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.
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.
By Georgina Smith of CIAT. New maps show massive potential to store more carbon in farmland soils through better management practices, contributing to global emission reduction targets. The amount of carbon stored in the top 30 centimeters of the soil could increase an extra 0.9 to 1.85 gigatons each year, say authors of a new study published today in Scientific Reports.
WLE, in partnership with the Wageningen Centre for Development Innovation, ZEF Center for Development Research, and the Global Landscape Forum, is co-hosting a course during the GLF in Bonn from December 11-22 on what it means to take a landscape approach, both in terms of a biophysical entity, but also from an economic and governance perspective.
From IUCN Water. The Tana River, Kenya's Liveline. The Tana, Kenya's longest river, flows for over 1,000 kms with a catchment area of 95,000 km² (roughly the size of Portugal). The River Basin has significant development opportunities for hydropower, domestic water provision, and irrigation - planned as part of Kenya's Vision for 2030.
Increasing soil carbon would benefit food security and mitigate climate change, but more research is needed about how to sustainably manage the soil for carbon and other benefits.
“Where farmyard manure has been added, there is living soil. But the soil is dead where there is only mineral fertilizer application”. This statement by Erest Omulama, a farmer in western Kenya, represents a view shared by many in this region and beyond. What Erest is actually implying is the lack, or reduced activity, of soil microbes in soils that do not receive organic matter inputs. How can microbe health in soils be balanced with sufficient nutrional inputs?
CIAT, with the Watershed Organisation Trust (WOTR), is working to assess the impact of various soil conservation practices on Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions from agricultural soils in India. The work investigates how agricultural practices could potentially lead to reductions in GHG emissions, and highlights the pressing need for research allowing the quantification of GHG emissions of ongoing agricultural practices in order to better understand their impacts.
