Carbon farming can also rejuvenate forests and improve resilience
What is carbon farming, and can it help us reach the EU’s commitment to climate neutrality by 2050? Our ThinkForest event in Brussels on 16 October unpacked some of the complexities around the topic.
“Carbon farming” practices aim to enhance the carbon storage in forests and soils, explained Ana Rey, co-lead author on EFI’s latest science-policy study, Carbon Farming in the European Forestry Sector, which was launched at the event. Sustainable forest management practices that are suitable for carbon farming include afforestation, agroforestry, species selection and peatland restoration – and these have important co-benefits other than just carbon storage, including increasing forest resilience, improving biodiversity and providing additional income for land managers. Co-lead author Tommaso Chiti compared these forest management practices to the EU’s QUALITY framework, which focuses on Quantification, Additionality, Long-term storage and Sustainability.
“All practices have pros and cons that need to be carefully evaluated, as well as regionality taken into account”, he said. He took a deep dive into forest management practices in the Mediterranean to show the trade-offs – for example longer rotation periods increase carbon storage considerably but can give rise to risk for fires because of the increment in biomass. He also touched on some of the main challenges for carbon farming – long and variable timescales vs short-term/long-term climate goals, and the difficulties of establishing reliable systems for setting baselines, measuring and verifying carbon removal.
A lively panel discussion explored the opportunities and challenges of forest carbon farming, concurring that a solid framework to measure and verify additionality is vitally important, as well as ensuring that co-benefits like improved forest resilience are generated. Jurij Krajcic from DG Clima explained how an expert group is currently working on the methodologies for carbon certification, to try to make this as operational as possible. “The resilience component is central to these methodologies”, he emphasised.
Trust, clarification and transparency on criteria were seen as important to get buy-in, not only from forest owners but also from investors. Julia Grimault from the Institute for Climate Economics explained how things had been done in France, where the Label Carbone had been created in a bottom-up process. It has created its own certification methodologies together with stakeholders, and is now state operated by the French Ministry of Ecology.
The connection between science, policy and practice was also important, said Piotr Borkowski, from the European State Forest Association (EUSTAFOR). Capacity-building and finance would be needed for forest owners, to implement innovative (and often more expensive) methods of silviculture. This funding could be a blend of EU (e.g. CAP funding for agroforestry), state funding and private sector finance.
Margherita Miceli, from the Confederation of European Paper Industries (Cepi) also pointed out that we shouldn’t look at carbon farming in isolation, and that a broader picture including industry providing economic viability to sustainable forest management (e.g. genetic improvements, management of risks), was needed.
