22. April 2021

Do CO2 certificates actually make sense?

SOIL, CLIMATE AND Money: Insights from Praxis-Talk #03 on Climate Agriculture

There is a spirit of optimism in agriculture: regenerative methods, soil-building farming practices and CO2 certificates are on everyone’s lips. Thanks to them, farmers are supposed to make a major contribution to solving the climate crisis in the future. But do these promises stand up to scientific examination? Is it right to link environmental performance to agricultural production? And do we even have suitable measurement methods to conduct a well-founded discussion about humus buildup?

We wanted to find out what the trending topics of humus buildup and CO2 storage are really all about with Praxis-Talk #03 on Feb. 17, 2021. Our invited soil experts gave critical insights into these concepts and reported on their experiences:

LEARNING 1: Humus does more than climate protection. Soils are not carbon reservoirs.

Humus is the central indicator of soil fertility and soil health. It is responsible for countless positive effects in the soil, including yield stability. Now it is also supposed to save the climate by allowing farmers to bind carbon in the soil through humus-enhancing farming practices, thus compensating for the CO2 emissions of large companies.

However, the business with CO2 certificates can raise false hopes for solving our climate problem: Even an ambitious combination of humus-building measures such as agroforestry and hedgerows, increased grassland cultivation and intercropping can only compensate for three to five million tons of CO2 per year in Germany. With approximately 800 million tons of CO2 emitted annually, this is merely a small contribution.

You can find the full text in our whitepaper.