Credit Where it's Due

Including agriculture in the market for carbon offset credits is key to ensuring Africa a fair deal regarding incentives to mitigate climate change.

Drawing on more than 15 years of research, the World Agroforestry Centre is providing evidence that, while agriculture contributes significant amounts of greenhouse gases, it can also mitigate climate change, sequestering an estimated 5.5-6.0 gigatons of carbon dioxide (CO2) per year by 2030. It must therefore be part of any post-Kyoto climate agreement.

Seeking to ensure that African nations are not excluded from carbon markets, the 19-member Common Market for East and Southern Africa (COMESA) and the World Agroforestry Centre are collaborating to provide the science to support the African Biocarbon Initiative.

Agroforestry systems, such as these fodder trees on a farm near Mount Kenya, increase carbon stocks both above and below ground.
Photo: Vanessa Meadu, World Agroforestry Centre.

Agriculture is a leading driver of deforestation, linked in one way or another to almost 80% of deforestation globally. Susan Chomba, consultant to the African Biocarbon Initiative with the World Agroforestry Centre, says agriculture must be viewed as part of the solution, not just part of the problem.

“In working with COMESA, we’re synthesizing extensive research carried out on ecosystem services and livelihood benefits under the ASB Program at sites across the tropics and reviewing existing scientific literature,” Chomba says, using the abbreviation for alternatives to slash and burn. “What is becoming clear is that agriculture can reduce its own emissions and offset significant emissions from other sectors by removing CO2 from the atmosphere and storing it in plant biomass and soils. Agriculture can also reduce emissions from other sectors by replacing fossil fuels with biofuels.”

Agroforestry and conservation agriculture practices such as minimum tillage increase carbon stocks both above and below ground. Traditional parkland systems in the West African Sahel can store up to 87.3 tons of carbon per hectare in their biomass and soil, 10 times the 9 tons stored in degraded lands. Improving soil carbon increases productivity and improves livelihoods and local food security, helping to alleviate poverty and making African smallholder farmers more resilient to climate change.

While evidence continues to mount that agriculture can mitigate climate change, current mechanisms of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change deal only with afforestation and reforestation. A significant step forward would be for nations to agree to the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) scheme during the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December. However, World Agroforestry Centre scientists believe REDD alone will not be enough.

“The current version of REDD fails to deal with agriculture and other drivers of deforestation,” says Peter Minang, global coordinator for the ASB Partnership at the World Agroforestry Centre. “Payments alone won’t address those causes, because most of the people who depend on agriculture for food and a livelihood won’t receive the REDD payments.”

George Wamukoya of COMESA adds that 70-80% of rural Africans depend on agriculture, livestock and forests for their livelihoods. If climate change mechanisms deal only with forest emissions, he says, many African nations will be effectively locked out of carbon markets.

“African countries without tropical forests would have little to gain from REDD,” he observes. “There will be no incentives for them to adopt sustainable agricultural systems that store carbon.”

The data studied by World Agroforestry Centre scientists support an approach that considers greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture, forestry and other land uses (AFOLU).

Minang says agriculture in developing countries is one of the world’s largest, most efficient storers of carbon, but until now there has been no reliable method to verifiably determine how much carbon they remove from the atmosphere or calculate incentive payments.

The recently launched Carbon Benefits Project — involving the World Agroforestry Centre, United Nations Environment Programme, Colorado State University, World Wildlife Fund and others — combines the latest remote sensing technology and analysis with infrared soil carbon spectroscopy, ground-based measurement and statistical analysis to measure and predict more accurately carbon storage in all land uses.

“We now know enough not to use uncertainty as an excuse for not including all types of land use in a climate change strategy,” Minang asserts.

Current research is investigating the biocarbon potential of different African countries and landscapes. In the humid tropics of Africa, well-managed systems combining trees and crops can store 29-53 tons of carbon per hectare, and agro-ecosystems that mimic natural forests, such as cocoa agroforests in Cameroon, can store up to 180 tons.

Results such as these support the development of an AFOLU mechanism (REDD phase two or REDD plus) that would offer Africa incentives to mitigate climate change. The World Agroforestry Centre has released, in cooperation with COMESA, two policy briefs on this issue:  Policy Brief 4 - The case for investing in Africa’s biocarbon potential and Policy Brief 5 - Africa’s biocarbon interests — Perspectives for a new climate change deal.