In 2014, the USAID project ‘Grazing lands, livestock and climate resilient mitigation in Sub-Saharan Africa’ held two workshops, hosted by the Colorado State University, which brought together experts from around the world. Two reports resulted from these workshops, one an assessment of the state of the science, and the other an inventory of related activities in the region to date. In this short communication we summarize the main points of the first report – The state of the science (Milne and Williams, 2015).
Drylands across Africa have significant role as potential sinks of carbon. Sequestering carbon is cool, but more important is that increasing sequestration there could be a critical path towards greater resilience of both the environment and livelihoods in these regions of Africa and similar systems globally.
Topline takeaways :
Carbon sequestration for climate change mitigation should be treated as a co-benefit rather than the target of a project/activity. Paying people to maintain C stocks by persisting with existing good practices is likely to be easier than introducing new practices to increase stocks. When resources are limited, the focus should be on areas where the co-benefits of C sequestration and livelihood improvement are highest and this may be in moderately rather than severely degraded areas. In terms of where to focus investment, from a purely biophysical Carbon sequestration point of view, investment should be in areas where mineralization rates are low (cold, moist) or input rates are high (warm, wet).