Stichting Rewilding Europe
Rewilding Europe wants to make Europe a wilder place, with much more space for wildlife, wilderness and natural processes.
ID: 203835118406-89
Lobbying Activity
Response to Carbon Removal Certification
2 May 2022
As nature (not just carbon) related reporting standards become a market norm, it can be expected that mitigation will seek to cover biodiversity and nature related mitigation measures together with carbon and climate targets. This will be critical to demonstrating and achieving commitments to improving impacts on nature and/or reducing exposure to nature loss. Such a trend could be analogous to the uptake of carbon offsets following the introduction of emissions reporting and Net Zero targets. Methodologies for carbon farming should therefore be designed to anticipate and enable the inclusion of nature-related criteria on biodiversity and ecosystem improvements to enable carbon farming to address both net zero (carbon) and nature positive (rewilding) targets, in line with evolving regulatory requirements and disclosure standards.
Because biodiversity and ecosystem processes operate at multiple spatial and temporal scales, achieving the above is more likely if a landscape-scale approach is adopted. The EU should avoid generating a sectoral policy silo around carbon farming and instead support the implementation of a landscape approach through which the overall carbon stock can be increased overtime into a self-sustaining system. Monitoring, reporting and verification (MRV) systems should be designed to incorporate landscape-level criteria that incentivize carbon farming ventures to align with partners and stakeholders in the landscape, and develop innovative governance systems to assign and share responsibilities for achieving the desired landscape transformations under the MRV.
Wetlands and peatland restoration illustrates this well. These ecosystems store huge amounts of organic carbon and can start removing carbon again with appropriate restoration and sustainable use, at scale. Wetland and peatland restoration, through rewetting and sustainable use, is tried and tested and has been shown to be cost-effective across Europe. Carbon farming can provide the right incentives to make rewetting economically attractive for wetland and peatland owners and managers, instead of the current system of harmful subsidies that provide a perverse incentive to continue farming generally marginal wetlands and peatlands, or systems that favor afforestation of peatlands. Effective rewetting requires a watershed approach that typically requires multiple landowners and users to coordinate under existing water management systems with multiple governance layers. Any certification system for carbon farming on wetlands and peatlands will need to involve these water governance layers in its MRV.
Restored wetland and peatlands must for part of largely self-regulating landscapes where natural processes are allowed to shape and adapt ecosystems to the changing climate, instead of people trying to actively manage them, often at high cost. Naturally functioning ecosystems are more sustainable in the long run, but this also means that there is no pre-defined end point to their restoration. This can be a challenge when designing a certification framework for carbon removal or nature-positive targets. An enabling environment for cost-effective carbon removal through rewilding will need to consider a broad range of indicators and innovative metrics that recognize the importance of giving more space for nature. Current carbon methodologies do not meet the needs of this promising open-ended restoration approach which is most suited to the forthcoming climate uncertainties.
Read full responseMeeting with Ladislav Miko (acting Director-General Health and Food Safety)
4 Aug 2015 ยท Horse grazing in Lika Plains, Croatia - Improvement of international veterinarian cooperation