Lifecycle carbon accounting is the missing piece in the push for landscape restoration

The landscape restoration field ended 2015 with significant forward momentum.

At COP21 in Paris, governments announced major efforts to stem the tide of climate change, such as the the 4 per 1000  soil carbon initiative, the Great Green Wall afforestation project, and advances in ongoing projects like the Bonn Challenge. China and India were among many countries to include restoration pledges in their national climate commitments. Side events, like the Global Landscapes Forum, attracted an overflow of people.

What was missing from all of this encouraging activity in Paris, however, was discussion about life cycle greenhouse gas (GHG) accounting for landscape restoration projects. While the unassuming task of life cycle GHG accounting maybe not be good fodder for press releases at major international climate conferences, it is nevertheless critical for accelerating the deployment of landscape restoration projects around the world. This post explains why, and what we can do to start addressing the current lack of its consideration.

Crowds gathered at the Global Landscapes Forum meeting in Paris, but there was little discussion about how to measure the benefits of different techniques for sequestering GHGs through landscape restoration projects. Photo by Noah Deich.

Hard to measure, and even harder to predict

Part of the reason why landscape restoration projects have gained so much recent support is their potential to enhance natural GHG sinks. Enhanced carbon sinks remove excess GHGs from the atmosphere, counteracting some of the GHG emissions that flow into the atmosphere each year through the burning of fossil fuels. The potential for landscape restoration to sequester GHGs is on the order of billions of tons of CO₂ per year (as a reference, we emit around 50 billion tons of CO2-equivalent annually).

While the macro potential of landscape restoration is significant, it remains very difficult to measure and verify the total GHG sequestration of individual landscape restoration projects at a project level. For example, it can be hard to estimate the GHG sequestration of a specific project due to complex plant microbe dynamics in soils that regulate GHG emissions and sequestration. In addition, future land use is unpredictable. Anything from a forest fire to urbanization can undo efforts to sequester GHGs made by any given landscape restoration project, making the permanence of each project difficult to pin down.

GHG accounting  is necessary to scale-up landscape restoration

Good GHG accounting at the project level is critical for landscape restoration projects to flourish. One common theme coming out of COP21 was that a large barrier to scaling landscape restoration was the availability of financing. The problem is that governments and businesses do not want to finance projects where GHG benefits are uncertain. Without rigorous accounting standards and cost-effective (and user-friendly) monitoring techniques, land managers will have a tough time convincing financiers of the value of their efforts for the mitigation of climate change.

In addition, good GHG accounting is critical for landscape restoration projects to gain legitimacy as a “negative emissions” strategy. In the coming years, governments and companies are likely to seek out landscape restoration projects as a low-cost solution to removing carbon from the atmosphere. But without good accounting, it will be hard to understand the true contribution of these landscape restoration projects to carbon removal goals set out in future national climate action plans.

To access the capital needed to expand their impact at a larger scale, landscape restoration projects will need more robust GHG accounting tools and protocols. Photo by Neil Palmer/CIAT, from CIAT on Flickr.

Even without good GHG accounting, some landscape restoration projects are likely to move forward based on the measurable benefits these projects generate around ecosystem services, climate adaptation, economic development, and environmental justice. But the projects that move forward on these co-benefits alone will likely be insufficient to battle climate change in the future. As shown by the collectively weak national climate action plans submitted prior to COP21, we need to pick up the pace on climate action. It is only by using strong accounting to demonstrate the GHG sequestration value of landscape restoration projects that we can accelerate the deployment of these projects as swiftly as is needed.

The challenges and opportunities

The good news is that the recent talks for increasing the prevalence of landscape restoration projects means that there are numerous opportunities to develop rigorous GHG accounting tools and processes. A recent report by the Center for Carbon Removal identified that early landscape restoration projects motivated by non-sequestration co-benefits offer low-cost opportunities for developing effective GHG accounting techniques. In particular, directing philanthropic grants toward the development of GHG accounting tools for existing restoration projects can have a large impact in accelerating the implementation of new landscape restoration projects around the globe.

Landscape restoration is also ripe for entrepreneurship. Land managers are increasingly demanding more low-cost tools and effective business models for monitoring and verifying carbon sequestration. As a result, incentives for innovation around connected soil sensors, drones, and satellite technology for landscape restoration are poised for substantial growth over the coming years.

With COP21 in the books, the great challenge of 2016 and beyond will be to figure out the details of landscape restoration as a technique for mitigating GHGs. The future looks bright, but requires we get to work today to develop accounting systems that ensure that GHG books balance for landscape restoration projects around the globe.

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Noah Deich is the Executive Director of the Center for Carbon Removal, based in Berkeley, California.