A delegation from Makueni County, Kenya went on an exchange visit to Tigray, Ethiopia to see integrated landscape restoration approaches in action and learn some lessons for restoring watersheds in their own county.
One-third of carbon emissions are absorbed by the earth’s biosphere. After forests, agricultural lands and wetlands have the most potential to do this. A panel of experts convened at COP24 last week to discuss ways in which this potential can be realized.
Advancing the agenda of land restoration in Africa’s Sahel region, let alone globally, is no small feat. But it is essential to underpinning fragile livelihoods and achieving the SDG’s.
In recent years, the mitigation of climate change and the improvement of soil fertility by sequestering carbon in the soil has become a hot research topic. The Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences and the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), supported by WLE, have had great success in developing projects to provide individual farmers and extension officers with soil information of relevance for their management decisions, meeting an increasing need for spatial data on soil properties at multiple scales.
Researchers frin the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), the German Society for International Cooperation (GIZ), and the University of Illinois find that a soil's prior management impacts its response to liming and phosphorus uptake.
Sequestering carbon into agricultural soils has the potential to reduce atmospheric greenhouse gasses while improving soil quality for farmers, but to what extent? A recent webinar looks at the mitigation potentials.
The Africa Soil Information Service (AfSIS) aims to fill a major gap in soil spatial information in Africa. To this end new soil data were collected at over 9,000 locations from 60 sentinel sites in Africa and combined with collated and harmonized soil legacy data from over 18,000 locations in Africa.
A workshop on how to transform soil science to policy and practice was arranged by AgriFoSe2030 in Nairobi. Decision makers, practitioners, implementers as well as researchers in the fields of biophysical and social science took part in the workshop.
Ethiopia has experienced significant deforestation over the past century – driven by rapid population growth, the expansion of agricultural land, and the unsustainable demand for wood, often as a source of fuel for cooking and heating. The World Bank suggests that less than 3 percent of the country’s forests remain untouched.
By Dr. Louis Verchot, Director of Soils Research at the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT). Amid the roaring debate on how to curb climate change in Bonn last year, an impasse was finally broken on agriculture. Both a cause and casualty of climate change, our food system accounts for up to 24% of greenhouse gas emissions.
Soil management doesn't sound snazzy, but scientists say it offers huge potential for keeping carbon emissions in the ground—and out of the atmosphere.
