Introduction - Climate impacts of agricultural management practices such as mulching and no-tillage are usually evaluated with regard to soil organic carbon stock changes or greenhouse emissions. However, albedo effects of these practices that have been found to be of similar importance for climate change mitigation are usually ignored in this kind of assessment. This is even true for agricultural systems in Africa, which are less studied than temperate systems. In this study, we aim to assess the effect of land management on albedo dynamics and Radiative Forcing (i.e. climatic impact) in two long-term experiments established in Zimbabwe in 2013 with contrasting soil types. The Radiative Forcing (RF), is a metric used to quantify the change in Earth energy budget (radiation absorbed and emitted by the Earth) relative to an assumed default state (Betts 2000; Forster et al. 2007). The albedo of a cropland depends on soil properties, surface rugosity, soil moisture and coverage by plant litter, but also on plant density, phenology, architecture and spectral properties. Note that the latter may change for instance with phenology. The RFs resulting from land management changes are determined by their effects on the surface albedo dynamics but also by the solar radiation and atmospheric transmittance dynamics. Using a soil-crop model such as STICS coupled with a spatialization method that allows to represent changes in vegetation and soil properties is a promising solution to upscale RF related to albedo effects associated to land management changes at regional to global scales. 1. Modelling albedo using STICS Surface albedo is the fraction of solar radiation reflected by Earth surface back to the space. Currently, STICS estimates surface albedo as a function of soil and vegetation albedo (Brisson et al., 2008). Soil albedo is a function of soil colour and moisture and also depends on the presence of mulch at the surface. Current formalism considers total leaf area index