An international project is setting up the world’s first carbon measuring and modelling system to help mitigate the effects of climate change, boost carbon trading and verify whether carbon-offsetting initiatives really work.

The two-year “Carbon benefits” project has €6.7 million in funding from the Global Environment Facility and the United Nations Environment Programme. The UK’s University of East Anglia, two universities in the US and the World Wildlife Foundation are among the many partners involved in the project, which is developing Web-based systems for measuring, monitoring and modelling the amounts of carbon and greenhouse gases produced and stored in soil and vegetation.

The project will also study the huge potential for storing carbon in soil and vegetation by measuring the carbon-storage potential of agricultural land and forests. Using land in this way could also potentially help to alleviate poverty.

Currently, much more information is needed on the process of climate change, how it affects the land and how the potential for land to be used for carbon storage could be improved. In addition to creating a “tool box” of best-practice land-management options, the project will also produce estimates that could be used for carbon trading markets — a system in which farmers, landowners and rural communities could be paid by nations that want to offset their carbon emissions.

‘We need to be able to track the change in carbon levels above and below ground, but at the moment there is no standardised, cost-effective and simple method to do this,’ said Michael Stocking of the Overseas Development Group at the University of East Anglia. “A system is needed that that can be applied to and measure the carbon impact of all types of projects, whether they are encouraging small-scale enterprises such as furniture making and carving or planting forests and crops. Natural resource management projects claim to have carbon benefits, and organisations need to be able to demonstrate how their investments achieve global environment benefits.”

The project will help farmers and forest managers understand the carbon content of their land and the impact their activities have on this. It will also help them find ways to reduce their impact using selective agricultural and forestry options.

“This research will develop a tool to help us to understand what the carbon impacts of our activities are on greenhouse gas emissions and on sequestration by vegetation and the soil,” Stocking said. “Agriculture has the biggest potential for capturing and storing carbon, thus reducing climate change. It will also enable organisations to establish whether carbon-offsetting schemes are a success, which would hopefully then act as an incentive to do more.”

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