Overcoming knowledge gaps in soil science and Voluntary Carbon Markets
Although soils contain larger amounts of carbon than standing biomass, such as trees and plants, soils are rarely considered in forest management decisions concerning forest carbon or in carbon voluntary markets. Wide knowledge gaps exist for forest carbon, both in terms of cost-efficient monitoring methodologies and whether current forest management decisions are good or bad for forest soils and the amount of carbon they store.
The current EU Carbon Removals & Carbon Farming Certification (CRCF) regulation does not yet include soil carbon, but it probably will in its 5-year revision, hence there is a rush to fill the gap with collaborative and scientifically-based results.
To tackle this issue, in Catalonia, the Agricultural Department is setting up a living lab on Soil Health under the framework of the EU soil mission, to which the INFORMA partner CPF is contributing. In the last group meeting, held on 25 October, the work carried out by INFORMA’s KU Leuven team, led by Prof. Dr. Bart Muys and Dr. Ilié Storms, was presented.
In September 2024, the Belgian team, accompanied by the project’s technical coordinator Celia Yagüe, from the Polytechnic University of Valencia (UPV), also visited Catalonia to carry out fieldwork in managed and unmanaged forest stands in collaboration with Catalan stakeholders, which included members of the CTFC (Forest Science and Technology Centre of Catalonia) working on the Horizon project HoliSoils. Together they discussed the best methodologies to estimate soil carbon in Mediterranean forests, especially if the effects of forest management on soil carbon are to be assessed.
To learn more about the topic, watch the video interview below with CPF’s Teresa Baiges, a researcher active both in INFORMA and HoliSoils: