Shaping the future for agricultural carbon projects in Latin America

EKO ECO Guest Blogger on August 2, 2010 Comment

By Seth Shames and Sara J. Scherr, EcoAgriculture Partners

Below is an opinion piece originally published in the recent SinergiA newsletter - a collaboration between five Latin American PES networks. This edition of SinergiA focuses on agriculture's growing role in payments for ecosystem services schemes, and offers opinions, tools and methodologies, projects, publications, and events related to PES and agriculture in Latin America. SinergiA is available in Spanish, English, and Portuguese.

Though largely ignored in the rush to REDD, we contend that agricultural carbon initiatives are equally important to land-based carbon markets, both in Latin America and internationally. Without agricultural components, the integrity and viability of REDD projects is compromised, and the opportunity to develop carbon projects with strong co-benefits for food security, poverty reduction and ecosystem restoration is missed.

Agriculture accounts for 20% of total emissions in Latin America and the Caribbean. Large-scale commercial farms and ranches emit carbon via high use of fertilizer, tillage, irrigation and livestock wastes. Small - scale farmers live in landscape mosaics which store considerable carbon in perennial forest fragments, pastures, palms, hedges, scattered trees and crops. The landscapes contribute to emissions with widespread soil and vegetation degradation. The largest driver of deforestation is agriculture; its exclusion from climate mitigation frameworks makes REDD programs unsustainable.

Carbon markets must evolve to include agricultural mitigation activities. Examples include: reduced soil tillage intensity, reduced soil erosion, perennial crops that maintain root and branch systems year-round, vegetative soil cover, permanent vegetative cover in non-cropped areas, increased biomass in grazing systems through improved varieties and management, improved fertilizer use efficiency, improved livestock waste management and utilization of methane emissions for biogas; and reduced fossil energy use in farm operations. Such practices reduce farm risks and production costs, improve farmer incomes, protecting watershed services and conserve biodiversity. These benefits often exceed those of carbon payments in helping farmers shift to sustainable and profitable systems.

A movement is building to expand agricultural carbon markets globally. Certification standards are proliferating within voluntary markets. In regulatory markets, a work program on agriculture appears likely under the UNFCCC SBSTA coming out of the December COP in Cancun. It's time to move from small projects to whole supply chains and large landscape initiatives that support sustainable development.

Innovators in Latin America are leaders in mechanisms which reward farmers for stewardship.

• The Regional Integrated Silvopastoral Ecosystem Management Project piloted the use of payments to promote carbon sequestration along with biodiversity conservation, through silvopastoral practices in degraded pastures in Colombia, Costa Rica and Nicaragua.
• CEDECO (Corporación Educativa para el Desarrollo Costarricense), is developing the potential of small-scale organic farming in Costa Rica, Cuba and Brazil to reduce GHG emissions and sequester carbon, and exploring the potential of landscape-scale projects for 'carbon-plus-biodiversity' that could be branded by the conservation values they achieve.
• Numerous regional projects are re-establishing or improving shade in coffee and cocoa plantations for carbon sequestration, and agricultural product certification programs are experimenting with climate-friendly labeling.

Despite inadequate field measurements in most Latin American farming systems, cost-effective MRV (monitoring, reporting, and verification) methods for field, farms and landscapes are rapidly developing. Colombia, Chile and Uruguay have joined the new Global Research Alliance on Agricultural Greenhouse Gases, now focused on high-input commercial systems. FAO is establishing a center to collect GHG emissions data for diverse farming systems.

To be financially viable, agricultural carbon projects need to reduce transaction costs, reduce costs of aggregating large numbers of farmers in climate deals, reduce risks to farmers, and empower them to negotiate reasonable agreements. Fortunately, the agricultural sector can build carbon projects on existing institutions such as farmer cooperatives, agribusiness outgrowing schemes, and territorial development initiatives. Costs can be reduced with improved local capacity for project development and management, access to project pre-financing, and simplified MRV. Latin American leaders must engage in structuring logical, functional, and regionally appropriate agricultural carbon finance systems.