Voice of Change: Championing Ecotourism Through Tree Planting

Climate change bears down hardest on the communities who depend most directly on the land - and in Baringo County, Kenya, the Endorois pastoralist community is answering that pressure with a homegrown idea: ecotourism built on tree planting.

Jeremiah Kiprotich leads a community-based organisation that has turned reforestation into both a conservation strategy and an economic one. Trees restore degraded land, hold soil against erosion, and draw down carbon - but they also draw visitors, create guiding and hospitality work, and give young people and persons with disabilities a stake in a thriving local economy. In Jeremiah's own words, captured on camera for this series, ecotourism is what happens when conservation stops being a cost communities bear alone and starts being a livelihood they can build together.

This story is one of seven told by community champions themselves, part of Voices for Change - a partnership between the CGIAR Initiative on Climate Resilience (ClimBeR) and CEMIRIDE exploring how indigenous knowledge and rights-based approaches are already building climate resilience across Kenya's minority and indigenous communities.