Nature: The Right Balance of Cost, Quality, and Permanence in Carbon Offsets
By Adriel Hsu-Flanders
The more I talk to people about carbon offsets, the more I sense a lingering unease around nature-based programs. Some of this hesitation is understandable: we’re still in the relatively early stages of the carbon credit market as a whole; there’s a lot of variability in programs and credits themselves, which buyers have to become familiar with; and a select few projects have earned damaging headlines for the companies involved in them. In a landscape of uncertainty, companies naturally look for the most secure options available—often dismissing nature-based solutions as too risky.
That hesitation is unfortunate, as nature-based solutions (NBS) are among the strongest options for carbon credit buyers today. They offer a compelling balance of cost, quality, and integrity – three qualities that buyers highly value. Given the high/rising demand for offset credits, more should be taking advantage of all nature programs have to offer – they belong in almost any portfolio of carbon offsets.
On Permanence and Durability
Recently, some large credit buyers (mostly private organizations and large conglomerates) have arbitrarily set the standard that offset credits should have a 1,000-year durability. While this is a noble goal, the market currently lacks the volume of sufficient viable solutions to meet that standard, and supply falls far short of demand.
This pursuit of “perfect” has impeded them from acting on existing “excellent” nature-based options – namely, carbon sequestration in the soil. Agriculture, in particular, can offer low- and medium-duration credits, ensuring carbon stays in the ground for at least 100 years – far longer than any of us will be alive. Well-designed programs (like those EarthOptics designs and quantifies) further ensure that buyers avoid costly reversals or negative scrutiny.
Lower Cost
Agriculture remains the most affordable large-scale carbon capture strategy available today, and the potential supply is vast. For various industries to meet their 2030 and 2050 climate goals, companies will have to invest in a broad portfolio of reduction and removal approaches. Agriculture is one of the few sequestration approaches that has the correct scale for the problem.
Higher Quality
The risks companies perceive in nature-based programs can be mitigated through high-quality design and measurement. At EarthOptics, we’re passionate about helping the industry legitimize and validate nature-based projects.
- Precision Soil Carbon Measurement – Our TruCarbon analysis provides field-level, farm-level, and project-level soil carbon data that meets or exceeds registry standards.
- Registry-Quality MRV – Our measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV) framework meets the requirements of carbon registries and corporate audits.
- Chain of Custody – We design, sample, and analyze soil from our carbon projects in-house, using proprietary software that ensures quality control and chain of custody of measurement data from farm to delivery.
- Scalable Data and Insights – Our analytics dashboard aggregates soil, carbon, and management data across thousands of acres – giving sustainability teams visibility into where interventions deliver the highest carbon return.
EarthOptics’ science-based approach to measurement helps credit buyers see with actual data that nature-based programs work incredibly well – providing the transparency needed to reduce risk in credit buyers’ portfolios.
As a whole, we should be encouraging the development of more nature-based carbon offset programs – and educating/encouraging people to take advantage of them. There’s so much that can be done in this space, and we stand ready to help however we can.