Guidance Development Spotlight: Agriculture Sector

This series provides a window into the development of the various components of the Initiative’s Methodological Framework. Previous story here.

The guidance under development by the Initiative for Climate Action Transparency includes several sector-specific components. The Agriculture Sector Guidance will provide instruction on measuring GHG emissions from key agricultural activities to aid practitioner and policy makers in assessing the effectiveness of policies and practice. Our team is partnering with the Greenhouse Gas Management Institute (GHGMI), who are experts in GHG estimation and climate science communication, to help develop this guidance.

In order to be most useful to practitioners, two key goals of the ICAT guidance are to focus on the issues most important to countries and their reporting and to provide detailed, rather than high-level, guidance on GHG quantification from specific activities. To that end, through analysis and consultation with experts in the field, we have arrived at two focus activities for the Agriculture Sector Guidance: enteric fermentation mitigation and soil carbon sequestration.

Enteric fermentation is the process by which ruminants like cattle digest their food. Unfortunately, the fermentation produces methane as a byproduct. Given that almost half of global emissions from livestock come from enteric fermentation, measures to mitigate its methane release could have big positive impacts on the climate.

Cultivated soils around the world have lost 50-70% of their original carbon stock. Soil carbon sequestration can rebuild soil carbon stocks, pulling carbon back out of the atmosphere and reinvigorating soils as a net carbon sink.

While project-level guidance exists for both of these activities, guidance does not yet exist at the large scale. The Agriculture Sector Guidance will focus on assessing the impacts of policy instruments on national GHG emissions. The guidance will provide methods for top-down estimation of policy impacts and tools to answer questions like “How is this policy going to change the amount of land that is sequestering soil and what does that equate to in terms of emissions?” The Agriculture Sector Guidance will also help assess changes in policy adoption and/or penetration rates (e.g., with incentive x, how many more people will take action y?).

The guidance will cover several practices that support each mitigation pathway.

Practices for reducing emissions from enteric fermentation covered by the guidance will likely include:

• Livestock feeding strategies;
• Improved silvopastural systems;
• Improved feed efficiency through diet and breeding;
• And others.

Practices for sequestering soil carbon covered by the guidance will likely include:

• Switching to low or no-till agriculture
• Rotational grazing practices
• Restoration of natural grassland ecosystems;
• And others.

Overall, the guidance will provide resources for every step of policy assessment, from initial assessment to long-term monitoring of policy performance over time.

Agriculture is only one of four sectors our guidance will cover. Stay tuned for more information on our other sectoral guidance for the energy, forestry and transport sectors.