What’s the weather in Burkina Faso?

A UBC study on rainfall and agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa was featured on the Thomson Reuters Foundation news site Trust.org.

The study discovered that clearing land for agriculture in Burkina Faso had the unexpected result of reducing rainfall over the cleared area.

Author and hydrology specialist Marc Parlange said the results suggest that policymakers avoid extensively converting land to agricultural fields and try to keep planting trees in the region.

“You really have to think about how you are going to insert the farms into the landscape, and keep them such that there is natural savannah that is left…so to hopefully not have such a reduction in rainfall,” said Parlange.