Innovative payment systems encouraging changes in land use and management practices, to store and sequester carbon, whilst delivering mitigation and pro-poor adaptation benefits, are becoming integral to global efforts to address climate change. At the same time, investors are becoming more
aware of the need for carbon sequestration projects to take account of their impacts on a whole range of ecosystem services utilised by the poor, to ensure that they are delivering benefits to the most vulnerable sectors of society and are durable under future bio-physical and socio-economic conditions. Knowledge and evidence gaps abound however. In this paper we analyse the most pressing deficiencies in understanding carbon storage in soils and above ground biomass, focusing on the semi-arid and dry sub-humid systems of sub-Saharan Africa inhabited by many of the world’s poor. We identify important opportunities and challenges for researchers, policy makers and
practitioners in order for the poor to benefit from carbon storage in dryland and sub-humid systems, through both climate finance streams and collateral ecosystem service benefits delivered by carbonfriendly land management. We propose new opportunities, enabled by scientific advances and integrated monitoring approaches that offer considerable scope for developing the new knowledge, methods and tools required for enabling pro-poor, climate- and ecosystem service-smart development.