liter bucket of water on her head as she holds another 10-liter blue bucket filled with water. She trudges these back home along a narrow pathway leading to her house in Mpopoma, one of the high-density areas here.

Similarly, in Masvingo, Zimbabwe’s oldest town, 30-year-old Ruramai Chinoda stands at her neighbor’s house in Rujeko high-density suburb, where she fetches water from a tap because her neighbor has a borehole and shares the precious liquid with the community.

Nearly 300 kilometers north of Masvingo, 43-year-old Nevias Chaurura, a pushcart operator in Mabvuku high-density suburb in the Zimbabwean capital Harare, struggles with a load of eight 20-liter buckets. He delivers them from door-to-door for a minimal fee as many city dwellers battle to find water.

These ongoing water shortages are blamed on a lack of planning and the ongoing El Niño drought. If the residents were hoping for a change in weather conditions, a report released today (Wednesday, December 11, 2024) by the World Meteorological Organization suggests that while the cooling La Niña climate pattern may develop in the next three months, it is expected to be relatively weak and short-lived.

Latest forecasts from WMO Global Producing Centres of Long-Range Forecasts indicate a 55 percent likelihood of a transition from the current neutral conditions (neither El Niño nor La Niña) to La Nina conditions during December 2024 to February 2025, the WMO explains.

Infographic credit: WMO

The return of the ENSO-neutral conditions is then favored during February-April 2025, with about a 55 percent chance.

La Niña refers to the large-scale cooling of the ocean surface temperatures in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean, coupled with changes in the tropical atmospheric circulation, such as winds, pressure and rainfall. Generally, La Niña produces the opposite large-scale climate impacts to El Niño, especially in tropical regions.

“However, naturally occurring climate events such as La Nina and El Nino events are taking place in the broader context of human-induced climate change, which is increasing global temperatures, exacerbating extreme weather and climate, and impacting seasonal rainfall and temperature patterns,” the WMO warns.

WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo said 2024, which started out with El Niño, is on track to be the hottest year on record.

“Even if a La Niña event does emerge, its short-term cooling impact will be insufficient to counterbalance the warming effect of record heat-trapping greenhouse gases in the atmosphere,” said Saulo. “Even in the absence of El Niño or La Niña conditions since May, we have witnessed an extraordinary series of extreme weather events, including record-breaking rainfall and flooding, which have unfortunately become the new norm in our changing climate.”

Zimbabwe is one of six countries that declared a state of emergency over the El Niño-induced drought, which resulted in the lowest mid-season rainfall in 40 years. The weather phenomenon also resulted in intense rain in other regions.

“These severe weather shocks have led to the displacement of thousands of people, disease outbreaks, food shortages, water scarcity and significant impacts on agriculture,” according to the organization OCHA.

Zimbabwean residents blame the water shortages on both the weather and bad planning.

Mulawuzi said for nearly two decades, she has lived with the crisis in the country’s second-largest city and as residents, they have only learnt to live with the challenge and ignore the promises from politicians to end the city’s perennial water crisis over the years.

Each election time, politicians from the governing Zimbabwe Africa National Union Patriotic Front (Zanu-PF) have pledged to end Bulawayo’s water woes by working on the Zambezi water pipeline project meant to end the city’s water challenges.

However, since the country’s colonial government laid out the plan more than a century ago, the project has not been implemented.

A 450-kilometer pipeline to bring water from the Zambezi River to Bulawayo was first proposed in 1912 by this country’s colonial government.

Then, like now, the Matabeleland Zambezi Water Project (MZWP) aimed to address the region’s chronic water shortages and to promote socio-economic growth.

Now, water-starved residents of Bulawayo, like Mulawuzi, are forced to endure the accelerated water rationing that has hit the city, lasting at times for nearly a week.

“I have no choice for as long as there is no running water on our taps but to go around some boreholes here in search of the water for my family,” Mulawuzi, a mother of four, told IPS.

When Bulawayo residents, like Mulawuzi, are lucky to have access to water, people in high-density suburbs are now limited to 350 litres of water per day, reduced from 450 liters.

In Bulawayo’s low-density areas, the affluent residents are restricted to 550 liters, down from 650 litres of water when supplied by the council.

In Harare, life has become a gamble for many urbanites like Chaurura, who has now turned the drought into a money-making venture.

“People have no water in their houses and I made a plan to fetch it from boreholes and wells far from the residents and sell it to them. I get a dollar for each 40 liters of water I sell and I make sure I get busy throughout the day,” Chaurura told IPS.

The El Niño drought has resulted in major lakes and dams supplying water in urban areas running low across Zimbabwe, triggering an acute water crisis in towns and cities.

According to the Zimbabwe National Water Authority, most of the dams supplying water to Bulawayo are dangerously low—the Inyakuni is at 9 percent, the Insiza at 36.5 percent, the Lower Ncema at 5.9 percent and the Upper Ncema at 1.7 percent.

The city is currently under a 120-hour water shedding program due to the reduced inflows from the 2023/24 rainy season.

