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Reorienting emissions research to catalyse African agricultural development

Nature Climate Change volume 11, pages 463–465 (2021)Cite this article

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Improving agricultural activity data is a cost-effective option for reducing the uncertainty of greenhouse gas inventories and monitoring mitigation actions, meeting multiple national data needs, and bolstering investments. It’s time to direct effort to this opportunity.

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Fig. 1: Activity data uncertainty for major SSA agricultural GHG sources and sinks is often of similar magnitude to that of emission factors but would be relatively cost-effective to improve.

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Acknowledgements

We thank E. Wollenberg, D. Pelster, M. Richards and A. Nowak for discussions on this topic over many years. This work was implemented as part of the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS). CCAFS is carried out with support from the CGIAR Trust Fund and through bilateral funding agreements. For details, please visit https://ccafs.cgiar.org/donors. T.R. also received support from the United States Department of Agriculture-Foreign Agricultural Service (USDA-FAS). The views expressed in this document cannot be taken to reflect the official opinions of these organizations.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for International Forestry Research-World Agroforestry (CIFOR-ICRAF), Nairobi, Kenya

    Todd S. Rosenstock

  2. CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security, Nairobi, Kenya

    Todd S. Rosenstock

  3. Unique Forestry & Land Use, Freiburg, Germany

    Andreas Wilkes

  4. New Zealand Agricultural Greenhouse Gas Research Centre, Palmerston North, New Zealand

    Andreas Wilkes

Authors
  1. Todd S. Rosenstock
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  2. Andreas Wilkes
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T.S.R and A.W. outlined the Comment, T.S.R. drafted the manuscript and the figure, and T.S.R. and A.W. edited the manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Todd S. Rosenstock.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

Additional information

Peer review information Nature Climate Change thanks Rémi Cardinael and Martin van Ittersum for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Tables 1 and 2, and references.

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Rosenstock, T.S., Wilkes, A. Reorienting emissions research to catalyse African agricultural development. Nat. Clim. Chang. 11, 463–465 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-021-01055-0

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