Monitoring, Reporting and Verification of Soil Organic Carbon and Greenhouse Gas Balance

MRV4SOC aims at designing a comprehensive, robust, and cost-effective Tier 3 approach, accounting for changes in as many C pools as possible, to estimate GHG and full C budgets, coupling C and N cycles, quantify Soil Organic Carbon (SOC) accumulation, and assess the results of traditional management practices and C farming.

The main challenges addressed in MRV4SOC are: i) monitoring changes in SOC accumulation due to climate change and socio-economic pressures; ii) accounting for C and N cycles in full C budgets; iii) development of scientifically-sound, standard, and transparent Tier 3 methodology at different scales, iv) implementation of high-quality in-situ and RS data for testing methods and scale-up purposes; iv) standardisation of Monitoring, Reporting, and Verification schemes to ensure transparency, robustness, and cost-effectiveness; and v) a lack of trust in Voluntary Carbon Markets.

To overcome these challenges, MRV4SOC will develop 6 specific objectives, which will be measurable, verifiable, and monitored through KPIs pointing at specific targets.

MRV4SOC proposes a comprehensive 3-year work plan that ranges from the assessment of C pools in 9 land use/ land cover classes located in 14 Demonstration Sites (DS); to the potential integration of the approacMRV4SOC aims at designing a comprehensive and robust Tier 3 approach accounting for changes in as many C pools as possible (above-ground biomass, below ground-biomass, litter, dead wood, soil organic carbon, and harvested wood products) fully aligned with national GHG reporting.

MRV4SOC seeks to develop solutions applicable for different spatio- temporal scales and climate change scenarios and validated for a wide variety of ecosystems in arid, temperate, and continental climate zones in collaboration with local stakeholders.

The proposed approach will help establish reliable and transparent C farming credits within a cost-effective monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV) methodological framework.