Freya Chay summarizes findings from a CarbonPlan research review evaluating all existing soil carbon offset crediting protocols.
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“We did a really interesting review of all of the protocols, so all of the crediting rules that are currently used to issue credits to soil carbon in collaboration with Jane Zelikova, and basically, you know, you have these PDF documents that, maybe you have multiple PDF documents, and you're trying to stitch them all together and figure out what the minimum bar of a credit, like what minimum quality bar is promised by these crediting rules. So we analyzed the protocols across, you know, these three dimensions and some other details, and basically what we found is you have lots of protocols who, you know, maybe aren't even measuring the soil, so it's actually really hard to tell what's going on. And kind of across the board, you have low permanence, so low durability, short, short contract terms. And across the board, you're really missing additionality protections that are meaningful.”
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More from Freya Chay (Freya Che)
Insight
Chay: Treating uncalibrated models like sampled soil creates a race to the bottom
“If you're in a market and everything looks like a ton, so I could take any of these approaches and get tons that I can sell, and they look the same in the market you really result in a race to the bottom. It's way easier to not sample anything and get some ton…”
Chay: California depleted its 100-year forest carbon wildfire buffer in 10 years
“Yeah, it's not all the way gone, but we've, we have used up all of the credits that were meant to protect against forest fires for the next 100 years in the first 10 years of the program.”
Chay: Soil carbon additionality screens function primarily as box-checking exercises
“Across the board, you see additionality screens that, in my opinion, look a lot more like box checking exercises and a lot less like, kind of, a rigorous questioning around how these dollars enable new practices.”
Chay: Ton-year accounting fails to reflect the physical reality of temporary storage
“There are different methods, but I would lead by saying, I really don't think we should do it. I don't think tenure accounting represents the physicality of temporary carbon storage in a meaningful way.”
“Consensus is you really need to sample your soil in the place that you're trying to quantify outcomes if you want to have a robust quantification that you can use for an offset.”
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