The meeting produced a communique which pleased meeting sponsor Theodor Friedrich, senior officer for Crop Production Systems Intensification in the FAO’s Crop and Pasture Service at the organization’s world headquarters in Rome, Italy. “We had a very good, sound gathering of experts and we had an unexpectedly high degree of coinciding views and agreement, and that allowed us to come up with a fairly punchy, clear and concise document with relevant recommendations,” he said. “I could imagine that this meeting, the outcome and the proceedings being produced might be future references to further our objective to get soil carbon into the international carbon trading markets.” (Mr Friedrich is pictured in hat and glasses.)
The UN FAO International Conservation Agriculture Carbon Offset Consultation called for soil carbon to be included as a class of offset credits for greenhouse gas emissions trading on the global market. It called for governments of the world to recognise farming that accumulates soil carbon as providing an ecosystem service and creating economic opportunities.
The meeting’s Communique states: “Conservation Agricultural systems for crops and pastures sequester carbon from the atmosphere into long-lived soil organic matter pools; they maintain and increase productivity, promote a healthy environment and strengthen rural communities. Potentially one third of annual global fossil fuel emissions could be offset by applying Conservation Agriculture.”
UN meeting recognises soil as massive carbon sink
Carbon Coalition convenors Michael & Louisa Kiely presented a report on the state of play in Australia on the morning of the first day. "I am very delighted that such a significant group of experts has assembled here from all over the world," said the FAO's Crop and Grassland leader Theodore Frederich. "This meeting produced an output which should stimulate the inclusion of appropriate agricultural land management culture linked to global mechanisms for the mitigation of climate change."
Nations represented that the FAO’s “Consultation” included Australia, Brazil, Italy, Canada, Columbia, Mexico, Germany, Denmark, South Africa, Tunisia, and the three biggest emitters who are yet to enter the Kyoto trading system, the USA, China & India.
The North Americans - now headed in the same direction as Australia - are also headed into the same quagmire called "the science": “To create working markets for farmers’ efforts to capture atmospheric carbon, we need to understand the science of how carbon acts in the soil, and the science behind no-till systems,” said Karen Scanlon, executive director of co-host Conservation Technology Information Center. “With that insight, we can quantify the effect that farmers have with specific practices and on specific soils, and create a fair compensation structure for those effects.”
The USA and Canada may have a natiional offsets market on the voluntary side, but they are yet to start unravelling the hard parts of the puzzle, as this statement reveals: "Changes in soil carbon are small... Complex chemistry dictates that the soil can only sequester a limited amount of carbon per year, and that after a certain number of years – scientists believe it is 15 to 20 years – a field reaches a plateau.
To make it even more complex, the soil’s capacity to store carbon depends on soil type, tillage system, the use of cover crops, cropping history and how much carbon it lost in the first place. Research from highly degraded soils in South America put into improved pasture showed dramatic jumps in carbon levels after five years – much higher storage than Midwestern soils in the U.S. Deep-rooted pasture plants also have the capacity to place carbon deeper into poor South American soils than annual crops do in cooler climates with richer ground. “The higher the clay content, the more capacity there is to store carbon,” said Charles Rice of Kansas State University.
In Brazil, Telmo Amado of the Federal University of Santa Maria plants corn and a deep-rooted, perennial pasture grass called deep into the soil. The result is a tremendous amount of biomass above and below the ground – a cash crop, a grazing opportunity and plenty of residue for carbon-fixing microbes.
But just growing biomass isn’t enough, says Amado. “One side of the equation is introducing this carbon,” he noted. “The other side is how we stabilize it in the soil. Both physical and chemical protections are important.”
That means protecting the soil surface with plenty of residue, maintaining soil structure by no-tilling or minimizing tillage, keeping soil microbes healthy (again through minimal soil disturbance), fertilizing crops adequately, avoiding soil compaction and rotating crops. “It’s really site-specific, and we really need to understand the crop system we’re talking about,” said Amado.
