Carbon market for climate smart agricultural practices

Why rigorous measurement, modeling, and scalability matter to farmers

potato field
Climate-smart agricultural practices that improve soil health and sequester carbon can provide financial benefits to farmers while concurrently improving environmental conditions by increasing biodiversity, reducing GHG emissions from
undisturbed land, minimizing the need for fertilizers and pesticides, and improving water quality and drought tolerance.1
Farmers currently lack financial incentives to implement climate-smart management practices. Through a carbon credit
program, farmers can increase their profitability and simultaneously implement farm management practices that
enhance soils, improve environmental conditions, and mitigate climate change.2 Generatinghigh-quality carbon credits requires meticulous and transparent standards for GHG mitigation (for example, realistic baseline, additional, and permanent, etc.). Therefore, policy initiatives must focus on high-quality carbon credits underpinned by robust monitoring, reporting, and verification to ensure the long-term viability of carbon crediting program. This provides financial resilience to farmers and ensures long term environmental benefits. The government can support these initiatives by providing market assurance via certification of acceptable soil carbon offset standards, and by providing technical assistance to encourage grower enrollment in the most robust programs. This document serves as a primer on the current state of the science that enables robust measurement, reporting, and verification.

Key Takeaways

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1 Popkin, G. 2020. March 31. Can ‘Carbon Smart’ Farming Play a Key Role in the Climate Fight? Yale Environment360. https://e360.yale.edu/features/can-carbon-smart-farming-play-a-key-role-in-the-climate-fight
2 National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2019. Negative Emissions Technologies and Reliable Sequestration: A Research Agenda. Washington, DC. The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/25259