Developing and testing a framework for the design of harmonized, context-specific Monitoring, Reporting and Verification systems for soil Carbon and greenhouse gas balances by Agricultural activities

The EC has set the ambition to become climate neutral by 2050. As not all greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions can be avoided, such as GHGs from biological processes in agriculture, carbon removal will become increasingly important to meet the neutrality targets set. Besides carbon capture and storage by industry, carbon sequestration in the land use sector will need to compensate for the remaining emissions. In this respect, reliable yet cost-effective systems to monitor, report and verify efforts by land managers become increasingly important. This is particularly relevant for the international GHG inventory reporting, and for the development of payment systems to reward land managers for sequestering carbon and reducing GHG emissions by carbon farming (CF). The interest in CF schemes is substantial, as illustrated by the large number of (pilot) payment schemes that have been initiated in recent years. Most of the schemes are experimenting on relatively small geographical areas with a relatively small number of land managers involved. In the ‘Sustainable carbon cycles communication’ that was launched in December 2021, the EC has expressed the challenging ambition that ‘every land manager should have access to verified emission and removal data by 2028 to enable a wide uptake of CF’. MARVIC has been specifically designed to generate instruments and knowledge that enable fulfilling this ambition. The main goal of MARVIC is to develop and test a reliable Framework for the design of harmonized, context-specific MRV systems (‘MRV Framework’) for assessing carbon stock changes in soils and woody biomass and soil GHG emissions. The development of a generic MRV Framework, applicable to all agricultural land-use activities, is essential for boosting faith in public and private CF schemes in Europe.