Carbon farming schemes throughout Europe, an overall inventory and analysis

In the EJP Soil project ‘Road4Schemes’ (WP2), we have been working on an inventory of carbon farming schemes throughout Europe. This resulted in a list of 175 schemes, of which some however were located outside the EU. These schemes differed a lot in several characteristics, summarised in six overall themes: 1) documentation available, 2) Payment / Buyers Information, 3) MRV, 4) Safeguards for the society and the environment, 5) Transparency, and 6) Attractiveness. Each of the partner countries in the project selected 1-5 schemes from their national inventory, that they found promising in the light of the expected framework for Carbon Farming that would be outlined by the European Commission in December 2022 (which they actually did). The schemes selected were analysed using the method of a SWOT-analysis. In the SWOT-methodology Strengths and Weaknesses of each scheme were identified using a questionnaire with questions that covered the six themes listed. These questions already included the Opportunities and Threats that were expected to come up from the framework that was announced by the EC. For each theme a score 1, 2 or 3 was given, 1 indicating a very poor quality of that specific theme, 2 presenting an average quality and a score of 3 was given when the theme was (almost) perfectly addressed in the way the scheme had been organised. Each scheme in the SWOT-analysis received six scores in total and an overall score was calculated as the unweighted average of these six scores. The results of this method revealed large differences in quality between the schemes in the inventory. [1] Looking deeper into the results showed us, that a number of ‘overall methodologies’ for carbon farming including making schemes result-based and taking care of proper payments for the farmers can be discerned, that can serve as a basis for designing more or less perfect archetype carbon farming schemes.

At the EGU-session, we would like to present the methods and results of this study and discuss the relevance and consequences of these results for the way existing carbon farming schemes should be improved or future schemes should be designed.

[1] However, quite a number of schemes were still in a pilot phase and not all information was already available of decided upon. That may be partly a matter of time.