 Thank you. Thank you very much Fabio and welcome everyone to our international technical webinar. Today we will be talking about climate change and agriculture and more specifically on quantifying carbon stocks in soils and their evolution. This webinar is part of a series of webinars and a very rich agenda that we have prepared for you for 2021. These webinars are organized by four organizations. So we have with us Future Food Institute, we have Agrinium, we also work with the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and Pacific and FAO. So we are four organizations which organize these webinars that we work throughout the world with over 40 partners who help us also in the promotion and also by providing experts and professors that contribute to these webinars. We are extremely pleased to have with us today two experts on carbon sequestration and carbon stocks. So I have the pleasure to have with us today my colleague Marcial Bernou, who is a senior natural resource officer in ATO and also Valentin Belacel, who is a senior researcher in environmental economics at INRAE, which is a French institution. Before giving them the I just wanted to let you know that these the technical areas that we cover in our webinars are all described in detail in the courses of the FAO eLearning Academy. So I'd like to invite you all whenever you can to visit the FAO eLearning Academy and to visit the courses that are relevant to your work and we also have a number of courses related to the thematic area of today's webinar. So without further ado, I would like to give the floor to my colleague Marcial Bernou. So Marcial, the floor is yours. You have about 30 minutes. Thank you. Thank you Christina. I will try to be even shorter to save a little bit of time for this discussion. So I will start sharing my screen. I will stop my camera but I will be up and after. So okay, you can still listen to me and now you should be able to see my full screen. Yes. Yes, everything okay. Yes. Okay. So it's really a pleasure to be here and I was looking at the list of participants. It's really nice to see a lot of colleagues, former colleagues, friends over the world from North America, Latin America, Asia, Africa. So it's really nice to have all of you today. I have a double ad today. The first ad will be to present the MOOC. So massive open online course on behalf of all the members of the MOOC coordinating team. So you have some names here. But a lot of scientists, some scientists, researchers, academics were also involved in the construction of that MOOC. So basically let's move here. So that MOOC is in French but with a subtitle on translation interpretation in English. It's related to all issues, processes, strategies to protect increased soil carbon stock, but in relation to the climate agenda. Rather to having a lot of slides, I prefer to present a teaser of that MOOC. So it's in French but with English subtitles. Then, when these plants die and decompose, they become organic matter. This organic matter, rich in carbon, is essential to the fertility of the soils and more generally to the whole of the ecosystem turned into soils. The increase in the amount of carbon in the soils contributes not only to stabilizing the climate but also to ensuring an optimal soil quality. But if agriculture and forest play a major role in climate change, stocking more carbon in the soils should effectively improve both the climate and the fertility of the soils. It looks very simple. Stocking carbon in the soils. But wait, I have a few questions. Are they really beneficial? How does it work? How are we sure we stock? What are the difficulties and strategies that exist? And what will be the main benefits of this stocking? Where do you see the answers to these many questions? In the MOOC, soil and climate, during these six weeks, you will discover the whole of the issues of biophysical processes, but also technical and socio-economic dynamics of carbon in the soils. Okay, so you really got a really short snapshot in one minute and a half. Here you have the, or it is organized in terms of logistics. So if you want to follow that MOOC, it's six weeks of your time and you need more or less two hours to three hours per week. It's open to all levels. Basically, you don't need to have any background. It's really accessible to a large number of people. The first session, you have the date on the screen. So starting soon, in May, on ending in 20 of June. And also, you will have the opportunity to have a certificate of achievement if you pass 60% of the question. Basically, that was the presentation of the MOOC. So I really invite you to go to the webpage. So you will have the link on the chat. You will have the presentation with the link. You can see that it has been done under the coordination of Agroparitech on its part of an agronium series in collaboration with a lot of partners. And you have here all the different organizations that was somehow involved in the creation of that MOOC. So it is over for that part. No, I will change my hat. I will move to more technical content. What I will present is also some all parts of that MOOC. But in the MOOC, it's much more diluted or much more in detail. Here, it would be really a brief overview on tool, on method for quantifying sol-carbon stock in a climate change context. So I started and I will use those three questions during my presentation. Why sol-carbon stock are important for climate change? Really brief because I guess most of you know why. As also considered by the UNFCCC, so the highest political policy level binding countries related to the climate change agenda. And do we have tools and methods for quantifying sol-carbon stock and providing some link to some tools? So the first question, it's quite easy. Here you have a really simplified representation of an ecosystem where you have atmosphere, plant, living biomass on soil. You have also animals you cannot see in the middle. But basically, we have a big mechanism that is called photosynthesis that is free. That's capture more or less one every seven to eight molecules of CO2 per year and put this into biomass. Then part of that biomass can be transformed into organic matter. And why it is important to have a more sol-carbon stock? Because if we also lose them, we will re-inject CO2. So here we have two levels of action. I would say we can sink. So it was really the arrow going down. And we should avoid having a mismanagement of soil that would inject more CO2 into the atmosphere. One way it is good for climate change. So the answer is quite straightforward. The less in terms of CO2, the better. So we are trying on all countries, all stakeholders are trying to fight against increasing or limiting the increase of CO2 or even thinking CO2. On the more organic matter, we are mentioning organic matter, not only soil carbon, but soil organic matter. The more we have, the better because it's also increasing fertility of soil fighting against erosion, stability of the soil. So it's providing you have here an illustration. It's linked with a lot of ecosystem services through regulation, water quality. So the more soil organic matter we have, the better. So it's