Implementing the Soil Enrichment Protocol at Scale: Opportunities for an Agricultural Carbon Market

Abstract

High-quality agricultural carbon credits that incentivize regenerative practices can help address climate change through greenhouse gas (GHG) abatement and CO2 sequestration. Generating large volumes of such credits requires rigorous crediting methodologies. The Soil Enrichment Protocol (SEP) by the Climate Action Reserve (CAR) aims to unlock this type of crediting potential. The SEP includes new expert-driven standards for validating the use of soil biogeochemical modeling to generate credits. Technical experts at Indigo Ag participated in the SEP working group and are supporting implementation of the first project, CAR 1459_RP1, on hundreds of thousands of acres in the US. The authors share their thoughts on new approaches enabled by the SEP as both contributors to the theory behind and practitioners of these approaches. The SEP enables scalable, high-quality credits through four main advances: (1) allowing flexibility in the use of biogeochemical models that meet explicit performance requirements, (2) enabling a new approach to field-level, modeled baselines, (3) supporting a hybrid approach of credit generation using both soil measurement and modeling, and (4) requiring a new type of credit uncertainty quantification that accounts for multiple sources of uncertainty. Together these advances support agricultural credit quantification that enables payments to offset transitional costs for growers, at large enough scales to create a robust market, with a level of rigor that ensures any credited emission reductions have real climate impact. Innovations in soil analyses, advances in research, and improvements in data collection could further improve the potential for agricultural carbon credits to scale.