碳市场对保护、恢复和提高土壤碳的激励（英文版）.pdf

Carbon Market Incentives to Conserve, Restore and Enhance Soil CarbonPresented by: Moritz von Unger and Igino EmmerThe content of this report does not reflect the official opinion of the client, The Nature Conservancy. Responsibility for the information and views expressed therein lies entirely with the authors.September 2018Report Authors and ContributorsThis report was written by the following lead authors with input from a strategic advisor and an advisory committee. Funding was generously provided by the Craig and Susan McCaw Foundation. Lead AuthorsMoritz von Unger and Igino Emmer (Silvestrum Climate Associates, LLC.)Strategic AdvisorDeborah Bossio (The Nature Conservancy)Advisory Committee Advisory committee members provided input on the scope and contents of the draft report, but were not asked to seek consensus or to endorse any of the views expressed, for which the authors are solely responsible: Louis Blumberg, Joe Fargione, Bronson Griscom, Clare Kazanski, Emily Landis, Priya Shyamsundar, Chris Webb and Stephen Wood (The Nature Conservancy)Nick Brickle (Permian Global), Neeta Hooda (World Bank), Tim Tennigkeit (UNIQUE), and Matthew Warnken (Corporate Carbon).About SilvestrumSilvestrum Climate Associates LLC. supports local, national, and international governments, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), as well as private enterprise focused on advancing climate mitigation, adaptation, restoration, resilience, and education for habitats and landscapes.About The Nature ConservancyFounded in 1951, the Nature Conservancy is a global conservation organization dedicated to conserving the lands and waters on which all life depends. Guided by science, we create innovative, on-the-ground solutions to our worlds toughest challenges so that nature and people can thrive together. We are tackling climate change, conserving lands, waters and oceans at an unprecedented scale, providing food and water sustainably and helping make cities more sustainable. Working in 72 countries, including all 50 United States, we use a collaborative approach that engages local communities, governments, the private sector, and other partners. This study has been commissioned by The Nature Conservancy (TNC) and is part of TNCs work on soils and climate within the Global Lands Program. To learn more, visit nature or follow nature_press on Twitter.Citationvon Unger, M. there is no guaranteed demand of any size to attract ubiquitous supply, and prices are mostly modest (often somewhere between US$4 and US$8).Secondly, civil society has long been, and still is, at odds over the use of carbon markets to protect ecosystems. A large number of environmental and social non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have been particularly vocal in their rejection of emissions trading instruments, with policymakers taking note. Many organizations (often vehemently) question both the environmental as well as the ethical integrity of emissions, claiming it would legitimize perpetual pollution. On the technical and implementation side, it has taken many years to build the skills and to design workable formats for the development of such projects. Land-use projects present challenges that are not found in industrial and energy projects. One key challenge concerns size and control. For industrial projects, size is all that matters. The bigger an installation, the better the carbon project opportunity. For land-use projects, size is sometimes hard to establish (think of small-scale farming), and where it is found, it often comes with problems of its own. Effective control over space and time may be hard to ensure harder in any case than within the walls of a factory. In many countries and regions, land tenure conflicts and tenure uncertainties make projects untenable from the start. Measuring emission fluxes is complex; and the risk of unwanted sequestration reversals and carbon stock losses creates a strange liability for commodity trading. Also, while in some situations the emission reduction output tonnes/hectare is high (true for many peatland projects), in others it is not, forcing projects to become large in size, incurring the trade-offs noted.Soils have missed out on carbon markets, and yet there are promising signs that the future may be different. The main difference between the early 2000s, when compliance markets decided against soils and other land-use categories, and today, is that robust methodologies exist for almost any project category covering woodlands, croplands, grasslands, savannahs, as well as peatlands. This means that project 8 CARBON MARKET INCENTIVES TO CONSERVE, RESTORE AND ENHANCE SOIL CARBONdevelopers can rely on robust intervention formats, which adequately deal with all sorts of technical challenges, from tracing carbon fluxes to mitigating risks of reversals and stock losses.It is not only methodological capacities, it is also skills and best practices accumulated over two decades and spread across countries and continents that have changed the odds. While the total project number is still small, many others are underway, and development timeframes are becoming shorter. Internationally active for-profit and not-for-profit organizations today form global networks of knowledge and support to steer climate-smart agriculture action in places as remote as the US and Kenya or the Netherlands and Vietnam. Voluntary carbon markets have been the facilitators of global concerted action. They are generally small in size, and relevant commercial trajectories number and size of voluntary market transactions, price per tonne CO2eq, and other look more stagnant than upbeat. However, it would be superficial to look at the carbon offsetting markets only in their entirety and to conclude that there is no space for more supply. The buyer market is increasingly selective in its demand profile, looking for what is rare as well as for what strikes many benefits (mitigation-cum-co-benefits). Under current conditions, a soil carbon project without a buyer will be hard to find. Furthermore, there are early indicators that the incoming aviation offsetting mechanism (Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation or “CORSIA”), with an expected demand of 150 to 800 million credits annually over the period 2025 to 2040, will include the land-use sector in its scope, and that buyers seek out particular projects rather than purchase wholesale from anonymous sources, though the list of eligible aggregation levels projects, programs, or jurisdictional approaches has not yet been spelled out.Thus, compliance markets are slowly opening up to the sector. While there is still no system in the world with direct coverage of soil carbon emissions, other types of agricultural emissions from livestock and fertilizer use are (slowly) coming into focus for regulators. New Zealand has introduced mandatory GHG reporting for livestock and fertilizer-related emissions. And soil carbon sometimes benefits indirectly from emissions trading: as a source of offset credits (particularly practiced in North America) or through providing centralized funding to encourage carbon project development (as in the case of Australia and California). The more carbon projects to create credits that are put into practice, the harder it will be over time to exonerate the agricultural sector from inclusion in a cap-and-trade environment (or to legitimize a blank inclusion, without