Road4Schemes - Roadmap for Carbon Farming Schemes

Background and Objective

Carbon farming has gained prominence as a mitigation option to reach targets set in the Paris Agreement and the European Green Deal. To achieve this, integrating research into policy design and implementation, ensuring mutual benefits for stakeholders, soils and society is helpful. Road4Schemes will

(1) assess the strengths and weaknesses of existing and planned schemes for carbon farming and additional Ecosystem Service (ESS) payments, including respective tools for monitoring, reporting and verification;

(2) assess stakeholders’ perceptions and preferences with respect to strategies for scheme design and policy drivers and barriers; and

(3) deliver a roadmap for developing and implementing contextually sensitive result-based schemes for carbon farming and additional ESS payments.

The project is being conducted as a sub-project within EJP-Soil. Institutes and research facilities from 9 European countries are collaborating in the project: EV-ILVO (Belgium), Aarhus University (Denmark), INRAE (France), Wageningen University (Netherlands), BIOS (Austria), Czech University of Life Science Prague (Czech Republic), TAGEM (Turkey) and Agroscope (Switzerland). Since February 2023, CREA (Italy) has joined Road4Schemes as its 10th partner.

Approach

The Thünen Institute is leading the work on policy frameworks and linkages with Greenhouse Gas reporting, but is also working closely with partners on all other working packages (including collecting and analysing existing carbon farming concepts and consulting with various stakeholders through focus groups and workshops).

Questionnaires are being developed at the Thünen Institute to investigate the current policy implementation of carbon farming measures and the reportability of the resulting climate mitigation effects. In this context, it is also of interest how the various challenges of these measures are dealt with at the national level (including measurability, permanence, additionality, double financing).

Our Research Questions

• What is the state of policy implementation of carbon farming in the countries studied? How do private and public activities correlate?
• How well are national GHG inventories currently able to reflect climate change mitigation effects from carbon-farming activities? What improvements are needed?