Any carbon credits generated by sequestration on farmland should not be sold into a separate sector until agriculture is climate neutral, farmers have been warned.

Should agriculture sell these sequestered carbon stocks, the carbon taken from the atmosphere would not be deducted from agriculture’s carbon emissions account, to prevent the removal from being double counted.

Double counting

The warning was issued on a carbon farming webinar hosted by MEP and dairy farmer Colm Markey on the challenges and opportunities of carbon farming.

“My worry at the moment with the way that the national inventory is constructed [is that] if we give or sell our carbon credits to aviation, our sector gets no recognition for that, because if it did that would be double counting,” director of agriculture and sustainability at Devenish, John Gilliland, said.

Teagasc’s Gary Lanigan reiterated the concerns raised by Gilliland on the possibility of double counting farming’s sequestration when answering a question posed by the Irish Farmers Journal.

“If you are setting up a system, it should be a sectoral system to start off with,” Lanigan said, before stating that surplus credits could then be sold into other sectors.

Lanigan also said that the carbon sequestering potential of Ireland’s farmed grasslands are underestimated by “about 100%”.

The emissions value used for blanket bogs may be too high, Lanigan went on to claim, stating that this change did not affect the carbon status of non-mountainous raised bogs.

He added that the baselines from which additions or removals from carbon sinks were likely to change, as more comprehensive data comes to the fore.

Meanwhile, the rewetting of peatlands was cited by the head of the European Commission’s climate action unit as being a carbon farming measure that could have a higher credit market value relative to coniferous monocultures, given the various biodiversity benefits that accompany peatland rewetting.