Carbon Offset Projects in the Agricultural Sector

The agricultural sector accounts for 14% of global anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. If we alsotake into account carbon emissions and sequestration from upstream – production of fertilisers,deforestation, etc. – and downstream – bio-energies, etc. – the share rises to 30%. Many practices andtechnologies enable agriculture's impact on climate change to be reduced. According to a number ofestimates that are summarised in this research, the agricultural sector’s mitigation potential is of the sameorder of magnitude as its emissions over a period of 30 years. However, changing agricultural practicescomes at a cost, and in most cases such changes are not made without economic incentives.Carbon offsetting projects are one of the economic tools available to reduce agricultural emissions bypaying for metric tons of avoided CO2e emissions. A summary of the emission reductions enabled byagricultural projects to date is provided in this report. It covers most projects certified by quality assurancestandards, including those set up by the Kyoto Protocol (Clean Development Mechanism and JointImplementation) and those in the voluntary market (Verified Carbon Standard, Climate Action Reserve,Gold Standard, Chicago Climate Exchange, and American Carbon Registry). The assessment drawn upon this basis shows that emission reductions enabled through carbon offsetting are thousand times lowerthan actual emissions and their potential mitigation. Agricultural projects have reduced emissions by 14MtCO2e in 2010, i.e. 7% of the reductions generated by all carbon offset projects across all sectors for thisyear.Initiatives focus on three technologies: bio-energies (crop residues), methanisation of livestock waste, andsoil carbon sequestration using no-till practices. This is very little compared with the large number ofmitigation technologies that could be used in this sector. The diffuse nature of agricultural emissions andthe cost of the abatement measures are the main obstacles to developing agricultural projects. However,the introduction of multi-farm aggregators enables to share costs. Moreover, research on new techniquesfor measuring emissions more efficiently and less costly is a mean to overcome these obstacles andrelease the mitigation potential.