Opportunities for Agricultural Producers to Participate in Compliance and Voluntary Carbon Markets

The agricultural sector’s potential for carbon offset generation is widely recognized, but few offset protocols in North American compliance or voluntary markets have successfully generated large volumes of offset credits. Here we use the Rice Cultivation Projects Compliance Offset Protocol—which has generated no offsets since its adoption by the California Air Resources Board in 2015—as a case study to examine barriers to agricultural offset generation. These barriers, which include small projects; low emissions reduction potential; complex emissions quantification; complex, non-standardized data management; and high verification costs, apply to many unproductive agricultural offset protocols and present an opportunity for additional policy action. By examining other protocols in North America’s compliance and voluntary offset markets, we identify design elements that can overcome these barriers and facilitate offset generation. These elements include standardized, technology-aided data management; streamlined emissions quantification methods such as emissions factors or N-balance; and project bundling.