Rural communities in developing countries could become part of the multi-billion dollar carbon-offset market if a project to assess the amount of carbon stored in vegetation and soils proves successful. The three-year Carbon Benefits Project, launched by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), will develop and test standardized procedures for measuring and monitoring carbon in soil and vegetation across complex agricultural and forestry systems; pilot areas are located in Brazil, China, Kenya, Niger and Nigeria. The project will also develop modelling tools to establish the carbon benefits of sustainable land management interventions in terms of protected or enhanced carbon stocks and reduced greenhouse-gas emissions. Different tools will be developed for application at the national, regional and farm-scale level.
The project is an innovative way to help mitigate climate change through adoption of sustainable land use management. It offers a new solution to a persistent problem: how to measure terrestrial carbon, particularly in complex landscapes. The project will provide a standardized, cost effective system that integrates the latest remote sensing technology and analysis, ground-based measurement, and new modelling tools; it will be made available freely as a web-accessible system, hosted by UNEP. The integrated system will help project managers to quantify carbon as a global environmental benefit in resource management projects using consistent, standardized procedures. If the project works well, a significant step will have been made towards helping smallholders to benefit from the rewards offered by carbon markets.
Project specifics
The project is co-funded by the Global Environment Facility (GEF), a leading global environmental public financial institution, and implemented by UNEP’s Division of Early Warning and Assessment (UNEP-DEWA). It is being implemented by an international consortium of scientists from five test case countries (Brazil, China, Kenya, Niger, Nigeria), the Netherlands (ISRIC – World Soil Information), United Kingdom and the USA; it also involves collaboration with farming communities from the test case countries.
The measurement and monitoring protocol component of the project will be developed in 18 months; the modelling and capacity building work will go on for three years when the project ends.
ISRIC – World Soil Information, an independent foundation affiliated with Wageningen UR, will provide global reference data on soil organic carbon stocks and changes - across the range of world climate zones, soil types and land use – derived from historic data; these can be used as default values for modelling applications at national scale, for data poor regions. More detailed data, derived from field monitoring and long-term chrosequence studies, are needed at project-level to verify projections from the process-based models. These data sets will be compiled and used for model validation by the respective test case partners.