2025-04-08, 14:30–14:45, HugoTECH
Developing Robust MRV Systems for Carbon Farming: Insights from the MARVIC and Credible Projects
Xu Hui1*, Ruysschaert Greet1, D’Hose Tommy1
1 Flanders Research Institute for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (ILVO), Merelbeke-Melle, Belgium
*corresponding author
Soil Organic Carbon is a fundamental component of healthy soils and plays a crucial role in many ecological processes. With the increasing interest in carbon farming—which involves capturing and storing carbon in soils and woody plants—it's essential to develop robust systems for monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV) and credible business models. Our study addresses this need by designing and testing a reliable MRV framework through the MARVIC project and by building a European network for carbon farming to collaboratively address current challenges through the CREDIBLE project.
Funded under the Soil Mission to support the Carbon Removal and Carbon Farming (CRCF) Regulation, MARVIC aims to create a framework for designing harmonized yet context-specific MRV systems applicable to diverse land uses such as arable land, grasslands, agroforestry/woody crops, and managed peatlands. This project explores the integration of various components like benchmark sites, sampling schemes, data layers, farm data, remote sensing, and modeling to establish comprehensive monitoring systems and operational processing chains. Additionally, the MARVIC team is actively engaged in the CRCF expert group and further contributes to discussions to achieve a good balance between minimizing risks of unjust payments, maximizing progress in the LULUCF sector, and minimizing costs.
At the 2nd Carbon Farming Summit organized by the CREDIBLE project, we will co-organize several sessions aimed at fostering collaboration between the public and private sectors on technical aspects like baseline approaches, data sharing and harmonizing. We will also engage with stakeholders—including farmers and companies—to build acceptance of the CRCF regulation, thereby promoting transparency and actionable steps.
In the conference, we will share our reflections on the Carbon Farming Summit. We will highlight key insights from our collaborative sessions on baselines, data sharing, harmonization, and strategies for farmer acceptance of the CRCF regulation.
Dr. Hui Xu obtained her PhD from Ghent University, Belgium, specializing in the stabilization of belowground biomass in soil. She is currently engaged in two major EU soil mission projects on Carbon Farming. In the MARVIC project, Dr. Xu co-leads the coordination efforts for the development and testing of a harmonized, context-specific MRV system applicable across Europe, focusing on the integration of monitoring methods across different land uses and at the whole farm level. Additionally, she is leading a Focus Group dedicated to using data from long-term monitoring sites in the context of carbon farming in the 'CREDIBLE' project, which aims to establish a network of networks to address challenges in Carbon Farming.