Carbon Corridors and Life Cycle Assessment: Building the Evidence Base for Regenerative Agriculture in Africa
Africa’s agricultural landscapes sit at a critical intersection, deeply vulnerable to climate change, yet holding enormous potential to contribute to global climate solutions. Two complementary research streams within the RCA programme are working to unlock that potential by generating the robust, Africa-specific evidence that farmers, policymakers, and carbon market developers urgently need.
Carbon Corridors: Understanding What Works, and Where
The Carbon Corridors work centres on a rigorous meta-analysis of regenerative agriculture and soil organic carbon across African farming systems. Regenerative practices such as conservation tillage, cover cropping, residue retention, agroforestry, and organic amendments have long been championed as tools for restoring soil health and storing carbon. But the evidence base in Africa has remained fragmented, scattered across individual field trials and localised experiments, making it difficult to draw the kind of broad, reliable conclusions that carbon markets and climate policy demand.
This research addresses that gap directly by synthesising empirical evidence from across the continent. It seeks to quantify how different regenerative practices affect soil organic carbon stocks across diverse African agroecosystems and identify which combinations of practices and environmental conditions deliver the greatest sequestration potential. The findings will go beyond science for its own sake. By generating credible, context-specific estimates of carbon sequestration rates and their uncertainty ranges, the research will directly inform the design of agriculture-based carbon credit methodologies, helping ensure that African farmers can meaningfully access the growing opportunities in voluntary carbon markets.
Harmonised Life Cycle Assessment: A Holistic Framework for Impact
This work takes a complementary approach, developing a novel analytical framework that evaluates regenerative production systems in a far more comprehensive way than conventional tools allow. Life Cycle Assessment is widely used to measure the environmental footprint of agricultural systems, but it has traditionally focused on burdens, greenhouse gas emissions, eutrophication, and energy use, while missing the ecosystem services that regenerative practices generate.
The harmonised LCA framework being developed here bridges that gap. By integrating LCA with ecosystem services modelling, the framework seeks to capture the full ecological contribution of regenerative production systems: not only soil carbon sequestration, but water purification services (through reduced nitrogen runoff into waterways) and soil erosion control. Ecological process models, including the RothC soil carbon model and InVEST nutrient and sediment delivery models, are used to simulate how agricultural management choices ripple through landscapes over time. Crucially, the framework also translates these ecological benefits into economic values, connecting them to carbon market pricing and avoided environmental costs. This creates a much stronger analytical basis for making the case for regenerative agriculture within climate finance mechanisms.
The framework will be tested and applied across four countries: Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana, and Colombia. They are chosen to represent the diversity of agroecological conditions, smallholder farming systems, and data environments that any credible methodology must be able to handle.