Putting soil on Africa's climate agenda

Soil is where our food systems begin, yet soil health has been largely left out of multinational climate conversations thus far.

The inaugural Africa Climate Summit (ACS) in Nairobi provided a critical convening for the continent to scale up climate action and highlight the key role with achieving soil health at its foundation. The African Union Development Agency (AUDA-NEPAD), with organizational support from the Accelerating Impacts of CGIAR Climate Research for Africa (AICCRA) project and the Coalition of Action 4 Soil Health (CA4SH), convened an important side event at ACS on the 6th September.

Through the event, we connected one of the commonly shared ambitions of both the ACS and the upcoming African Union's Africa Fertilizer and Soil Health Summit (AFSH) - the transformation of Africa’s food systems under climate change - drawing attention to the critical role that soils play in building climate-resilient food systems in Africa.

Moderated by Dr George Wamukoya, team leader of the African Group of Negotiators Experts Support (AGNES), the side event assembled an expert panel with Dr Janet Edeme (Head, Rural Economy Division in the Department of Rural Economy and Agriculture of the African Union Commission),  Dr Per Fredrik Pharo (Director, Partnerships and Shared Prosperity, NORAD), Armin Klöcker (GIZ), Dr Fatunbi Oluwole (Ag Director of Research and Innovation Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa, FARA), and Steven Muchiri (Executive Director, Eastern Africa Farmers Federation, EAFF) and Abubakarr Ibrahim Ndopaie, a young private sector innovator, from Sierre Leone, to discuss how and why we should accelerate action on soils.

Investing in healthy soil

Dr Manyewu Mutamba, Head (Ag) of Agriculture, African Union Development Agency-NEPAD, emphasised that soil health is a “proven gamechanger” when it comes to building climate-resilient food systems.

He also stressed that the resolutions decided at the upcoming Africa Fertilizer and Soil Health (AFSH) Summit to be held in 2024 will provide a roadmap for Africa’s soil and food systems, underpinning this as a critical moment for transformative action. Healthy soils provide multiple benefits that ensure sustainable food and nutrition security, biodiversity, and water resilience as well as vital ecosystem services for climate change mitigation and adaptation, including sequestering carbon. However, transforming Africa’s food systems in the face of a changing climate will require sustained action and investment to restore soil health.

Dr OIuwole from FARA shared four pillars that will underpin the Soil Health for Africa Action Plan to be launched at the AFSH Summit:

1. Optimizing integrated soil health and water management planning and implementation;
2. Strengthening human, institutional, and social capital for research, development, education, extension, and support of sustainable soil management;
3. Optimizing data and information for effective planning and monitoring; and
4. Ensuring enabling policy, legal, and regulatory frameworks.

“By investing in soil health we’re investing in the communities,” said Dr Janet Edeme (Head, Rural Economy Division in the Department of Rural Economy and Agriculture of the African Union Commission) in her address on behalf of African Union (AU) Commissioner for Agriculture, Rural Development, Blue Economy and Sustainable Environment Josefa Sacko. To achieve this, Dr Edeme underscored the need for supporting farmers through technology, collaboration and national-level climate strategies that build resilience from the ground up.

“It is not capital that is scarce, nor labour - it is soils,” said Dr Pharo, NORAD. This means not only supporting farmers with policies and regulations that promote healthy soils, but also that there must be “strong political ownership” of these initiatives for sustainability of activities, lest they lose steam and we lose out on our scarcest resource.

The key message from the Eastern Africa Farmers Federation (EAFF) highlighted the immense support requirements for farmers who are on the frontlines of soil health, climate action and food systems transformation.

Looking ahead to AFSH 2023

The event provided a strong momentum towards the Africa Fertilizer and Soil Health (AFSH) Summit. Key messages from across the distinguished panelists included the importance of strengthening land rights, diversity and inclusion, soil information systems, and financial innovation.

In addition, on the roadmap to COP28, we need to ensure soil health is formally recognised within the climate agenda. The event sent a clear direction on the importance of healthy soils as the foundation of sustainable and regenerative food systems and a foundation to climate action.