African River Study Analysing Carbon Emissions

African rivers emit a vast amount of greenhouse gases, a major paper on this understudied topic reveals

As rivers carry organic matter from the land to the oceans, bacteria turn it into greenhouse gases. While previous analyses had quantified emissions of these gases from rivers in Brazil, Europe and North America, the study in the journal Nature Geoscience last week (20 July) largely fills the African gap.

It used measurements of dissolved carbon dioxide (CO2), methane and nitrous oxide taken from 12 rivers between 2006 and 2014 to estimate carbon emissions from inland waters across Sub-Saharan Africa.

The study found that river channels alone emit about 400 million tonnes of carbon a year, which is equivalent to two-thirds of the net amount previously reported as being captured and stored on the land in Africa.

If emissions from the wetlands of the Congo River are also included, these emissions rise to 900 million tonnes of carbon a year — equivalent to about a quarter of the global carbon reservoir for both land and the oceans, it says.

“These results can be considered as the reference number for natural emissions for African rivers,” says Frédéric Guérin, one of the study’s coauthors, from France’s Institute of Research for Development. "

Source: SciDev Net

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