On Wednesday, ministers from the British and French governments will meet in London to discuss a joint initiative to boost soil health around the world and reduce emissions of polluting gasses from farming.

Defra Secretary Andrea Leadsom and french agriculture minster Stephane LeFoll will meet with Prince Charles (who is involved through his Prince’s Charities International Sustainability Unit) at a high-level meeting on land-use being held as part of the preparations for the COP 22 climate summit to be held in Marrakech next month.

France - which has a dedicated sustainable development ministry - believes that major contributions to emissions targets can be delivered through making farming more environmentally friendly, though most efforts to cut carbon emissions have tended to look at transport, housing, industry and power generation. Although greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture have fallen by around 14% since 1990 - as farm groups are fond of noting - most of these cuts occurred before 2008, and as a result of indirect regulations, like clean water laws. In fact, emissions have barely changed since the millennium whilst emissions levels from waste disposal and power generation have been slashed dramatically.

The French government believes that up to 15 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent can be saved just by tinkering with livestock systems. French ministers are arguing for strategies to reduce emissions from soils - which often come in the form of carbon dioxide from peatland or more polluting nitrous oxide from arable soils - through increasing use of cover crops, reducing actions that disturb soil and increasing the length of crop rotations.  

Organic farmers’ scheme to store soil carbon

Soils are viewed by scientists as non-renewable resources, as healthy soils take hundreds or even thousands of years to form, and yet in Europe they have no legal protection. It’s been estimated that since the mid-20th Century a third of farmed soils around the world have been damaged, though plans to introduce a legal framework to protect the EU’s soils were thrown out in 2014, having been held at the draft stage by a blocking minority of government’s including that of the UK, supported by the NFU.

Commenting ahead of the meeting, Soil Association policy director Peter Melchett said, “The House of Commons All-Party Environmental Audit Committee investigated soil health this year, and in May they recommended that to implement the COP21 initiative to increase soil carbon levels by 0.4% per year, the Government ‘should set out specific, measurable and time-limited actions that will be taken to achieve this goal’. The Government responded (in September) that they agree about the importance and are investigating what action to take. We called in our evidence, as the EAC recommended, for clear actions!”

Melchett also praised the French government’s initiatives on soil health. He said, “We have had a similar target (for arable rather than all soils, UK not international) set before COP21 in January 2015 - to increase organic matter in UK arable and horticultural soils by 20% over the next 20 years.
 
“This target was based on the scientific evidence that in northwest Europe, organically managed soils have significantly higher levels of organic matter - an average increase of 21% over 20 years.  There have only been three studies in the UK, they found the increase here for arable soils was 50%.  We believe (at 20% in 20 years) it would be possible to increase the water holding capacity of arable farmland in the UK by the equivalent of one and a half Olympic swimming pools per hectare, reducing flooding and increasing resilience to droughts, and reducing ghg emissions in the UK by the equivalent saved by taking nearly 1 million cars off the road.”
 
“Our target is very similar to the one adopted at COP21.  The French initiative is extraordinarily important – it has put greenhouse gas emissions from farming on the global climate change agenda for the first time since Kyoto.  It highlights the desperate need to stop emissions of greenhouse gases from soils (especially lowland drained peat), and the huge potential for sequestering carbon in agricultural soils. In the UK, ghg emissions from farming have been level since 2008 (CCC’s latest report out on 13 Oct), while industry and power generation emissions have fallen around 50%!  The UK farming industry has not begun to tackle ghg emissions, but we hope that the commitments made by the UK at COP21 will change that.”