By Simon Bird
As the delegates are meeting in Cancun for COP 16, the vast majority of the talk has been on the many failings in our attempts to manage and mitigate global climate change. This comes on the heels of the U.S.’s failed attempt to develop comprehensive energy and climate legislation in 2010. However, throughout the landscape there are bright spots and areas of important work on carbon management and environmental protection. This includes the incredible amount of groundwork that has been completed to create functioning carbon registries, standards and protocols.
A major accomplishment is the new carbon offset protocols for improved forest management, reforestation and avoided conversion of forests. These forest-based protocols required finding extensive common ground to adequately balance the need for credible standards and methodologies (including issues such as additionality, permanence and leakage), while keeping them both workable across a broad area and financially feasible. There are still improvements to be made, the protocols are far from perfect and the marketplace is still developing, but the power of having viable forest protocols is immense.
There has long been interest in carbon market protocols for the reduction of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and increased carbon sequestration in managed soils; however, the complexity of the issue has limited past attempts. Carbon offsets created from reductions in soil GHG emissions and carbon sequestration would pay many environmental dividends in addition to a potentially large impact at reducing atmospheric CO2 levels. These ancillary benefits could include ecosystem services such as increased water quality and management, nutrient management, decreased erosion and increased species diversity.
GHG emissions and carbon sequestration in managed soils pose many accounting challenges, which have derailed past attempts at the creation of protocols. For example, soils can be highly heterogeneous across even small areas, creating great variation in the GHG emissions and carbon sequestrations of the soil. Additionally, the precise mixture of crop and management practices being utilized influence the soil geochemistry, requiring protocols to be flexible enough to capture the wide array of the variables possible. Soil GHG emissions can be substantial, yet fleeting, happening over very short time-scales, increasing the risk of being missed by direct sampling, and, therefore, can be significantly underestimated. Consequently, soil geochemical modeling is likely to be the most viable solution for estimating the total GHG emissions and carbon sequestration of a soil based upon its physical and chemical properties, and the management history. There are several very powerful models such as DayCent and DNDC; while these models have passed scientific scrutiny, they still need to be validated over the vast array of crop, management, and ecosystem variables that are possible.
Several important steps have been taken towards solving these accounting issues including: the work of Steve Apfelbaum and The Earth Partners in creating standardized methods; William Salas’s DNDC model; and the T-Agg, M-Agg and C-Agg groups bringing parties together. Additionally, the American Carbon Registry has released a protocol for reduced N2O emissions from soil through fertilizer management. Non-carbon market projects have included the Stewardship Index and the SAN Climate Module, which are also important steps towards the development and standardization of soil emission and sequestration activities within agriculture.
Protocols for the reduction of GHG emissions and increased carbon sequestration in managed soils should be developed and implemented in the marketplace. With the monetization opportunity provided by these protocols, farmers and land managers would be encouraged to employ important management practices that will benefit the environment. There are still many issues outstanding in how to account for soil GHG emissions and carbon sequestration; and what action the Federal government will take, if any, to create a cap and trade system is unknown. However, we need to work together to create a functioning soil carbon market, as has been done with forest carbon. We can harness this “pre-competitive” space to create agreement on common ground, and widely field test soil carbon protocols to ensure that they are scientifically credible, while still being practical and workable across the U.S. This will guarantee that as carbon markets develop (and they will – be it voluntary, state, regional, or federal in scope), we will be ready and able to provide real and permanent carbon offsets using credible projects.
