Policy Roundtable: Integrating Soil Organic Carbon into the Nationally Determined Contributions
At a recent virtual roundtable discussion organised by Accelerating Impacts of CGIAR Climate Research for Africa (AICCRA), policy experts involved in the development of the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) met to share key opportunities and barriers for integrating soil health into national climate change adaptation and mitigation plans.
AICCRA works across six focus countries in Africa (Senegal, Mali, Ghana, Ethiopia, Kenya and Zambia), driven by their mission to “make climate information services and climate-smart agriculture more accessible to millions of smallholder farmers across Africa.”
CSA not only steers agricultural production towards farm practices that will remain sustainable and resilient under changing climatic conditions, it is also designed to be locally relevant and contribute to carbon sequestration and mitigation wherever possible.
Soil plays an integral part in carbon storage, accounting for about a third of Global stocks, but soil organic carbon (SOC) is being released at an alarming rate under widespread land degradation. CA4SH co-lead Dr Leigh Winowiecki cited figures from the Global Land Outlook Second Edition (2022) that 20-40% of Earth’s surface is degraded which impacts 3.2 billion people. Most of these are the rural poor.
Current global climate plans are not strong enough to mitigate the climate crisis, and SOC is a promising opportunity for contributing to national-level sequestration. To do this, targeted investments are needed to reverse and prevent land and soil degradation, enhance global food and nutrition security, contribute to carbon sequestration goals, realise the sustainable development goals and reach ecosystem restoration targets, including preserving and enhancing global biodiversity.
This session, which convened on 21 October 2022, collated ideas for policy design, governance systems, and land restoration through key insights from engagement with NDCs.
Joint presentation on the findings across AICCRA countries
Scientists Ermias Betemarian, Patricia Masikati and Endalkachew Wolde-meskel from the alliance of the Center for International Forestry Research and World Agroforestry (CIFOR-ICRAF) presented on their findings from a study dedicated to examining the processes, barriers and opportunities for NDC implementation in Senegal, Kenya, Mali, Zambia and Ethiopia.
While the country contexts differed in specific numbers and strategies, overarching themes were evident. These involved a call for collaboration and partnerships at the national and international levels and between sectors in generating evidence, frameworks, finance mechanisms and institutional capacity to address SOC. This means not only establishing a monitoring framework to measure SOC, but an enabling environment in which to do so, drawing on institutional support for farmers on the ground.
Panel Focus: Opportunities and barriers for integrating SOC into NDCs
Morton Mwanza, Principal Vegetable Production Officer, Ministry of Agriculture, Zambia
To integrate soil health in the Zambia NDCs, he describes the importance of supporting smallholder farmers who are the actual people on the ground implementing agricultural transformation. He called on the need to improve soil monitoring indicators and communicating the process and importance with farmers to enhance their adoption of new technologies. In Zambia, the focus is on practices to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but SOC is not specifically mentioned, however, co-benefits of CSA include greenhouse gas reduction and carbon sequestration. What’s next is supporting the farmers who will actually implement the CSA that is being scaled.
Vincent Onguso Oeba, Principal Research Scientist & Coodinator Climate Change in Forestry & Biometry at Kenya Forestry Research Institute
Describing the process for updating NDCs in Kenya, he pointed to the system of sectoral climate plans (like the National Climate Finance Policy) as contributors to developing national Climate Action Plans. By drawing on the unique needs of different sectors, the resulting national plan accounts for multiple stakeholders and is context-specific. The actions being taken forward are mitigative actions, such as CSA, afforestation and reforestation to reduce emissions and enhance adaptation and resilience of healthy land and soils.
Manyewu Mutamba, Acting Head of Agriculture - African Union Development Agency New Partnership for Africa’s Development (AUDA-NEPAD) pros and cons of explicitly mentioning SOC in NDCs
Engaging farmers on the ground is an incredibly complicated and nuanced task that is confounded by competing needs across scales, sectors and on the farm itself. Manyewu Mutamba gave the example of biomass which can have various uses from feeding livestock to feeding households to reforesting to providing building material. In any case, providing support to farmers to be able to meet their needs during periods of transition and looking to the future in terms of livelihood resilience are imperative. Smallholder farmers, national policies and global contributions are interconnected and so should be the approach.
Liesl Wiese-Rozanov, International consultant in agricultural science and policy
Using the “chicken or egg” analogy, Liesl Wiese-Rozanov pointed out that implementing land management practices and setting NDC objectives do not inherently hold a specific order. Land management on the ground is context specific and so are NDCs. Action at the country level may be reactive or proactive, but it need not wait to be stimulated by NDCs. The other side of this is that NDCs can facilitate an enabling environment for land use transformation, so the key is to look to context for a starting point in integrating SOC into NDCs.
Panel Focus: key recommendations on the way forward
Liesl Wiese-Rozanov
Countries need to work with the national-level institutions or draw on outside institutions to build a national team to address NDCs and SOC. This will enhance resilience of these systems into the future.
Vincent Onguso Oeba
Robust monitoring approaches are needed to form the basis for reporting on SOC, requiring institutional capacity to do so. Institutional linkages should provide supports and connect strategies and action plans with a means of implementation.
Manyewu Mutambab
Engaging with the African Union on establishing fundamental actions for restoring soil on the continent, and inviting member states to engage actively in soil health are the next steps.
Morton Mwanza
Countries should affirm the role of SOC as an indicator of soil health and place it at the centre of restoring degraded soils then communicate to farmers why this is important.
“[There is] no better time to go back to the soil like now. Everything starts from the soil and we need to do the same.”
Watch a recording of the session here
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