Got to Pay
Building carbon levels in the soil delivers a variety of important benefits, from improved soil quality to better water-holding capacity, higher fertility and resistance to erosion. Still, the biggest enticement to sequestering carbon will be creating markets through which farmers can sell the service they provide.
“I think what we’re really looking for as a farm organization, or society in general, is some way to reward farmers and ranchers for doing things like storing carbon and some other environmental practices,” said North Dakota farmer Dale Enerson, who serves as director of the Carbon Credit Program for the National Farmers Union in Jamestown, N.D.
The National Farmers Union has served as an aggregator of carbon credits, collecting pledges from 3,700 growers in the U.S. to sequester carbon on 4.7 million acres of cropland and rangeland and selling the bundle of carbon credits on the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX). Participating growers received an average of $1.20 per ton of sequestered carbon. Official CCX estimates for carbon sequestration range from 0.2 to 0.6 metric tons per acre on no-tilled cropland, 1 metric ton per acre on long-term grassland (such as CRP ground) and 0.12 to 0.52 metric tons on rangeland with enhanced management practices.
In a pioneering carbon offset trading program in Alberta, Canada, 47 percent of the offsets are from agricultural land. On the Chicago Climate Exchange, 25.52 percent of the offsets have been purchased from farmers. In Canada, provincial carbon offset trading in Alberta and Saskatchewan are paving the way for nationwide caps on industrial greenhouse gas emissions that will kick in on Jan. 1, 2010. Capping emissions will boost the market for tradable carbon offset credits, and agriculture wants to be part of the package.
“I think what we’re really looking for as a farm organization, or society in general, is some way to reward farmers and ranchers for doing things like storing carbon and some other environmental practices,” said North Dakota farmer Dale Enerson, who serves as director of the Carbon Credit Program for the National Farmers Union in Jamestown, N.D.
The National Farmers Union has served as an aggregator of carbon credits, collecting pledges from 3,700 growers in the U.S. to sequester carbon on 4.7 million acres of cropland and rangeland and selling the bundle of carbon credits on the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX). Participating growers received an average of $1.20 per ton of sequestered carbon. Official CCX estimates for carbon sequestration range from 0.2 to 0.6 metric tons per acre on no-tilled cropland, 1 metric ton per acre on long-term grassland (such as CRP ground) and 0.12 to 0.52 metric tons on rangeland with enhanced management practices.
In a pioneering carbon offset trading program in Alberta, Canada, 47 percent of the offsets are from agricultural land. On the Chicago Climate Exchange, 25.52 percent of the offsets have been purchased from farmers. In Canada, provincial carbon offset trading in Alberta and Saskatchewan are paving the way for nationwide caps on industrial greenhouse gas emissions that will kick in on Jan. 1, 2010. Capping emissions will boost the market for tradable carbon offset credits, and agriculture wants to be part of the package.
Preparing soil carbon offset credits for a full-scale, regulation-driven market will require policymakers to sort out an array of issues, ranging from how long the contracts should be, who owns the carbon (the operator or the landowner), how practices are verified, and how to handle situations in which an operator releases carbon by disturbing the ground in violation of his contract.“These cross-cutting issues can be worked out by working together,” says Don McCabe, an Ontario farmer who serves as vice president of the Soil Conservation Council of Canada, “because at the end of the day, it’s the same science. We’re starting to see the ball running down the hill. We’ve got to keep it rolling.”
Though voluntary markets have kept the value of a ton of sequestered carbon low – prices on the Chicago Climate Exchange have ranged from 90 cents to $7.50 per metric ton, and Alberta prices have ranged from $6.00 to $12.00 – McCabe believes a free market in which buyers are motivated by regulatory emissions caps could reach $65.00 per metric ton by 2020.
That would be music to the ears of farmers – and the participants in the October meeting. “There has to be a fair-price incentive,” said Rattan Lal, director of the Carbon Management and Sequestration Institute at The Ohio State University, “and $2 or $3 or $4 per acre in the market isn’t going to do it.”
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