- What investors want to account for:
- Scope of emission: soil C only, or also other agricultural emissions, landscape level emissions (e.g. forest conversion) or the value chain lifecycle?
- Methods that are affordable and practical:
- Practice-based planning or reporting is a preferred approach for many projects, e.g. “eligible practice” or “green lists.” How far does this go in accounting?
- Soil and other environmental data are often not available. Models for the tropics are often poor.
- Robustness needs:
- Aim for what is minimally necessary rather than waiting for perfection (Martin N’s recommendation).
- Accounting time and spatial scales:
- Projects usually report annually, so how do they report if changes are only detected after 3-5 years? What if an initial decline occurs, as is common?
Buyers/ investors in the carbon markets are looking for:
•Credibility of reductions/ removals
•Contribution to the level of ambition of the Paris Agreement goals
•Consistency with long-term climate strategy
•Clear economic impact at the local level and contribution to sustainable development
•Level of ambition in the mechanism or project
•Independent assessment
Fit-for-purpose methodology and MRV should could start with the purpose of encouraging investment, result based finance and evolve to “market grade” methodologies with increasing data, modeling and sophistication of MRV systems:
•Scalable and designed to catalyze and drive systemic change
•Landscape level design, validation and verification
•Stratification and innovative sampling will reduce cost and complexity
•Accurate for capturing the results impact
•Sampling and modeling utilized to identify impacts (sequestered carbon) at manageable costs and reasonable accuracy
•Methodology and MRV should evolve in accuracy
•With iteration, data and model accuracy should improve
•Sampling can become better designed at lower costs with more reliable results
•Growing interest in natural climate (nature based) solutions to meet the global goal a net zero planet by 2050
•Soil organic carbon removals can play a very important role in being part of the measures for sequestration/ removal of greenhouse gasses
•For this to happen, soil organic measures need to gain the visibility of the global community though credible accounting methodologies and MRV systems that is implementable in a cost-effective manner:
§Scalable and designed to catalyze and drive systemic change
§Accurate for capturing the results impact
§Methodology and MRV should evolve in accuracy
•Fit-for-purpose methodologies and MRV systems should could start with the purpose of encouraging investment, result based finance and evolve to “market grade” accounting methodologies and associated MRV systems.
•There is a need to consider a sequenced approach for result based payments to evolve into carbon market linked incentives
