ELTI Participant Uses Data to Fight Climate Change and Biodiversity Loss in Kenya

Growing up in Tetu village, at the edge of Kenya’s Rumuruti Forest, Ceciliah Mumbi experienced this firsthand. “Life unfolded alongside the wild,” she says. At night, she could hear elephants raiding crops and hyenas and leopards preying on livestock. Village members needed to adapt to the challenges of living close to nature, especially as the effects of deforestation and forest fragmentation due to human population pressure increased. On a school trip at the age of 10, Mumbi visited Sweetwaters Game Reserve, where she saw a Northern white rhinoceros for the first time. From then on, determined to try to shift how interactions with wildlife are perceived, she dedicated her studies and career to natural resource management.

Mumbi started her career as a wildlife monitor and researcher with the privately owned wildlife conservancy Solio Ranch in Kenya, where she monitored and collected data on its lion and rhino populations. She quickly learned that her strength was fieldwork. In 2022, Mumbi joined Natural State as a biodiversity field researcher, where her focus shifted from monitoring wildlife to monitoring biodiversity and carbon. Natural State sponsored her participation in an online GIS course, through which she strengthened her geospatial analysis skills and gained a deeper appreciation for transforming field data into meaningful insights and visualizing them through maps to facilitate effective communication with diverse audiences. Mumbi says, “Maps say a lot without saying anything at all.”

Mumbi learned about ELTI’s Tropical Forest Landscapes (TFL) online certificate program from her  Natural State colleagues and enrolled in the 2024–2025 program. She was eager to learn project planning skills in the Capstone course and more about engaging with stakeholders during the People course.

Since finishing the program, Mumbi has begun to implement her capstone project. She worked out an agreement with a local landowner whose land had previously been used for agriculture but over time had become degraded, and with the help of community members employed by the landowner she planted acacia seedlings, fruit trees, and native grass seed. She has implemented a long-term monitoring plan, including gauging the social impact, measuring changes in the landscape, and recording the species inhabiting the land. Beyond carrying out her capstone project, Mumbi has continued to apply the participatory approaches she learned in the TFL program by using maps to communicate project progress and monitoring results. Mumbi has developed a map showing a project's scope and sampling points, including the geolocation of every tree planted along the fence line. These maps make complex field data easier for stakeholders and community members to understand.

Mumbi says that participating in the certificate program and engaging with program mentors and instructors has opened new doors for her beyond the implementation of her capstone project. She is contributing a chapter on biodiversity credits to Yale School of the Environment senior research scientist Florencia Montagnini’s upcoming book. She traveled to New Haven, Connecticut, to take part in an ELTI workshop, “Integrating Forest and Carbon Monitoring and Training in Tropical Landscape Conservation and Restoration Projects.” The TFL program also encouraged her to resume her studies and start a master's program in Geoinformation Science and Earth Observation at the University of Twente, Netherlands. Mumbi has come far from her childhood visit to Sweetwaters Game Reserve. She aspires to be a data analyst, using data to develop actions items for fighting climate change and addressing other environmental issues. Mumbi believes that when you have the simplest way to understand an issue, it is much easier to implement solutions.

by Abby York, updated July 16, 2026

If we want to include everyone in implementing climate solutions, we need to talk a language that is not science. I want to share data and models that my grandmother can understand."

Ceciliah Mumbi