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High carbon and biodiversity costs from converting Africa’s wet savannahs to cropland

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Title High carbon and biodiversity costs from converting Africa’s wet savannahs to cropland
 
Creator Searchinger, Tim
Estes, L
Thornton, Philip K.
Beringer, T
Notenbaert, An Maria Omer
Rubenstein, D
Heimlich, R
Licker, R
Herrero, Mario T.
 
Subject agriculture
food security
farmland
biological resources
climate change adaptation
climate
soil
 
Description Do the wet savannahs and shrublands of Africa provide a large reserve of potential croplands to produce food staples or bioenergy with low carbon and biodiversity costs? We find that only small percentages of these lands have meaningful potential to be low-carbon sources of maize (~2%) or soybeans (9.5–11.5%), meaning that their conversion would release at least one-third less carbon per ton of crop than released on average for the production of those crops on existing croplands. Factoring in land-use change, less than 1% is likely to produce cellulosic ethanol that would meet European standards for greenhouse gas reductions. Biodiversity effects of converting these lands are also likely to be significant as bird and mammal richness is comparable to that of the world’s tropical forest regions. Our findings contrast with influential studies that assume these lands provide a large, low-environmental-cost cropland reserve.
 
Date 2015-03-16
2015-03-17T09:17:01Z
2015-03-17T09:17:01Z
 
Type Journal Article
 
Identifier Searchinger, T., Estes, L., Thornton, P.K., Beringer, T., Notenbaert, A, Rubenstein, D., Heimlich, R., Licker, R. and Herrero, M. 2015. High carbon and biodiversity costs from converting Africa’s wet savannahs to cropland. Nature Climate Change 5: 481–486.
https://hdl.handle.net/10568/58318
http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nclimate2584.html
https://doi.org/doi:10.1038/nclimate2584
 
Language en
 
Rights Limited Access
 
Format p. 481-486
 
Source Nature Climate Change