TY - JOUR
T1 - High carbon and biodiversity costs from converting Africa's wet savannahs to cropland
AU - Searchinger, Timothy D.
AU - Estes, Lyndon
AU - Thornton, Philip K.
AU - Beringer, Tim
AU - Notenbaert, An
AU - Rubenstein, Daniel Ian
AU - Heimlich, Ralph
AU - Licker, Rachel
AU - Herrero, Mario
N1 - Funding Information:
The authors wish to thank N. Walker for encouragement and for helping to organize the workshop that gave rise to this paper, and for financial support, the authors wish to thank the Princeton Environmental Institute Development Grand Challenges Program, the David & Lucile Packard Foundation, the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) from the CGIAR Fund and associated donors and the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013) under grant agreement no 308371.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2015 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved.
PY - 2015/5/28
Y1 - 2015/5/28
N2 - 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 (1/42%) 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.
AB - 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 (1/42%) 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.
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U2 - 10.1038/nclimate2584
DO - 10.1038/nclimate2584
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84928536083
SN - 1758-678X
VL - 5
SP - 481
EP - 486
JO - Nature Climate Change
JF - Nature Climate Change
IS - 5
ER -