Monitoring of soil carbon storage to achieve climate neutral farming – analysing existing MRV systems and model options

Among other sectors agriculture is under pressure to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emission to contribute to national net zero targets. Avoiding all emissions is not possible. Therefore, negative emissions are required to achieve climate neutrality or net zero targets. Croplands are acknowledged to have good capacity to capture and store carbon in form or soil organic matter (SOM). Management changes on croplands are required to increase SOM in cropland. Additionally, monitoring systems must be available to quantify SOM or soil organic carbon (SOC) changes. There are several measuring/monitoring, reporting and verification (MRV) systems in place to provide the required approaches for quantification. However, there are no standards about the structure of an MRV system. Financial constrains driving the applied methods in the available MRV systems for SOC changes, with remote sensing and modelling popular cost-effective solutions. This presentation shows results of an analysis applied in the ClieNFarms project, which assess and advice on solutions to achieve climate neutral farming. Selected MRV systems are analysed for their functionality, applicability and potential accuracy. Further, the available MRV systems are compared for the representation of different compartments that could be implemented for a perfect approach to quantify SOC changes. This is a qualitative analysis highlighting used methods to quantify SOC changes and provides an analysis about the functionality and the applicability of methods being influenced by stakeholder needs and varying levels of data availability. This study also highlights advantages and disadvantages of using the tools and models in MRV systems or for SOC monitoring in general. Models are powerful tools but there is a wide range of different models available, which differ in data demand and accuracy. The results highlight that the available systems are mainly driven by the urgent demand considering an easy applicability, low labour requirements and cost-effectiveness. This is a critical analysis not doubting the quality of available MRV systems, but provide discussion points and views on the available and applied systems.