Status and current considerations on carbon farming in selected European countries

There is the expectation that carbon farming can contribute significantly to climate change mitigation by both sequestering carbon from the atmosphere and preventing the release of additional CO₂-emissions from the soil. While it seems uncontroversial that measures to improve soil carbon provide many additional ecological benefits, it is rather challenging to integrate carbon farming activities into the existing climate policy frameworks. Apart from the usual concerns about the robustness of monitoring, reporting and verification (MRV) and the permanence of the carbon farming result there are other unresolved questions regarding additionality, double-claiming and double-counting when combining state-based action with voluntary carbon markets, where private schemes sell their carbon-credits to companies for the offsetting of their emissions.

Within the scope of the EJP-Soil sub-project Road4Schemes our objective was to examine the current state of carbon farming policies in 9 European countries (including Switzerland and Turkey as non-EU members). Having collected questionnaires both at the level of policy makers and at the level of experts on national greenhouse gas inventories, we are able to make a first assessment of the relevance of carbon farming as a climate mitigation strategy in the individual countries, the reportability of different measures in national climate reporting and the role of private initiatives in achieving scalable climate change mitigation effects. It is furthermore of interest to compare countries’ policy approaches for enhancing carbon farming and integrating the different stakeholders and actors. In this way, this study aims to contribute to the current discussion on the potentials and obstacles of using carbon farming for climate mitigation.