Baku climate conference ignores Africa's power to capture carbon emissions

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 typical farming acre in Africa creating 5 times that volume of waste, at almost 100 tonnes of stems and stalks per 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 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 the maths for African agriculture unanswerable as the world’s most powerful carbon store.

In Kenya, there were 277,100 square km of agricultural land in 2021, according to the World Bank, amounting to 68.4 million acres. A 1% hike in soil carbon on this acreage would capture 581 million tonnes of carbon per year.

Across Sub-Saharan Africa’s entire 10.5 million square km of agricultural land, a 1 per cent rise in soil carbon would capture 22.1 billion tonnes of carbon.

Yet that is still 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 5.1bn tonnes and has never secured a reduction despite more than a decade of funding and policies to drive it downwards. In 2023, alone, energy transition drew investment of $1.8 trillion dollars.

The same skewing of investment is also emerging in the newest big-business race into carbon capture technology. One of the largest such investments, the Lyseki plant in Sweden, is compressing biofuels and burying them underground: to capture 800,000 tonnes of carbon a year. But the costs are high, there are no other benefits, and the plant does nothing to arrest the decline of the world’s land.

Conversely, African soil carbon capture doubles and even triples food production.

Thus, while business interests may view energy transition and capture facilities as more lucrative, the logistics, processing and trading of African food, which currently generates $56bn a year, would also double or triple on agricultural carbon capture, delivering a row of value chain bounties for climate-keen investors.

The challenge, however, lies in persuading the world, and companies such as Microsoft, that 20 times more carbon capture at a fraction of the cost - and a transformed Africa - is more beneficial than another $2 trillion poured into western carbon burial plants: where it will barely move the dial, capturing a few billion tonnes of carbon.