Impressions from the 1st EU Carbon Farming Summit in Valencia

On March 5th-7th, the 1st EU Carbon Farming Summit took place in Valencia, Spain. The event was organized by project CREDIBLE, an EU-funded coordination and support action with the goal of building consensus on the methodologies maximising soil carbon storage, Soluciones Agrícolas Ecoinnovadoras (SAE), a Spanish company coordinating CREDIBLE and committed to promote the sustainable transformation of food systems, and EIT Climate-KIC, Europe’s leading climate innovation agency and community. The Summit welcomed a wide variety of stakeholders: scientists, policy makers, economic actors, NGOs, land managers, carbon projects developers. CinSOIL contributed to two sessions: our CTO Antonella spoke in the panel discussion in the Break-Out session “Earth Observation applications for monitoring carbon removals” on March 6th, our COO Tavseef presented a poster on “Carbon Farming MRV building on the QU.A.L.ITY criteria” on March 7th.

Antonella presenting the concept of a Carbon Farming Data Challenge at the Break-Out session “Earth Observation applications for monitoring carbon removals” on March 6th.

Data Challenges, with common high quality datasets as input, can provide a way to increase trust in the effectiveness of satellite-derived data and modelling for carbon farming MRV applications.
Antonella Succurro, 2024

The program was highly engaging with a great focus on the recent EU Carbon Removals Certification Framework, with two keynote speeches on the framework itself and on the role of the EU in carbon pricing and scheme validation by Christian Holzleitner and Valeria Forlin respectively, both from the EU Directorate-General for Climate Action (DG Clima). The third keynote speech delivered by Panos Panagos, key senior scientist at the EU JRC and EU Soil Observatory, provided a comprehensive overview of the status of data collection, monitoring and modelling of soil organic carbon in Europe. The closing keynote speech by Giulia Stellari, director at Fall Line Capital, brought to the table the perspective of what is needed to effectively engage farmers, namely policies and market options. In the plenary sessions the eleven focus groups of project CREDIBLE presented their work in progress and roadmaps. Complementing the Summit programme, eleven breakout sessions organized by the respective focus groups gathered together the interested stakeholders for active discussion. Finally, two poster sessions provided additional opportunities for further engagement and networking.

What we bring back from the first EU Carbon Farming Summit is that the time is right now to push forward with regenerative agriculture and soil recarbonization. We are at the forefronts of the development of much needed technology and knowledge to support soil restoration and are more motivated than ever to bring more carbon where it belongs: in soil.