exceptions).The Paris Agreement itself may turn the page towards soil carbon activities. It encourages countries to focus on sequestration to balance out GHG emissions, if not to reach “net-negative” emissions. It requires countries to aim for addressing mitigation action across sectors, including the land-use sector. It highlights the importance of adaptation and resilience activities and recognizes food security as a priority. Low-carbon or climate-smart agriculture delivers on all these cross-cutting objectives.The land-use sector may ultimately play a prominent role in emissions trading in the context of Nationally Determined Contributions under the Paris Agreement. Article 6 of the Paris Agreement includes several emissions trading instruments, a bilateral trade tool (Article 6.2), a multilateral mechanism (Article 6.4) and a non-market mechanism (Article 6.8). While details of how these mechanisms will work, for which sectors and with which type of intervention format, have still to be agreed upon in a dedicated “rulebook”, the odds are that Kyoto-style restrictions will not be replicated. In practice, countries may use the new trading formats both to enhance climate mitigation ambitions at relatively low costs and to channel climate finance into land-use; in particular, soil-based interventions may have a market advantage for quite some time. The scenario comes with a number of caveats nonetheless. First and foremost, size and scalability present a challenge. In countries characterized by smallholder farming in particular, steering transformational change towards carbon stock enhancement and sustainable soil farming is a complex operation requiring exceptional outreach and planning skills, financial needs and considerations aside. A single soil carbon project easily involves hundreds, if not thousands of farmers. To gain wide access in the field, to promote deep integration, and to secure continuity in implementation, can be strategically daunting and poses ongoing challenges even for experts. Moving towards upscaled levels of aggregation programs, jurisdictional and sectoral approaches, and country-wide roll-outs brings more complexities.A widespread lack of comprehensive land zoning, non-representative planning decisions, and uncertain land tenure arrangements add to the difficulty of implementing soil carbon policies in partnership with local communities. Against the backdrop of law and tenure, achieving an annual growth rate of 0.4% the aspirational goal of the 4 per 1000 initiative which may look straightforward on paper becomes highly ambitious.CARBON MARKET INCENTIVES TO CONSERVE, RESTORE AND ENHANCE SOIL CARBON 9Emissions trading, in this context, offers substantial opportunities, yet it will not bring about change single-handedly and not without concerted action on different levels. Carbon projects make useful laboratories for testing and spreading new technologies and practices and for channeling and leveraging finance. Non-state actors can provide relevant skills, technological and governance infrastructure, advance funding as well as investment to get a project off the ground. In order to leverage a project to trigger full-scale jurisdictional or even national roll-out, on the other hand, a supportive policy environment as well as domestically embedded partners ideally at both the government and the private level are essential. Public climate finance has an important role to play when it comes to creating supportive policy environments, creating institutional platforms for engagements, and promoting domestic champions for change. Carbon projects will be most effective if they second and respond to government-to-government cooperation, building knowledge and adding real-time experience on the ground. Public climate finance has a particular role to play, without which private-sector-driven field interventions will struggle to succeed in triggering transformational change. Building soil carbon projects into cross-cutting intervention formats such as REDD+ and/or Nationally Appropriate Mitigation Actions (NAMAs) seems an adequate way forward. At the same time, the climate mitigation objective should always be put in context.Climate-smart agriculture is first and foremost about strong yields, second about healthy soils, third about resilience and only fourth about climate mitigation. Soil carbon activities need to be aligned with and respond to this specific list of priorities. Public climate finance can (and should) help place climate-smart agriculture firmly at the interface between food security, resilience, adaptation, as well as climate mitigation.In the long run, soil carbon projects will not thrive in the absence of broader policy-level transformations addressing strategic plans, zoning, land tenure, investment climate, and more. Conversely, such policy-level transformations are best helped through strong backbone projects, which show strong results in terms of soil protection, output (yields) and climate action. Projects are important workshops (laboratories) for engagement with a wide set of stakeholders, notably farmers and local communities. They point the way by spreading knowledge and practice in the field; they become meaningful showpieces for regulators to seek replication and, ultimately, transformational shift; and they attract national and international investors to identify the kind of impact they wish to achieve.Much can and should be done on the practical side to improve soil carbon standards and the investment environment for soil carbon projects in the short term. Thirty, 40 or 100-year-permanence requirements make sense for many land-use projects (in particular: A/R and forest management) but they fail to recognize the permanent climate benefit that many short-to-medium-term soil carbon interventions have. This is a lost opportunity. Many farmers will be hostile to committing to a certain land-use for several generations; making a similar commitment for 10, 12.5 or 20 years will seem less daunting.Land-use-focused carbon standards have adopted a laudable rigor in defining and applying carbon accounting rules to projects, and it is a major achievement that today few question the integrity of their work. This said, in various settings, the rules have become so complex as to act as a disincentive for carbon project development rather than encouragement, without bringing about any clear benefit. Standards must be checked for both their environmental integrity and their fitness to encourage mitigation action. Furthermore, land-use-focused carbon standards must find formats for small-scale and micro interventions. Project design, registration and verification must be a lot cheaper than what is currently on offer through various standards.Perhaps most importantly, governments should guarantee offtake (e.g. into an existing emissions trading scheme) or help set up centralized funds to create predictable demand and, thus, trigger carbon project development. While there is clearly no abstract shortage of demand for existing soil carbon projects, there is no routine investment path for future project developers, and that hurts. Voluntary carbon projects today rely too much on individual networks to connect developers and buyers. Governments can and should help fill this gap.Looking AheadSoil carbon is on its way to getting recognition commensurate with its potential for the net zero emissions pathway of the Paris Agreement. Car