Last week, I was thrilled to participate as a subject-matter expert for the Climate Advisory Group on “Scaling Regenerative Agriculture with Scientific Integrity,” hosted by Just Climate and Generation Investment Management. I was invited to join a panel of fellow scientists to brief investors, corporate leaders, farmers, and new technologists on Monitoring, Reporting, and Verification (MRV) of soil to scale regenerative practices with integrity.
Former Vice President Al Gore—founding partner and chairman of Generation IM—facilitated a lively discussion with our panel, and I want to share some highlights from our conversation that stood out to me:
- There is a need for enough soil sample data that would provide acceptable levels of uncertainty reporting in order to be able to implement model-based MRV solutions with integrity and efficiency at scale.
- We currently lack available soil sample data needed to unlock some potentially viable soil carbon solutions at scale, and there is a desire for more publicly available sample-resample datasets. Identifying this information gap led to an interesting conversation around the role investors can play in encouraging data sharing to unlock new soil carbon solution technologies, while still maintaining the intellectual property—or moat—needed to differentiate new technology companies. We also discussed some examples of this type of data sharing that helped to unlock technologies in weather or Bluetooth.
After the panel, we moved into a larger roundtable discussion focused on “Taking Regenerative Agriculture to Scale,” which brought in more voices from regenerative producers, MRV providers, regenerate agriculture enablers, corporate buyers, new technologies, NGOs and institutional investors.
One of my takeaways from our broader conversation is that, along with enabling rigorous and scalable MRV solutions to incentivize carbon financing opportunities for climate change mitigation associated with regenerative agriculture, we must also think about building the evidence and education around potential costs—such as yield risks, input costs, and demand fluctuations. We also need to build the evidence around co-benefits of soil carbon—such as climate change resilience, water quality, input and labor cost savings, and possibly biodiversity in order to provide a holistic framework for evaluating these projects.
We now know that regenerative agriculture can help to move the needle on addressing climate change, but the outcomes will be variable, and the co-benefits and tradeoffs must be considered as investments in these solutions are taken to scale. I look forward to continuing to be a part of these valuable and thought-provoking conversations to help advance regenerative agriculture.
Asmeret Asefaw Berhe Bruno Basso Tamara Jane Zelikova