Emissions of carbon from land use change in sub‐Saharan Africa

Abstract

Previous estimates of the flux of carbon from land use change in sub‐Saharan Africa have been based on highly aggregated data and have ignored important categories of land use. To improve these estimates, we divided the region into four subregions (east, west, central, and southern Africa), each with six types of natural vegetation and five types of land use (permanent crops, pastures, shifting cultivation, industrial wood harvest, and tree plantations). We reconstructed rates of land use change and rates of wood harvest from country‐level statistics reported by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) (1961–2000) and extrapolated the rates from 1961 to 1850 on the basis of qualitative histories of demography, economy, and land use. We used a bookkeeping model to calculate the annual flux of carbon associated with these changes in land use. Country‐level estimates of average forest biomass from the FAO, together with changes in biomass calculated from the reconstructed rates of land use change, constrained the average biomass of forests in 1850. Comparison of potential (predisturbance) forest areas with the areas present in 1850 and 2000 suggests that 60% of Africa's forests were lost before 1850 and an additional 10% lost in the last 150 years. The annual net flux of carbon from changes in land use was probably small and variable before the early 1900s but increased to a source of 0.3 ± 0.2 PgC/yr by the end of the century. In the 1990s the source was equivalent to about 15% of the global net flux of carbon from land use change.