Why we can't rely on carbon-offset farming to save us

Issue 164: Regenerative agriculture can indeed pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, but measuring and standardizing it is really tough.

Hello! Welcome to Nosh Box, a lunchtime-ish food newsletter that recognizes the vital role of food waste reduction in addressing climate change.

Read yesterday’s dispatch: Reopening plans are leaving out street vendors

When companies announce plans to go “carbon-neutral” or “remove the carbon we’ve generated from the environment,” it’s not a guarantee that they’re making meaningful changes to reduce their emissions. Some are, but many fulfill these pledges by purchasing what are called carbon offsets.

Essentially, offsets rely on farmers adopting practices that pull CO2 out of the atmosphere and trap it in the soil. Corporations purchase offsets through certain marketplaces, which then give farmers credits to adopt these methods. Common tactics — a.k.a. “regenerative agriculture” — include planting cover crops (intended to “cover” and protect the soil, rather than be harvested for food), not tilling every planting cycle (which upturns and disrupts soil, releasing trapped nutrients), crop rotation, and more.

Here’s a handy (if simplified) illustration of how carbon offsets work, courtesy of the UN Environment Programme:

So functionally, companies that purchase offsets are literally offsetting their continued emissions with drawdown practices elsewhere in the world. In order to make offsets functional, you have to somehow certify and standardize how much carbon each farmer is trapping. Here’s the problem: This is proving to be extraordinarily difficult, per the MIT Technology Review.

---

In that article at MIT Technology Review that’s absolutely worth reading for anyone interested in climate change mitigation, regenerative agriculture, or the general survival of humanity and our food system (so, everyone), James Temple unpacks why we shouldn’t count on offsets alone to save us:

The world’s farmlands do have the capacity to store billions of tons of carbon dioxide in the soil annually, according to a National Academies report last year. But there is still uncertainty concerning which farming techniques work, and to what degree, across different soil types, depths, topographies, crop varieties, climate conditions, and time periods.

It’s unclear whether the practices can be carried out over long periods and on a massive scale across the world’s farms without undercutting food production. And there are significant disagreements about what it will take to accurately measure and certify that farms are actually removing and storing increased amounts of carbon dioxide.

These uncertainties further complicate the well-documented challenges in setting up any reliable carbon offsets program. Studies have frequently found these systems can substantially overestimate reductions, as economic, environmental and political pressures all push toward issuing large numbers of offsets credits. The programs can also create opportunities for gamesmanship and greenwashing that undermine real progress on climate change, observers say.

To be clear: Regenerative agriculture, as a practice, works. By using more sustainable growing methods that take advantage of plants’ natural photosynthesis — and that protect soil health — we can indeed pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.

The concern is that it’s proving SO hard to quantify and standardize how well it works. The concern is in commercializing offsets as a silver bullet that will magically save us all. Selling them to corporations as a planet-saving solution is… insufficient, to say the least. Maybe even actively destructive if it’s incentivizing corporations not to make more structural environmental changes.

Good on us if we can get offsets to work accurately as one strategy of many, James Temple says in the MIT Technology Review article. But…

If they don’t, it means we’re allowing companies to buy certificates that enable them to keep polluting, on the false promise that emissions are declining an equal amount somewhere else in the world.

The climate system doesn’t award bonus points for that. If the actual emissions in the actual atmosphere continue to climb, temperatures will continue to follow.