CARBON MARKETS AND AGRICULTURE

The report contends that carbon offsets in agriculture fail to reduce absolute emissions due to measurement uncertainties, lack of permanence, and issues with additionality. It highlights how these schemes often benefit agribusinesses while undermining food security, increasing land financialization, and locking in industrial farming models. The authors recommend excluding the land sector from international carbon markets under Article 6 of the Paris Agreement and redirecting finance toward agroecological practices.

• Agricultural carbon offsets are unreliable for climate mitigation because carbon stored in soils and trees can be easily released by human action, natural disasters, or climate change, making long-term permanence virtually impossible to guarantee.
• Measurement of soil carbon is plagued by significant uncertainties; accurate sampling is too costly for wide use, and mathematical proxy tools like COMET-farm are unreliable due to farm-level variations in soil type and land use.
• Many agricultural projects lack additionality, often using flexible 'baseline scenarios' or 'positive lists' to generate credits for emission reductions that would have occurred regardless of the carbon market.
• Some projects use 'carbon intensity' metrics, which allow for the issuance of credits even if absolute emissions increase, provided the emissions per unit of production decrease.
• Offsetting schemes can harm farmers' autonomy and food security by incentivizing the use of GM seeds and synthetic chemical inputs, creating a dependency on multinational agribusinesses.
• Carbon markets risk increasing land-grabbing and the financialization of land, as the potential for carbon sequestration can increase land value and make it an attractive investment for private entities.
• Agricultural offsets often focus on farm-level mitigation, ignoring that approximately half of the sector's emissions occur off-farm through agribusiness activities such as the production of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides.

APA

Dufrasne, G., Lickel, S., Castagné, M., & Ritter, T. (n.d.). CARBON MARKETS AND AGRICULTURE. Carbon Market Watch. https://carbonmarketwatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Carbon-markets-and-agriculture-1.pdf

Chicago

Dufrasne, Gilles, Sara Lickel, Manon Castagné, and Tara Ritter. CARBON MARKETS AND AGRICULTURE. Carbon Market Watch, n.d. https://carbonmarketwatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Carbon-markets-and-agriculture-1.pdf.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |last1=Dufrasne |first1=Gilles |last2=Lickel |first2=Sara |last3=Castagné |first3=Manon |last4=Ritter |first4=Tara |title=CARBON MARKETS AND AGRICULTURE |publisher=Carbon Market Watch |url=https://carbonmarketwatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Carbon-markets-and-agriculture-1.pdf |access-date=23 October 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{dufrasnendcarbon, author = {Dufrasne, Gilles and Lickel, Sara and Castagné, Manon and Ritter, Tara}, title = {{CARBON MARKETS AND AGRICULTURE}}, institution = {Carbon Market Watch}, url = {https://carbonmarketwatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Carbon-markets-and-agriculture-1.pdf}, urldate = {2026-10-23}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }