Are soil carbon credits empty promises? Shortcomings of current soil carbon quantification methodologies and improvement avenues

As the consequences of climate change are looming large, agricultural soil carbon credits have emerged as an increasingly advocated lever to incentivize the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions and promote carbon storing farming practices. These credits are exchanged on self-regulated voluntary carbon markets, each of them using distinct protocols to assess the changes in soil carbon stocks and convert them into carbon credits. Although serious discrepancies between protocols have already been noted regarding general carbon credit accounting principles, an in-depth evaluation of how changes in soil organic carbon stocks are calculated is still lacking. In this context, the primary objective of our study was to investigate how changes in soil organic carbon stock are estimated by the major carbon credit protocols worldwide. We evaluated the requirements of each protocol regarding the estimation of the initial SOC stock as well as the modelling and/or measurement of changes in stock with time. We found that existing protocols vary greatly in their scientific rigour. We showed in particular that some protocols do not require in situ soil analyses to estimate initial soil carbon stocks but rely on regional values, leading them to potentially overestimate these stocks by up to 2.5 times. Our study also found that the protocols relying on models require different farming practices and different levels of information for each practice to estimate SOC stock changes. The protocols relying, at least partly, on soil sampling also displayed different requirements for the sampling design, sampling tools, SOC analysis methods and SOC stock calculation methods. On this basis, we suggest reforms designed to improve and standardize the quantification of carbon stock changes in soils and to improve the reliability of soil carbon credits.