Wilder rangelands as a Natural Climate Solution: the carbon offsetting potential of African grassy biomes with wild grazing regimes

Grasslands and savannas cover more than half of Africa and support a unique, rich, biodiversity and the livelihood of hundreds of millions of people.

Large-scale afforestation campaigns, promoted as a Natural Climate Solution to offset carbon emitted by northern hemisphere countries and industries, threaten these systems and the functions they provide, by planting trees in these habitats.

We urgently need alternative mitigation opportunities that use the carbon offsetting potential of grassy biomes and the natural processes, grazing and fire, that drive these systems.

The proposed project will investigate rangeland restoration with wild grazing and natural fire regimes (i.e., Wilder Rangelands) as a promising alternative Natural Climate Solution.

More specifically, as a team of leading European and South African ecologists, soil scientists and biogeochemists, we will contrast soil organic carbon persistence and methane emissions in wildlife versus livestock-dominated grazing regimes in South Africa through a combination of landscape and subcontinental-scale field surveys.

We will then use these findings and work with societal partners to develop a Verified Carbon Standard methodology for Wilder Rangelands.

Such a methodology could be the basis of alternative carbon credit schemes for grassy biomes focused on rewilding rangelands.

This would allow governments and industries in Sweden, and elsewhere, to make more sustainable choices when aiming to offset their carbon emissions.