Development of a Geovisualisation Tool for Clean Development Mechanism Projects in Kenya

Abstract

Kenya is one of the developing countries that are a party to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement. These agreements are the world’s advancement towards reducing emission which is being addressed by the Clean Development Mechanism. The National Environment Management Authority is currently responsible for reporting Kenya’s progress towards emission reductions from various sectors. However, there is need to map and visualise these project activities and support their monitoring by all relevant stakeholders. This research project explored how web GIS can be used to map these projects to support collaboration, information sharing, reporting and sustainable development implementation. The aim was to provide a free and open-source application, to generate and visualise more geospatial data on Clean Development Mechanism projects in Kenya. The methodology involved data extraction from excel sheets, development of data models relevant to user needs, developing the conceptual, logical and physical model of the database which was queried through PostgreSQL. An account was set up in Geoserver to host the feature services and geospatial data. A web based GIS application was developed and linked to the server and internet. HTML, CSS and JavaScript were used to develop the web app. The project resulted in a web-based GIS platform in which users can query and overlay CDM and reference layers. 67 CDM projects were identified and it was discovered that majority of these projects in Kenya have been registered (65%), are small in size and 32.8% of the projects are mainly focused on reforestation and clean cooking mechanisms. Only 17% of the projects have generated credits. The CDM projects are located within Meru and Nakuru counties. Low performance could be attributed to lack of institutional capacity, policy and legislative frameworks. The web GIS is a thin-client based platform that will be available for embedding in websites. It also provides an information solution for governments, private sector, academia, research funding agencies and the general public. The project recommends further research to explore mobile platforms that can be used to access the visualization tool and increased development of data models for the display of the most appropriate sustainable data.