Journally Speaking: Farming carbon

Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy has initiated a working group to develop a US protocol for paying ranchers and farmers to store carbon in their soil. The current system for voluntary carbon transactions is broken and needs to be fixed, group founders said.

The group is co-led by attorney Jim Blackburn, a professor in the practice of environmental law at Rice, Baker Institute Rice Faculty Scholar and co-director of the university’s Severe Storm Prediction, Education and Evacuation from Disasters Center, and Kenneth Medlock, the James A. Baker III and Susan G. Baker Fellow in Energy and Resource Economics and senior director of the Center for Energy Studies at the Baker Institute. Robin Rather, chief executive officer of Austin-based Collective Strength, is the group’s facilitator.

Most accepted carbon transactions are based on standards that originated from the Clean Development Mechanism of the Kyoto Protocol to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. These standards impose significant and unnecessary impediments to US landowners, so few or no transactions happen, Blackburn said.

The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations estimates that soils can sequester around 20 petagrams of carbon in 25 years, more than 10% of anthropogenic emissions, while simultaneously preventing erosion and desertification and enhancing biodiversity. FAO noted that the Kyoto Protocol focused on afforestation and reforestation but that post-Kyoto talks have paid closer attention to rangelands.1

NBC News reported in late November 2019 on a coalition of Osage Nation landowners, ranchers, and environmentalists working together to save Oklahoma grasslands. A study by The Nature Conservancy estimated that tallgrass captures enough carbon dioxide that Oklahoma’s protected grasslands alone remove the equivalent of 4 million cars worth of carbon dioxide emissions from the atmosphere.2

There are other ranchers and farmers in the southwestern and central US whose land has potential to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, according to The Baker Institute’s working group. They are being kept from participating by current standards for voluntary carbon trading, which were not developed to optimize carbon storage in the soil, the group said.

“In the United States, the potential exists for the removal of 1 to 2 billion tons of carbon dioxide or more by these natural systems, yet to our knowledge, only one grassland project has been approved in the US for carbon sales,” Blackburn said. “As we move toward attempting to avoid, minimize, and remove the US’s 7-billion-ton carbon dioxide footprint from the atmosphere, we are going to need a range of alternatives that remove and store carbon.”

Through carbon farming, farmers and ranchers could reap additional cash flow while helping restore ecological systems. Industries and businesses that emit carbon dioxide would also be provided with a scalable and affordable carbon dioxide removal process, according to the group.

Over the next several months the working group will discuss topics such as general principles of eligibility, measurement protocols, and buyer needs. The goal is to develop a set of principles for these transactions that will be endorsed by its 45 diverse stakeholders, including but not limited to experts from King Ranch Inc., the Nature Conservancy, Audubon Texas, Texas Parks and Wildlife, the Texas Coastal Exchange, the New Mexico Department of Agriculture, GSI Environmental Inc., Texan By Nature, the US Department of Agriculture Natural Resources Conservation Service, the Lone Star Coastal Alliance, the Quivira Coalition, Sprint Waste Services, the Dixon Water Foundation, Climate Action Texas, the Cynthia and George Mitchell Foundation, Valero Energy Corp., the US Business Council for Sustainable Development, and the US Environmental Protection Agency.

When completed, the working group’s concept will be available and open to anyone who wants to buy or sell carbon.