Discerning Climate Urgency: National “Tree Planting” & Community-Led “Tree Growing” as a response to Climate Change in Nairobi, Kenya

Abstract (English)

In response to climate urgency, trees, in their assigned role as carbon sequestering agents, have become key actors in large-scale tree planting and reforestation drives. This paper draws upon digital ethnography following the Kenyan government’s commitment to plant 15 billion trees by 2032, to illustrate how a global discourse of climate urgency both endorses and is mobilized for rapid climate action. As a counterpoint, I engage with a community-led “tree growing” approach - observed during in-person fieldwork in Nairobi’s Karura Forest - which challenges climate urgency’s insistence on immediacy. This paper emphasizes that proclamations of climate urgency can be met with discernment (Bandak & Anderson 2022), over “haste” (Haarstad et al. 2023), resulting in action informed by a deeper engagement with socio-ecological entanglements.

While this research responds to a call for “anthropologies of urgency” (Wahlberg, Burke and Manderson 2021, 21): ethnographic inquiry into life-threatening crises, this paper heeds a more specific call, for deeper anthropological engagement with the notion of urgency itself (Bandak & Anderson 2022). Kenya’s national tree planting days on 13 November 2023 and 11 May 2024 were presented to the Kenyan public as a response to climate urgency. They were widely publicized across social and news media, yet were also criticized for what was seen as a hurried, often performative, approach. In contrast, “tree growing” in Karura Forest attunes to the more-than-human temporalities of a forest ecosystem, demonstrating a less-frenzied relationship with climate urgency. Climate change, experienced as unpredictable rainfall and - at its extremes - droughts and floods, is acknowledged as a driving force for their work. Yet, climate urgency is only one of many environmental and social urgencies they contend with.

By grappling with how climate urgency is employed and responded to within this specific “patch” of the Anthropocene (Tsing, Mathews & Bubandt 2017) this paper contributes towards our collective understanding of how “urgency” itself operates. I argue that climate urgency’s insistence on immediacy can be subverted, not as a challenge to or disengagement from climate change, but in order to enact a more sustained, socially-responsible form of climate action.