Three Key Takeaways from the Dutch National Soil Summit
Soil management research is an important focus area for LANDMARC, as it's crucial to our mission of better understanding the realistic potential of land-based emissions solutions - that is, using land slightly differently, so that more carbon is captured in the soil.
That is why on the 8th of February 2023, LANDMARC team member Eise Spiijker from JIN Climate and Sustainability attended the National Soil Summit (Nationale Bodemtop in Dutch), an annual event organized by the Dutch ministry of agriculture.
The Nationale Bodemtop brings together farmers, ecologists, biologists, scientists, policy makers, and representatives of various ministries, water boards and provinces.
Eise participated in the three sessions most relevant to LANDMARC’s work: one about carbon farming and voluntary carbon markets, a second about knowledge transfer in the soil health and agricultural practices space, and a third session about Albert Heijn supermarket's efforts to encourage more sustainable agricultural practices throughout their value chains.
We asked Eise Spijker (JIN) what was the most insightful part of the summit. Here are the three key takeaways:
Climate services are an exciting prospect. Participants showed great interest in the potential financial incentives for providing climate services. However, they also expressed concern about the reliability and quality of GHG monitoring, the possible legal implications of transferring carbon credits, as well as the lack of explicit inclusion of other sustainability benefits (e.g., biodiversity). This is particularly interesting for us, as one of the things LANDMARC is doing is developing a novel earth observation based GHG monitoring tool that could in time potentially help with these concerns about reliability and quality.
Knowledge transfer is already well underway. One thing that became clear during the summit is that there is already an extensive and diverse ‘ecosystem’ of formal and informal networks that facilitate knowledge transfer in this space. Discussions were about expanding the potential of these existing ecosystems – rather than on trying to establish them. We hope to be able to feed our own research into these networks as it develops.
Non-climate benefits are potentially better drivers for climate action. As we’ve explained elsewhere, our research suggests that climate benefits may not be the primary driver to implementing the carbon sequestration methods we endorse. Using land in the ways we propose aren’t just good for capturing carbon, they also come with a host of other benefits like water retention and biodiversity – which may be better drivers for many people. The way the people from Albert Heijn supermarket (a dominant supermarket in The Netherlands) presented their sustainable food supply chain program ‘Better for’, seemed to support this idea. This program incentivises sustainable agricultural practices (which also happen to be good for carbon sequestration!) by providing a premium price for participating livestock and plant farmers who commit to an extensive auditing and sustainability certification program.
