Draft Concept Note

Workshop on Monitoring climate benefits of sustainable land management with a focus on Soil Organic Carbon - April 2021

Topic and aim of the CoP-event

Building on the success of the last event in October 2020, the Climate-Soil Community of Practice (CoP) and the 4 per 1000 Initiative are pleased to announce their next event. The CoP has selected the topic "Monitoring climate benefits of sustainable land management, with a focus on Soil Organic Carbon (SOC)" with special attention to remote sensing and farmer-led monitoring in the field.

Sustainable land management is receiving increasing attention as a promising climate action option. As part of GIZ's Sector Project on Soil Protection, 'climate protection through soil conservation' has been defined as a priority area for its activities from 2020 to 2023. Last CoP-Event provided an insight into the growing voluntary carbon market and the role of soil carbon projects in offsetting emissions.

The need of transparent, accurate, consistent and comparable methods for accounting changes in SOC stocks and net GHG emissions remains a challenge, particularly the quantification of the climate effects of sustainable land management interventions. Nevertheless, there are successful pragmatic, farmer-centered approaches, which need to be highlighted to enable collective learning from these experiences.

This CoP is meant to provide a space for actors to exchange knowledge and experiences, to present their work, to learn from each other, and to develop partnerships. At this upcoming event, we invite you to go back to the roots of a true workshop format aiming for participatory presentations, hands-on learning, small-group activities and collective problem solving. For the specific topic of monitoring, we propose to address these subjects:

1. Systematic monitoring framework for assessing soil and land health at landscape-level
2. Farmer-led monitoring nested into national carbon monitoring platform
3. Soil carbon monitoring of large areas with a stratification approach

Throughout the workshop, the discussion will revolve around these guiding questions:

• How does monitoring work on the ground?
• How can monitoring be efficiently organized?
• How can organizations and research institutions involve farmers/land users?
• How to bridge the gap between anecdotal and experience-based knowledge from farmers and scientifically robust data (incl. data collection)?

Proposed structure of the event

The event will take place in the second half of April (exact date and time TBD) and will be structured as a two-day workshop composed of three moderated sessions, each lasting 1.5 hours. While we hope that you can attend the entire workshop, participants can pick and choose which session they want to attend.

Importantly, we want to move away from traditional formats of presentations, followed by short questions and answer sessions. Instead, we are proposing interactive sessions that will facilitate knowledge exchange between participants and presenters. Therefore, the moderated sessions will follow one of the following formats (to be decided be the presenter):

1. Longer case study presentation followed by interactive discussion
2. Short case study presentation and interactive knowledge exchange
3. Case study presentation followed by breakout groups

AGENDA

Day 1

1. Welcome note and setting the scene by CoP-organization (10 minutes)
2. Session 1 (1.5 hours in the morning)
3. Session 2 (1.5 hours in the afternoon)

Day 2

1. Session 1 (1.5 hours in the morning)
2. Final wrap-up of the workshop by CoP-organization (15 minutes)

Feedback request

We want this CoP to be lively and innovative. Therefore, we would like to ask you for your feedback on the workshop concept and format. Please consider yourself co-organizers discussing this as a virtual group. 

You can provide your feedback through inline comments on specific points (see below). General comments can be expressed at the bottom of the page. Please share your feedback within one week, by 19 March 2021.

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