Département d’Agropédologie, Unité de Formation et de Recherche en Agroforestérie, Université Jean Lorougnon Guédé de Daloa, BP 150 Daloa, Côte d’Ivoire
In the department of Daloa, one of the main agricultural areas of Côte d’Ivoire, the change in land use is so enormous that it threatens the ecosystems and, with them, the services provided, in particular the stabilization of the climate via carbon storage in vegetation and soils. Thus, one of the major environmental challenges to be met in this department is to determine, among the crops grown, those that have a significant potential for reducing CO2 emissions into the atmosphere by conserving existing carbon reservoirs in the soil. This is the objective that was targeted in the present study. It consisted in choosing in three different villages, three same crops (cocoa tree, hevea and oil palm) among the most practiced. The physico-chemical properties of the soils were determined from three soil pits located on a useful plot of 10000 m2, by land use. The carbon stocks contained in the first 100 to 120 cm of the soils were calculated. It emerged that soils under cocoa trees store carbon better than soils under hevea. The latter have greater potential than soils under oil palms. However, the stocks measured remain low overall, which shows that the farming practices assessed should be improved.