GIZ Soil Carbon Webinar, 28 April 2020
How to realize the potential of soil
carbon benefits?
Practical pathways for achieving impact

A Grand Challenge
Soil carbon sequestration for climate change
mitigation
• An opportunity that should be “neither dismissed nor exaggerated.”
(Bossio et al. 2020)
• A live debate that is pushing our knowledge forward (Rumpel et al.
2019)
• Despite strong political will, decades of knowledge, alignment with
soil health policy, multiple SDG co-benefits, few negative impacts,
and constant flow of emerging science, implementation has been
slow.
….So what’s the problem?

Global estimates of soil carbon potential in
agriculture
• Technical potential of 2 to
5 GtCO2 in agriculture
(Fuss et al. 2018)
• ~1.2 GtCO2e economic
potential at USD
10/tCO2e (Bossio et al.
2020)
• SOC sequestration rates
and areas vary
• Uncertainties due to land
area, depth, and soil,
subsoil and landscape
processes
Paustian et al. 2016

The issues
No guarantee that what you
add will stay
• Agriculture is a driver of
soil carbon loss
• Stability of storage
• Permanence and
saturation
• Slow gains, quick losses
You can’t easily tell how
much has been stored
• 3-5 years to see change
• Activity-based indicators
are poor
• Variability over space and
depth
Large-scale change is tough
(1) biophysical limits (water, nutrients, energy, exogenous inputs), (2)
GHG trade-offs, (3) climate change effects and (4) socio-economic
barriers (C price, need for ongoing incentives, slow policy change,
investment risk, land tenure etc), (5) context-specific solutions

Time to move from
discussion of
potentials toward
doing…
Rwanda New Times Newspaper

Soil carbon sequestration: public policy
and private investment still small scale
• NDCs: At least 27 UNFCCC parties’ Nationally Determined
contributions refer to soil carbon and 11 have targets – more can be
done to specify targets
• Government initiatives: Australia’s Carbon Farming Initiative and
California’s Healthy Soils Program provide C market incentives and
subsidies to farmers
• Private sector initiatives Indigo’s Terraton Initiative: 1 trillion tons, 5
billion ha $12-24/ha, aim for quantification methods, technologies, and
innovative finance. Corporates: Danone, Mars, Bayer, Coca Cola,
Fonterra, Diageo and Olam
• C-Market projects: Kenya Agricultural Carbon Project (World Bank
Biocarbon Fund): 37,000 smallholders, 1 MtCO2e verified mitigation
from trees and soil in East Africa, since 2009.

Address barriers to implementation
Stakeholders consultation. Farmers (world, ≈ 1500)
https://www.circasa-project.eu
Slide courtesy of Claire Chenu

Systemic transformational change
Improved advisory services, novel technologies,
strong C-market, policy subsidies and regulation, company offsets,
impact investing, farmer learning and social movements (regenerative
agriculture, agroecology)

Good practice features for transformational
change (review of 24 cases)
Principles Features of successful large-scale mitigation projects
Technology
transfer and
infrastructure
1. Strong value propositions for farmers beyond carbon payments
2. Farmer- and local government-driven decisions about practices
3. Effective technical change agents with capacity for large-scale outreach
4. Farmer access to integrated support services (on-line knowledge platforms for climate information services
and technical option feasibility and suitability analysis, ICT-based services, carbon accounting linked to project
activities, centers for input and service delivery)
Finance 1. Subsidy or credit used to catalyze new practices
2. Where offered, result-based carbon payments can create incentives for sustaining projects or incremental
improvements
3. Aggregated carbon payments to communities during times of low carbon prices to reduce transaction
costs and increase reward size
4. Public-private partnership, with public support to de-risk farmer transitions and private investment, and
private funds to drive scale
5. Low entry requirements for participation in enterprises or carbon schemes
6. Low transaction costs for finance delivery
MRV 1. Low-cost MRV methodologies specific to practices, e.g. use of existing statistics, such as fertilizer sales or
milk yields, remote sensing for agroforestry or AWD
2. Activity-based monitoring
3. Continuously improved modeling and science to verify activity data
4. Automated payments
Policy 1. National policy mandate for change in practices (not necessarily climate policy)
2. Inter-ministerial and administrative unit coordination, including between central and local government
Wollenberg et al. 2019, TCAF/World Bank

Cropland soil mitigation potential
Zomer et al. Nature
2017

Global agenda for collective action on soil
Foster vision for
action, led by
champion countries
Demonstrate
investment case
through seed funding
of commercial soil
carbon initiatives
Identify farmer
incentives
Vermeulen et al. 2019

Getting the balance right
Source Campbell et al. 2019
• Set standards for optimal outcomes
• Monitor for negative impacts or create safeguards/no
go zones

Priority actions to meet climate targets
 Stop carbon loss
− Protect peatlands –32%-46% of all soil carbon (~500–700 Gt C), e.g. through
supply chain accountability and monitoring and enforcement of land use
boundaries
 Promote significant carbon uptake
− Identify geographic priorities, regional strategies and country champions
− Create platforms for sharing knowledge and practices among farmers, locally,
regionally and globally.
− Support public-private investment (technical de-risking, project match making)
and viable carbon-markets
− Demonstrate benefits that balance crop productivity, SOC and SDG impacts
 Ambitious policy and standards
− Increase ambition and specificity for SOC targets in NDCs and other policy
− Integrate SOC sequestration into national best practice and green finance
standards
− Develop and harmonize low-cost monitoring systems

Conclusions
We have a grand challenge, but we can work on it!
Action is needed on multiple fronts; it not just a technical implementation
problem.
• Set ambitious targets and work toward for large-scale, systemic change
across the public and private sector institutions, esp. incentives,
advisory services, novel technical options, political will. This will take
time.
• Test priorities and strategies with iterative, adaptive approaches that
consider optimizing impacts and trade-offs.
• Improve understanding of mitigation potentials and implementation
successes with monitoring of networks of long-term sites on farmers
fields

Lini.Wollenberg@uvm.edu
Thank you!