Soil carbon sequestration in sub-Saharan Africa – Great expectations, limited potentials?

Improving carbon storage in soils and the biosphere is a promising nature-based solution to combat climate change and is receiving more and more attention with little understanding how this can be achieved globally and in a sustainable way.

Many of our expectations in finding nature-based solutions rely on vast, less developed–but nevertheless populated and rapidly changing– regions of the Global South. At the same time, concepts and assumptions about which solutions work for increasing long-term carbon capture in soil systems are based on knowledge gathered largely from the Global North in often fundamentally different environmental settings and development history. 

In my talk I will illustrate with examples from the socio-ecological context of the African Tropics how these knowledge gaps and our lack of understanding of tropical carbon cycling mislead us into thinking that we can find easy solutions in the Tropics to mitigate climate change. I will highlight how the interactions of weathering and erosional disturbance can influence and dominate biogeochemical cycles in soils and discuss some directions where geochemical proxies that are available at the global scale can be useful for improving the spatial and temporal representation of tropical carbon storage and turnover.