Cropping Africa's wet savannas would bring high environmental costs

Cropping Africa's wet savannas would bring high environmental costs Posted March 16, 2015; 03:00 p.m. by B. Rose Huber, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs With the global population rising, analysts and policymakers have targeted Africa's vast wet savannas as a place to produce staple foods and bioenergy groups at low environmental costs. But a new report published Climate Change finds that converting Africa's wet savannas into farmland would come at a high environmental cost and fail to meet some existing standards for renewable fuels. Led by researchers from Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology , the study finds that only a small percentage of Africa's wet savannas (2 to 11 percent) have the potential to produce staple crops while emitting significantly less carbon dioxide than the world's average cropland. In addition, less than 1 percent of these lands would produce biofuels that meet European standards for greenhouse-gas reductions (taking land conversion into account). "Many papers and policymakers have simply assumed that Africa's wetter savannas are expendable from an environmental standpoint because they aren't forests,” said co-lead author Tim Searchinger , a research scholar at Princeton's Program in Science, Technology and Environmental Policy (STEP) , which is based at the Woodrow Wilson School. "Governments have used this assumption to justify large leases of such lands to produce food for the outside world and large global targets for bioenergy.