Roadmap for carbon farming schemes (Road4Schemes) : Deliverable D2.1-2, D2.4-5 : carbon farming schemes throughout Europe, an overall inventory and analysis

Carbon farming is considered as one of the mitigation options to reach the targets of the Paris Agreement and the European Green Deal. The purpose of this report is to assess which carbon farming schemes are available throughout Europe, how they can be characterised and to which extent they deal with principles like additionality, fairness and long-term carbon storage, besides the issues of a proper MRV(monitoring, reporting and verification)-system with acceptable costs and sufficient payments for the farmers.

The way in which carbon farming is organised is very different depending on the type of scheme. In this report, a carbon farming scheme is defined as any voluntary agreement in which a farmer or a group of farmers commit themselves to apply carbon farming measures to get a positive balance between soil carbon accumulation and GHG emissions (possibly measured as CO2 equivalents) or reduction of GHG-emissions in return for a payment or compensation in any form.

The research team of the EJP SOIL - Road4Schemes project carried out an inventory among their member states of the EU, some nearby states, member to be (Turkey) and some schemes in the USA and Australia. In total, 162 schemes were identified in a first round, mainly looking at public data sources like websites, reports, etc. In a second round, 45 scheme holders were approached for an interview, for which a structured questionnaire had been developed. This questionnaire addressed a large number of characteristics that are or could become important for a successful adoption and implementation of carbon farming schemes in the EU. These characteristics were divided into six main themes: (1) General scheme information, (2) Payment / buyers information, (3) Monitoring, reporting and verification (MRV), (4) Safeguards for the society and the environment, (5) Transparency, and (6) Attractiveness. From this set of 45 schemes, two were not taken into account, since they worked with biochar production 1. The remaining 43 schemes were scored for each of these themes with a three-level scoring method, attributing a value of 1 for a poor performance, of 2 for a medium performance and of 3 for a perfect performance. In order to find characteristics that contribute to a promising scheme structure, 23 out of these 43 were selected, having an average unweighted score of 2.0 or more over the six themes listed.

We analysed the selected 23 schemes in more detail. It appeared that of these 23 schemes, the majority of result-based schemes was private, whereas the public schemes were mostly action-based or hybrid. ‘Private’ means that the organiser is a private stakeholder, so that the payment model is privately funded. Public schemes are relatively often linked to the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) of the EU, like agro-climatic-environmental measures, providing a compensation payment for additional costs and/or lost revenues. Even in schemes that had been qualified as result-based, accurate measurements of organic matter contents are not always organised according to the scheme description. Misinterpretation of terms by the respondents, i.c. the scheme holders, probably gave an incomplete picture of the true character of some of the schemes in the survey. Some schemes may have been characterised by the scheme holders as ‘result-based’ but were in fact ‘action-based’ according to our definitions.

Compared to the 43 schemes that had been selected in the second survey, the top 23 schemes are characterised as follows:
• They have a larger share of private schemes.
• They are more often result-based, at least according to the scheme holders.
• Their level of documentation is higher.
• Soil sampling is less often applied.
• Trade-offs and leakage are more often considered.
• They score more or less equally high on attractiveness for farmers, funders and policy makers.

For international (and perhaps EC) acceptance by policy makers and buyers, an international standardization could be a prerequisite. However, most schemes in the top 23 ranks, regardless of payment model, do not have an internationally approved standard for monitoring or prediction of the carbon amount stored or carbon emission avoided. On the other hand, relatively more result-based schemes have an internationally approved standard than action-based schemes.

The results of this inventory can only be seen as preliminary, not only because of possible misinterpretations by scheme holders but also because of further developments of existing schemes and the occurrence of new schemes since the survey was carried out in 2022.