Organic carbon and greenhouse gas balance comes from the soil

The meeting was attended by 67 participants, including four representatives of the European Commission, who explained their expectations of the outcomes of the project’s objectives.

The European Research Executive Agency, DG-Clima, DG-Agri, and JRC are actively supporting the MRV4SOC project, emphasizing the importance of achieving exploitable results with a tangible impact. Other points of interest are the contribution to appropriate carbon farming methodologies as part of the EU Expert Group on Carbon Removals, and the development of tools aligned with the JRC-European Soil Observatory Platform.

The MRV4SOC’s consortium, which consists of 20 partners from 10 countries including GMV, UCLouvain, AUTH, TAU, CZU, ISRIC, CREA and ERSAF, UAntwerpen, DLR, CNRS, CSIC, ICONS, SC, EVENOR, K&I, UVIGO, NIBIO, ULIEGE, GFZ, and UG, aims to create solutions applicable across diverse spatio-temporal scales and climate change scenario.
By collaborating closely with local stakeholders, the project will validate its solutions in various ecosystems in arid, temperate, and continental climate zones.

This approach will contribute to establishing reliable and transparent carbon farming credits within a cost-effective monitoring, reporting, and methodological framework. The project will collect and organise the results in a Knowledge Hub.

 At its core, MRV4SOC recognises the importance of monitoring, reporting, and verifying soil organic carbon to understand how land management can mitigate the effects of global warming and climate change. The project acknowledges the complexity of land use and soil development, and the interactions between different elemental cycles such as carbon and nitrogen.

The project’s three pillars – standardization, reporting, and verification – ensure robust, transparent, and cost-effective results.

In particular, MRV4SOC aims to: 

1. measure long-term soil organic carbon accumulation in 9 EU representative land use/land cover classes;
2. assess how carbon farming practices drive carbon flux dynamics in the 9 classes;
3. evaluate the impact of climate change on soil organic carbon accumulation;
4. develop a robust, transparent, standard, and cost-effective monitoring, reporting, and verification system to facilitate results-based payments associated with farming practices;
5. identify revenue opportunities to unlock results-based payments;
6. increase stakeholders’ confidence in voluntary carbon markets.

MRV4SOC is a three-year long Horizon Europe project (GA no. 101112754). Stay updated with its progress as it unravels the delicate equilibrium of the components of our soil, and its importance for our present and future.