A Roadmap for Land in Carbon Removal: Activating Farms, Ranches, and Forests as Carbon Sinks

by Cristel Zoebisch, Dr. Gretchen Kroh, and Mary Olive (Carbon 180) The soil beneath our feet and biomass on lands are a powerful carbon sink, second only to our oceans. Farms, forests, wetlands, and other land-based systems remove and store 25% of annual CO2 emissions from the atmosphere, and, currently, almost all of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) comes from these ecosystems. Yet as emissions keep rising, it’s becoming harder for these systems to keep pace and hold on to carbon — especially in places where poor land management has degraded agricultural soils and increased the risk of uncharacteristic wildfires in forests.

With a majority of US lands devoted to agriculture and forestry — 52% for agriculture and 33% in forests — the potential to optimize CDR through sustainable management is a significant and largely untapped opportunity. Early projections suggest scaling some agricultural land-based CDR pathways to their full potential could remove up to 380 million tons of carbon dioxide per year, while reforesting ecologically appropriate acres — up to 148 million across the US — could capture almost 500 million tons of carbon dioxide per year. However, uptake of CDR practices across US farms and forests has remained relatively low, despite recent increases in public investment into MRV and climate-smart agriculture and forestry, alongside rapid proliferation of private carbon markets.

In 2017, Carbon180 set out to uncover the key barriers land stewards face in adopting carbon-sequestering practices and systems, resulting in our Leading with Soil report. Farmers, ranchers, and technical service providers were clear: Lack of technical assistance, mismatched financial incentives, and incomplete research in soil carbon were key constraints. Since then, Carbon180 has focused on developing policies to address these challenges to support deployment of land-based CDR. Now, truly activating agriculture and forest lands as carbon sinks will require the CDR field to rethink the support that land stewards require to implement holistic land management that both removes carbon and builds a climate-resilient future. Over the next year, the Carbon180 team will be working to:

Below, we’ll dig further into each area of focus and existing gaps in the CDR landscape.

Determining what “good” land-based CDR means

The metrics applied to technological CDR, which focus tightly on tons removed, cannot account for the total impact of land-based CDR. For instance, a direct air capture project might be scored on how long it can seal CO2 underground, known as its “permanence” and by how protected that carbon is from reversals, known as “durability.” But land is ruled by natural fluxes of the global carbon cycle, which are increasingly affected by climate change and a different definition of these terms is needed for land-based pathways. That definition should consider and value the social dimensions and processes of both building and maintaining carbon in agriculture and forestry.

Evaluation of land-based CDR should span beyond carbon sequestration to also include the myriad of ecosystem and community benefits delivered.

Public support — in the form of incentives, specialized training, or even paying premiums for goods grown with carbon-storing practices — may help to de-risk land stewards’ adoption of land-based CDR pathways.

USFS is currently working on a plan that would conserve old-growth forests, which are more resilient to stressors (i.e. wildfire, disease) and capable of storing exponentially more carbon than their younger, smaller counterparts. READ MORE