Here are the challenges the report found with current soil carbon credits and recommendations for overcoming them to build confidence in soil carbon markets.<\/p>\n
Soil carbon credits aren\u2019t an apples-to-apples comparison<\/strong><\/p>\n The protocols all take different approaches to measuring, reporting and verifying net climate impacts, which makes it difficult to compare soil carbon credits or guarantee climate benefits have been achieved. The result is confusion and uncertainty in the marketplace.<\/p>\n For buyers and sellers to have confidence that soil carbon credits are truly delivering net positive climate benefits, a ton of carbon sequestered under one protocol should be equal to a ton of carbon sequestered under another protocol.<\/p>\n Clear standards \u2014 such as those that the U.S. Department of Agriculture could identify and highlight as part of Growing Climate Solutions Act<\/a> implementation \u2014 will help ensure credits are comparable and have high environmental integrity. That\u2019s good for the climate, investors and farmers seeking to tap into new revenue streams.<\/p>\n Credits need to manage four key issues<\/strong><\/p>\n High-quality soil carbon credits must also account for four critical issues:<\/p>\n The protocols reviewed account for these issues differently and with various levels of rigor. The result is a risky foundation for a carbon market and a weak basis for assessing net climate impact.<\/p>\nSoil carbon is important to climate mitigation and resilience efforts. Here's how USDA can ensure high-quality soil carbon credits reflect that contribution: <\/a><\/span>Share on X<\/a><\/span>\n Aggregating projects \u2014 taking a regionally defined approach that accounts for all cropland \u2014 would help manage for additionality, reversals, leakage and permanence.<\/p>\n A clearly defined regional approach, which could be organized using existing USDA reporting districts, would make it easier to account for new areas converted to cropland to accommodate any loss in productivity (leakage) and to assess whether the conservation practices were likely to have been adopted without participation in a carbon market (additionality).<\/p>\n The accounting would be consistent and transparent, enabling the creation of a sufficiently large buffer account of credits that would be set aside and used to cover the reversals that inevitably occur. The buffer account would also help achieve market participation by farms of all sizes and help promote systemic changes in agricultural practices to build more assurance of permanence over time.<\/p>\n Soil carbon is difficult to measure<\/strong><\/p>\n Soil carbon levels can vary significantly over small distances, and carbon takes a long time to accrue. This makes it difficult to detect soil carbon changes over time without collecting a lot of samples, an approach that is potentially cost prohibitive.<\/p>\n As a result, many protocols use models to estimate soil carbon levels, but these models can\u2019t accurately capture soil carbon changes at the field level under all proposed management interventions for all combinations of soils and climates. Accuracy requires averaging over multiple fields, but not all protocols use this approach.<\/p>\n The best balance between measurement accuracy and practicality can be found by using models paired with periodic soil sampling to validate and improve modeled estimates.<\/p>\n Researchers, agricultural technology companies and protocol developers can collaborate to create high-quality, open-access datasets to improve model calibration and determine baseline carbon storage amounts.<\/p>\n The path forward<\/strong><\/p>\n Agriculture has the potential to help solve climate change through avoided emissions and carbon sequestration, as well as building resilience to unavoidable climate impacts. Soil carbon sequestration, for example, could remove 4-6% of annual U.S. GHG emissions, while also boosting soil health and water quality.<\/p>\n Until guidelines for soil carbon credits are in place and implemented, companies should double down<\/a> on efforts to reduce emissions from their own operations and supply chains and to reduce emissions from deforestation, for example via high-quality credits such as those sold by Emergent.<\/p>\n With guidelines in place for high-quality soil credits, companies, governments and farmers can have confidence that credits are driving progress toward achieving agricultural soil\u2019s full climate mitigation potential.<\/p>\n\n
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