How to create safe, effective and just soil carbon governance

As the next electoral cycle dawns, the European Union faces interconnected climate, biodiversity, and soil crises. Big decisions lie ahead. Soil stakeholders debate how best to reverse worrying degradation trends; some prefer regulatory measures whereas others champion market-oriented policies. The EU is currently considering many different approaches, such as the Soil Monitoring Law and the Nature Restoration Law. There is also discussion on whether soil carbon should be “unitised” and traded in an Emissions Trading Scheme specific to the land and agricultural sector, or certified through the EU carbon removal carbon farming regulation. Given the entwinement of soil and climate outcomes, the stakes are high for Europe to act wisely and achieve coherence across its soil governance.

So far, the EU and many of its member states rely heavily on nature-based removal pathways for their net zero targets. These pathways are typically perceived as cheap, easy to deploy, widely beneficial and accepted by the general public, which makes them attractive to policy-makers. The use of soils as carbon sinks was particularly popularised during COP21 with the advent of the 4p1000 initiative.

But nature-based removal pathways have limitations. Some of these limitations are well known, such as the fragility of soils’ carbon stock which entails low durability storage. Other limitations are less well popularised, such as the notion that biospheric carbon sinks should not be used to counterbalance fossil emissions since they entail different pools within the carbon cycle. This idea is paramount in the concept of durable net zero.

In addition, considering the limited soil reserves that underpin food production, water maintenance, terrestrial ecosystems, land steward lifestyles and many services besides, to what extent should soil be viewed through the climate regulation lens and commandeered for mitigation efforts?

As an NGO advocating for the principled scale-up of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) methods, Carbon Gap has undertaken an investigation into soil as a key variable of the CDR equation in acknowledgement of the uniquely complex trade-offs involved in land-based management approaches. Our aim is to enrich discussion by disentangling debates and highlighting potential ways forward.

To that end, we interviewed fourteen experts across a diversity of perspectives, from farmers’ unions to civil society watchdogs to soil carbon specialists. These interviews complemented a review of the science and political landscape. Interviewees discussed the role they think soil carbon (and land stewards more broadly) should play in EU climate mitigation efforts. A collective list of dos and don’ts emerged, albeit with significant areas of disagreement. In this paper, we present our key findings and explain the positions Carbon Gap has reached, with the understanding that this space is fast-evolving, both politically and technologically, requiring nimble advocacy.

EU land is in critical condition and the Union has not yet managed to turn the tide on land degradation. With climate change accelerating and unleashing its impacts, the EU must rapidly restore soil health both for mitigation and adaptation purposes.

To instigate this transition, Carbon Gap proposes three high-level recommendations: mandatory requirements for member states, tailored transition pathways for farmers, and regulated private sector involvement. This multi-layered approach can help Europe maintain minimum soil health levels, kickstart an inclusive mass movement of change among land stewards, and crowd in private investment to distribute the burden of change, respectively. Although these components are stackable, the EU should not overlook the importance of legally-binding targets to complement voluntary schemes. Enforcing Union-wide requirements will entail harmonisation of soil data collection processes across member states and an appropriate level of monitoring, reporting and verification (MRV) to track progress.

European land management is at a crossroads defined by multiple needs and mounting challenges. Any governance that emerges around soil carbon must take account of this complexity. To that aim, we propose looking through the lens of doughnut economics at soil policy, defining a “safe, effective and just space” for EU efforts to operate within. This approach, distilled through interviewees’ collective recommendations, clarifies a social foundation that must not be transgressed and a socio-ecological ceiling that must not be exceeded by soil carbon governance outcomes.

Within this safe governance space, tailored farmer transition pathways must be pursued, reflective of their different priorities, levels of responsibility and capacity to transition. We review different approaches for catalysing large-scale change in land stewardship and explore how these can combine in a tiered framework. We also review MRV options, highlighting promising new areas of research, technological bottlenecks, and noting the need to match costs with the benefits derived. Ultimately, to ensure urgent action is not delayed, it is essential to reduce the dependency of soil carbon restoration efforts on developing mature MRV tools.

Alongside binding targets, tailored transition pathways and regulated private sector engagement, we also highlight the need for the EU to review and phase out the perverse incentives that are still pushing land stewards to manage soils unsustainably.

Ultimately, because soil restoration is so strategic to prioritise, the EU should seek to maximise control over its trajectory towards soil health targets, achieving the bulk of its targets through publicly driven measures.  Also, since the fate of soils depends on broader trends, explicitly linking EU soil health policy with food management and international trade is essential.

This research also shows that the risks, implications and costs of investing in soil carbon as a climate change mitigation strategy are likely underestimated, and limitations such as the speed of adoption of new practices among a shrinking, ageing land steward population are overlooked. Therefore, Carbon Gap recommends that the EU not over-rely on soil carbon to meet its climate objectives and further recommends that it accelerate the deployment of alternative CDR approaches with reduced land-footprints to alleviate the stakes on soil carbon and leave more room for soil health.