Project Type Insight - Regen Ag (Croplands): Leveraging Carbon Credits to Scale Regenerative Agriculture and Restore Soils

Functional soils enable nutrient and water cycling, which underpins food production and water availability. If the soil cannot absorb and retain nutrients and water, the surrounding agricultural ecosystem will eventually dry out and collapse, leading to the collapse of the human communities that depend on it. Healthy, functional soils are crucial to humanity's survival, but they are currently at risk globally.

Soil degradation is occurring over a quarter of the Earth’s ice-free land area and has an estimated cost of $6.3–10.6 trillion per year (or 10–17 percent of global GDP) due to the resulting loss in primary productivity. Degradation leads to increased emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) from soils as well as lower rates of soil carbon sequestration, creating a feedback that is both contributing to and exacerbated by climate change. This process is driven by the extractivist (conventional) agricultural activities that are the standard in today’s farming systems, but there is an alternative that can halt degradation, and even regenerate the land.

Regenerative agriculture (Regen Ag) is a set of management activities that can decouple agricultural productivity from the degradation of soils and landscapes. At the heart of Regen Ag is the symbiotic relationship between plants and soil microbes, where most of the carbon fixed by plants is sent to their roots and exuded into the soil to feed microbes. In return, microbes make nutrients available to plants, creating a symbiotic relationship vital to healthy ecosystems. Regen Ag supports this process by focusing on four key practices: reducing soil disturbance, increasing plant diversity, maintaining living roots, and keeping soil covered. These strategies boost productivity, food security, and environmental resilience. 

Since Regen Ag also increases soil carbon, it offers vast potential for carbon sequestration. Global cropland soils have the capacity to sequester upwards of 1.85 billion tonnes of carbon (or roughly 6.79 billion tonnes of CO2) annually, which represents roughly seven times the entire carbon market. Regen Ag developers and registries are nascent and ultimately have yet to face the same scrutiny as other sectors of the market. Regen Ag carbon projects often lack critical data on key performance parameters, an urgent issue given the 500+ projects in development.

It is clearly important to increase the uptake of Regen Ag management, and carbon credits offer a promising mechanism to leverage this change. Therefore, the rush to procure Regen Ag credits is understandable; however, without transparency and deep due diligence, the credits represent a material risk in your carbon credit portfolio. To solve this problem, Sylvera has developed a framework for rating Regen Ag carbon projects. While the term “Regen Ag” applies to both cropland and livestock systems, the current framework focuses on croplands. A separate grassland framework, primarily addressing livestock production in grazing systems, will be released in the future.

Sylvera’s Regen Ag (Croplands) white paper clarifies our provisional rating approach, highlights key components of the rating framework, describes the carbon quantification approach currently under development, and emphasizes the need for higher data transparency standards as a step toward complete ratings in the future. Sylvera is actively working with stakeholders in this space to share data on projects in hopes of catalyzing scale and quality for the Regen Ag market.

Download our Project Type Insight to learn more about Regen Ag (Cropland) projects, how we approach rating them, and what attributes they need in order to maximize climate impact.