In Harare, where many like Chaurura now thrive making money from the crisis, urban residents commonly move around carrying buckets in search of water. They form long and winding queues at the few water points erected by Good Samaritans.

Some, like 37-year-old Jimson Beta working in the Central Business District, where he fixes mobile phones, now carry empty five-liter containers to work.

“After work, I always fetch water to carry with me back home because there is often no running water where I live with my family. It only comes once a week. We have become used to this problem, which is not normal at all,” Beta told IPS.

For people like Beta, the water situation in the capital Harare has not improved either, even as authorities in government have drilled boreholes to address the crisis.

Just last year, in October, the Zimbabwean government appointed a 19-member technical committee to manage the City of Harare’s water affairs as part of efforts to improve the availability of the precious liquid across the city.

Despite that move, water deficits have continued to pound Harare rather mercilessly and many, like Beta, have had to bear the pain of finding the precious liquid almost every day on their own.

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The coastal village of Scotts Head, Dominica: The 2023 State of the Climate in Latin America and the Caribbean report is calling for robust early warning systems to safeguard small island developing states from rising sea levels and other impacts of climate change. Credit: Alison Kentish/IPS

By Alison Kentish
DOMINICA, May 10 2024 (IPS)

Every year for the last four years, a collaborative effort involving scientists and other experts has assessed the state of the climate in Latin America and the Caribbean. The findings have revealed increasingly alarming trends for the world’s second-most disaster-prone region.

The latest report by the World Meteorological Organization published on May 8, confirmed that 2023 was the hottest year on record. The Atlantic region experienced a rapid rise in sea levels, surpassing the global average and threatening the coastlines of several small island developing states. The spike in temperatures hit agriculture hard, worsening food insecurity, while wildlife populations suffered. Meanwhile, heavy rainfall triggered floods and landslides, with significant fatalities and economic losses across the region. 

“In all types of climatic and environmental variables, records were broken during the year 2023. In terms of the amount of heat in the ocean, sea level rise, ice loss in the Antarctic Sea and the retreat of  glaciers, Latin America and the Caribbean have been seriously affected by the effects of El Niño, which are of course added to those of climate change induced by human presence,” said Professor Celeste Saulo, WMO Secretary General.

The report highlighted Category 5 Hurricane Otis, which hit near Acapulco, Mexico, as one of the strongest hurricanes on record in the Eastern Pacific. It also underscored the impacts of heavy rainfall, such as the deadly landslide in Sao Sebastiao, Brazil, and noted that the Negro River in the Amazon hit record low levels, while low water levels restricted shop traffic in the Panama Canal.

“In 2023, around 11 million people in the region were affected by disasters. Out of all these, climate-related disasters were the majority, resulting in over 20 billion US dollars in economic losses,” Acting Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Disaster Risk Reduction, Paola Albrito, told the report’s launch.

“We are unfortunately seeing this play out now in Brazil, where devastating floods have taken almost 100 lives and displaced over 160,000 people to date.”

Albrito told the launch that in order to meet their commitments to the Sustainable Development Goals, countries must reduce the burden of disasters.

“This starts by accelerating the implementation of the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, in line with the agreed Regional Action Plan, which was updated last year,” she stated.

The UN Disaster risk official is calling for integrated disaster risk reduction into development financing to close funding gaps. Presently, just 1% of official development assistance in Latin America and the Caribbean goes towards disaster prevention.

She urged countries in this Region to take advantage of the opportunity presented by the UN Secretary General’s Early Warnings for All Initiative to enhance multi-hazard warning systems and emphasized the importance of heightened collaboration in disaster preparedness and risk management between the European Union and Latin American and Caribbean intergovernmental organizations to improve response mechanisms and enhance resilience to natural disasters.

The report acknowledges progress made in using meteorological data for health surveillance, particularly in disease monitoring, citing it as a “move towards stronger public health strategies.” The COVID-19 pandemic underscored the importance of this area and the need to address gaps in disease surveillance.

“Climate change is a threat to global health that directly and indirectly affects health, well-being, and health equity. It exacerbates existing public health challenges in the Americas, such as food and water insecurity, air pollution, and the transmission of vector-borne diseases,” said Dr. Jarba Barbosa, Director of the Pan American Health Organization.

One of Barbosa’s first actions as PAHO Director was the relaunch of an initiative for the elimination of more than 30 diseases and health conditions from countries in the Americas. He says social and environmental conditions contribute significantly to elimination efforts, but climate change continues to challenge experts’ understanding of the epidemiology of many of those diseases.

“This is why member states have asked PAHO to develop a new policy to strengthen action of the health sector to respond to climate change with equity. This will be presented to our governing bodies in 2024, so that the Region of the Americas can have climate resilient and low carbon health systems, adopting a climate justice approach to increase equity in health,” he said.

The collaborative effort behind the 4th State of the Climate report involved over 30 national meteorological and hydrological services and regional climate centres, 60 scientists and experts and the support of organizations like the Food and Agriculture Organization and the Pan American Health Organization.

Partners say the report is a valuable resource to enhance regional risk knowledge and provides critical benchmarks for countries to better understand and address the growing climate risks they face.

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