African leaders score near-zero on world’s largest carbon capture potential

credit: netl.doe.gov

Africa holds the potential to capture more than 20x the world’s oil and gas emissions - blamed for causing climate change - but cannot get a hearing in a global climate agenda that is leading the world into deepening weather crisis.

Global leaders now in Baku at the COP 29 global environment conference have scheduled natural solutions to climate change as a fifth, or lower, agenda item, behind international carbon trading and an energy transition.

Yet, as the energy sector attracts ‘investment’ of almost $2 trillion a year to offset oil and gas carbon emissions of 5 billion tonnes, African agriculture has the power to reduce emissions by more than 132 billion tonnes, but remains cast as an appeal fund.

“We often see debates where leaders’ thinking just cannot catch up with the facts, like ‘let’s stop oil’, which is so obviously making no progress at all, but is also largely an irrelevancy next to our global land crisis,” said FarmBizAfrica’s CEO Jethro Tieman.

“Our leaders are fiddling while Rome burns, yet the consequences are unimaginably huge. They are going to end up destroying our whole planet, during this generation, if they don’t wake up.

It’s not about trading chips on industrial emissions: the time has come to address soil carbon head on, and invest more in African carbon capture than in the entire energy transition.”

Globally, the top one metre of soil holds more carbon than the atmosphere and all plant and animal life combined, dwarfing all human emissions. But agricultural practices, most powerfully in Africa, have been pouring out extra soil carbon, reducing the percentages held in soils.

That, in turn, is reducing food production, with soil carbon critical to plant life, fertility, and moisture retention in soils. Without it, soils progressively turn to sand, moving towards eventual desertification.

In Africa, that land degradation is now affecting a new 35 million hectares of land a year, reducing the continent’s rainfall as plant cover diminishes, and triggering deepening droughts. It

has also moved the continent to the lowest soil carbon count in the world, at 1 to 2 per cent, compared with 5 to 8 per cent for soil that is carbon replete.

Yet the ease with which this carbon can be recaptured is phenomenal. A smallholder farmer in Africa can dig a simple hole, put her farm waste into it and light it from the top, and it will burn smokelessly to create biochar. Mixed with manure and added to soil, studies show biochar adds

2.2 tonnes of soil carbon for every 9.9 tonnes of farm waste put into the biochar pit. A typical farming acre in Africa creates 10x that volume of waste, at almost 100 tonnes a year of stems and stalks.

Soil carbon can also be restored by rotating crops, growing cover crops instead of exposing naked soil for months, and deliberately growing deep-rooted crops. Across the full set, achieving a 1 per cent rise in soil carbon is easy: yet studies show that even just a 1 per cent rise captures an extra 8.5 tonnes of carbon per acre per year.

That makes African agriculture the world’s most powerful carbon store.

In Kenya, alone, the 277,100 square km of agricultural land amounts to 68.4 million acres. A 1% hike in soil carbon on this acreage would capture 581 million tonnes of carbon per year.

Across SubSaharan Africa’s 10.5 million square km of agricultural land, a 1 per cent rise in soil carbon would capture 22.1 bn tonnes of carbon.

Yet that is a fraction of the potential in reaching carbon-replete soil at 5-8 per cent. If African agriculture were to fully restore its soil carbon to replete levels, it would capture 132 billion tonnes of the greenhouse gasses that are now disrupting the whole planet.

By contrast, in 2022, the oil and gas industry emitted 5.1 bn tonnes and has never secured a reduction despite more than a decade of funding and policies to drive it downwards. In 2023, energy transition drew investment of $1.8 trillion dollars.