Soil carbon and ADDITIONALITY: We're not in, so we're in!

"You could explore possibilities with soil carbon. It is not covered by Kyoto here and is therefore additional." Jaws dropped all around the two tables that the Soil Carbon contingent occupied at a recent "information session" staged by the Department of Climate Change to explain its position on a voluntary standard it is putting together. Convinced as we were by the tenor of the White paper and the paper on Voluntary Standards that the Government did not want a voluntary market, this revelation - out of the mouth of a very senior government official in a public forum - came as a shock. Additionality is the biggest of the 3 BIG CHALLENGES FOR SOIL CARBON: Additionality, Permanence and Measurement. W would not be so ungratefull as to suggest that it may have been the Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull's "Road to Damascus" conversion to soil carbon the week before that sparked this revival in our fortunes.