Climate impact concerns mount as herders turn to hardy camels

A camel drinks water. [File, Standard]

In September, 24 camels at Kapiti Research Station in Machakos County wore light harnesses for four weeks. Each harness held canisters that slowly filled with the animal's breath over 24 hours. Inside them was an answer Kenya has never had: how much methane a camel releases.

The trial, run by the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) and the French agricultural research centre CIRAD, is the first in Africa to measure camel methane directly. It comes as more herders in the drylands swap cattle for camels, and as no one can say what that switch does to the country's emissions.

The reason for the switch is plain. In the drought that peaked in early 2023, Kenya lost an estimated 2.6 million livestock worth Sh226 billion, according to the National Drought Management Authority (NDMA). That was about 5 per cent of the 52.8 million animals in the arid and semi-arid counties. Marsabit and Kajiado lost more than 40 per cent of theirs, the authority's data showed.

Camels fared better. In an NDMA assessment of Kajiado, Laikipia and Nyeri, camels were being watered once a week, against two to three days a week in a normal season. In 2024, Abdulahi Mohamud, 65, of Lekiji village in Laikipia, lost all 30 of his cattle and now keeps 20 camels.

"Pastoral communities are among the hardest hit by climate change," said Dr Mohamed Habibou Assouma, a joint appointment scientist at ILRI. "Their cows, sheep and goats are struggling to cope with repeated droughts, so camels are stepping in."

The herd is growing. ILRI estimated 3.2 million camels in Kenya in 2019, and the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics' 2025 production report puts the number above 4 million. Demand for meat is rising with it. The 2025 Economic Survey recorded 239,000 camels slaughtered in 2024, up 29.9 per cent from 184,000 the year before.

More camels raise a question that Kenya cannot yet answer. Like cattle, camels ferment their food in the stomach and release methane, mostly by belching. Over a century, the gas traps about 28 times more heat than carbon dioxide.

Kenya has no figures of its own for it. Countries without local measurements report livestock emissions using default values from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and for camels that default is 46 kilogrammes of methane per animal each year, the same number for every country. Earlier IPCC guidance traced the camel figure to a study from 1993.

The stakes extend past camels. A review of livestock research in Africa found that more than 70 per cent of the continent's agricultural greenhouse gas emissions come from livestock, mostly methane from digestion, and that most countries still rely on IPCC defaults to estimate them.

Multiply that default by 4 million camels and the result is about 184,000 tonnes of methane a year, or roughly 5.2 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent. The real number could be higher or lower, which is the point of the trial.

"We have long believed that camels are climate-friendly animals, but we have never had the data to prove it," Assouma said.

Measuring a camel that grazes freely is hard. The team did not put the animals in chambers. Each camel swallowed a small tube that releases a harmless tracer gas, sulphur hexafluoride, at a known rate. "Think of it as a slow leak," Assouma said. "Because we know exactly how much gas the tube releases each day, we can use it to measure the methane."

In the laboratory, scientists compared the tracer gas in each breath sample with the methane. They also recorded each camel's milk yield, weight and feed intake, and took samples of the microbes in its stomach.

Those extra measurements matter because a single total says little. "What really matters is how much methane is produced per litre of milk and per kilogram of feed," Assouma said. "That will show whether camels are climate-friendly or not."

Productivity shifts the sums. An animal that gives little milk emits more methane for each litre than one that gives a lot. If camels follow that pattern, better-fed animals could give families more milk through a drought while lowering emissions per litre.

None of that is proven yet. The results have not been published, and the trial cannot say whether camels help or hurt the climate. What it can do is replace borrowed numbers with Kenyan ones. The findings could also guide breeding for camels that give more milk and release less methane per litre.

A second trial, with a new group of Somali camels, is planned for the 2027 rainy season to test how diet and season change emissions. The researchers hope other African countries will use the evidence. The work is part of the Regional Livestock Programme, funded by the French Development Agency (AFD) and implemented with Mercy Corps, with support from the CGIAR Climate Action Science Program.

For Assouma, the stakes go beyond accounting. "Camels should not be seen as a last resort," he said. "They should be a strategic solution to climate change. That is why we need more evidence and more research on camel production and methane emissions."