New Calculations Show African Agriculture Could Capture 20x More Carbon Than World’s Oil And Gas Emissions

Africa holds the potential to capture more than 20x the world’s oil and gas emissions, with a new analysis by FarmBizAfrica finding the continent could absorb up to 132 billion tonnes of the carbon gases blamed for causing climate change.

In an analysis unveiled this week, the African farming service reported that simple shifts in farming practices and a new governmental and international focus on agricultural carbon capturing could nearly triple food production in Africa and slow climate change globally.

Instead, the world’s top priority remains energy investments, which are drawing almost $2 trillion a year in a so-far failed effort to offset oil and gas carbon emissions of just 5 billion tonnes.

African agriculture’s far greater potential remains substantially ignored.

“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 recapturing this carbon is easy. Even an individual smallholder in Africa can dig a hole, put her farm waste into it, 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. – where a typical farming acre in Africa creates 100 tonnes of farm waste a year.

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 this full set, achieving a 1 per cent rise in soil carbon is easy: while studies show.that each 1 per cent rise absorbs 8.5 tonnes of carbon per acre per year.

In Kenya, which has 277,100 square km of agricultural land, amounting to 68.4 million acres, a 1% hike in soil carbon would capture 581 million tonnes of carbon per year.

Across SubSaharan Africa, which has 10.5 million square km of agricultural land, each percentile point rise in soil carbon will capture 22.1 bn tonnes of carbon. Restoring African soils to full carbon levels at 5-8 per cent, would capture 132 billion tonnes of the greenhouse gasses now disrupting the planet.

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