Soil characteristics can vary widely across even the same field, and carbon can take years to accumulate in the dirt. Just a few vials from one farm won’t cut it. Today, samples are often dug up by hand and mailed to a faraway lab, where it can take technicians days or weeks to analyze the carbon content. One way to both ensure rigorous accounting and persuade cash-strapped farmers to change their ways is to make it faster and cheaper to conduct soil sampling. “We think that science is a really necessary precondition to having robust, effective incentives” for producers, she added. “We see…a lot of private companies and the federal government putting the cart before the horse when it comes to voluntary carbon markets or other soil-carbon-focused incentives,” Amador said. Firms such as General Mills, Cargill, IBM and Microsoft are already voluntarily purchasing soil carbon from farms to help meet their corporate sustainability goals. That’s especially important given the growing interest in selling off “tons” of carbon sequestered, and related concerns that soil carbon credits could amount to greenwashing by giant companies. agricultural producers, including not just industrial operators but also small-scale farmers and growers of specialty crops like organic fruits and vegetables, she said. But more fundamental research and demonstration projects are needed to further establish how soil carbon storage works, and to identify the best practices for a wide variety of U.S. “There’s a real movement to consider these nature-based solutions as ‘shovel-ready,’ or something that we can implement quickly as a no-regret strategy,” said Giana Amador, co-founder and policy director of Carbon 180. 3 billion “ soil carbon moonshot” plan to unify those efforts and boost federal funding in this field. Carbon 180, a nonprofit that advocates for carbon-removal strategies, recently proposed a $ 2. Such steps, however, are mostly happening in scattered and piecemeal ways across the U.S. A federal funding “moonshot” for soil carbon research
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Scientists are developing new tools to accurately measure and monitor soil carbon at a massive scale, and policymakers and environmental groups are studying how to set protocols for how farmers should report and verify those measurements. (Paustian et al., 2019)Īlthough sustainable agriculture methods aren’t new, and many trace their roots to Indigenous practices, pilot projects and real-world trials are emerging to determine which farming and grazing strategies could be best for storing carbon in soil. 5 degrees Celsius.Ī 2019 study in the journal Frontiers in Climate illustrates published estimates for soil carbon sequestration's potential. After rapidly phasing out coal, oil and gas and accelerating adoption of carbon-free electricity and fuels, some residual emissions will likely occur - and those must be canceled out in order to keep global warming to 1. Such approaches are now “unavoidable” if the world is to achieve net-zero emissions in less than 30 years, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said this week. The concept falls into a wider category of potential solutions for achieving “carbon dioxide removal,” which includes everything from planting trees and deep-sea kelp forests to spreading minerals over oceans and using giant air-sucking fans to capture CO 2. food producers and policymakers as a way to counteract the environmental toll of growing commodities like corn, soy and beef. The idea of “soil carbon sequestration” is gaining traction with U.S. Now scientists and farmers are working to reverse that trend by studying how well cropland and pastures can pull carbon dioxide from the sky and store it back in the soil. Terrain that once served as a carbon sponge has over time become a major contributor of global greenhouse gas emissions. For centuries, converting forests and meadows into industrial-scale farmland has unleashed carbon into the atmosphere.
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