a win-win on even more than that solution. Now, trying to answer to the second question. Are the soil considered in the highest policy level? Here are three elements of answer. First, we have method responding to request to the UNFCCC in term of communicating what is happening in the different country in terms of greenhouse gas emissions. And soil is fully considered. So we know, we have the knowledge about the level of greenhouse gas emission from the soil category. We have the possibility to have it at different level. Thus, those methodology exist since long ago. They have been recently refined in 2019 to ensure the best or the most updated science is reflected in the methodology. On some table, you can see here, it's not for you to read, but we have a default emission, a default value, different reference value for carbon stock in different soil of the world for different climate. The IPCC is also providing a simplified methodology in terms of modeling at tier two level. So we have different levels that are named tier by IPCC. So basically, we have a lot of reference values, scaling factor for management, for input, simplified modeling approach that can support the reporting for the UNFCCC, and soon we will see that later in the Paris Agreement. So it was the first level of answer. On here, just to remember that in the FAO E-learning Academy, you have some online courses where you can learn how to prepare a greenhouse gas inventory under the new UNFCCC framework that is part of the Paris Agreement and also in the National Greenhouse Gas Inventory for Agriculture on other venues. So please visit the E-learning Academy. Another element of answer, we were looking at, so the UNFCCC, everyone knows that five years ago was adopted the Paris Agreement, and the Paris Agreement is based on what we call NDC, Nationally Determined Contribution, that is basically a goal, target from countries expressing what they can do to fight, so it's meant to mitigate, but also to adapt to climate change. Those instruments are policy instruments, Determined National Levels. On the FAO, we have a build on regularly updating a database of all published NDC. It was a pleasure and it was really nice to see that almost half of all NDC already referenced soil in a direct or indirect manner in both mitigation or adaptation priority. You can see on the side that most it is in Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia Pacific in terms of number of measures, with more or less TITA in terms of adaptation mitigation, a little bit more in terms of adaptation, which is normal because adaptation is only in the NDC of developing countries. The focus is on agricultural soil in general, wetland and organic soil, so hot spot where you have a lot of soil organic carbon, with a predominant focus relatively on adaptation. In terms of adaptation effort, you can see that it's mostly on the conserving, so it's meant fighting the loss of carbon, restoration and rehabilitating agricultural soil, so increasing carbon stock. On mitigation effort, you can see here enhancing soil organic carbon in natural, unmanaged landscape, including wetland and organic soil. On here you have the different measures. We have a website at FAO, if you look in Google, FAO Climate Change and NDC, you will find all the different method publications on review or regional level. And we can share the link after. On the third element on the UNFCC, soil is also one of the topics discussed under the coronavirus joint work on agriculture. So it was a cop decision, cop 23, under the Fijian presidency to have joint work dedicated to agriculture. It's quite unique in UNFCC arena, which is basically not, I would not say allergic to sectoral approach, but nearly. So it was really encouraging for soil scientists, at least on other people working on agriculture, to see that there is a dedicated agenda, both under the two bodies. This is why joint work, so under the implementation body, under the scientific and technical advice body of the convention. You can see the decision is quite short, but sharp. With different topic on one, it is a topic known as 2C under improved soil carbon, soil S, on soil fertility, under grassland and cropland. So this is agriculture in the sense of UNFCC, known in the sense of a field that is wider in complacency, also agriculture, forestry and fishery. On what we have on the data agenda, parties or countries and observers already provided their views in terms of all the topics so you can see here to be a better, the 2C that is interested, interesting for us. So the views of the country, what we should do in terms of soil, where the question should be, where we need more science and etc. So we have a publication published by FAO where we did just a factual analysis of the different submission. Then the secretariat organized already a meeting to discuss the soil topic under the UNFCC and also a report that is a summary of the different discussion on the UNFCCC website. You can find the different presentation that was done. One was from an opening from Kershanu and another one from Ronald Vargas, people well known in the soil community and with the soil exchange with the different countries. On FAO also draft a brief, a two page summary on what we can have in terms of recommendation for policymakers. I'm just trying to summarize really those complex discussion. We can see that the narrative is evolving from a soil carbon sequestration pure and good to a more lc soil that encompass a soil adaptation, so not only on the mitigation side. The Cornivia should conclude at next cup, so in Glasgow this year normally, on a lot of stakeholders are hoping a clear signal supporting more investment for lc soil for GCF, Jeff and other multinational bank or development agency. If this happens it will request more research, modality, pilot phase scaling up on action for lc soil and then at the end it will support not only having soil in the NDC but having action to implement the NDC on the ground that would fully consider a soil. Now if I move to the last question, do we have tool and methods and first we need to consider different scale because we need it depending to the stakeholder interested people to fill plot on farm mostly that would be the scale where farmers long owners will look at. National and sub-national level where policymakers will during low regulation will also look at NDC at that level and we can also for private more private sector voluntary market the project level. And basically there are two scientific publications and there is much more but both are quite good review and we start with you can see a lot of colleagues. Another is how to measure, report and verify the system and you can see in one figure here a lot of different approaches where we have a lot of tools, methods, models and validated scientifically. So basically research is saying we have a lot. If you look also FAO recently in September 2020 under the umbrella of the global soil partnership and with its intergovernmental technical panel on the soil developed a protocol for MRV for measurement monitoring for the M reporting our landscape level for sustainable soil management practices at farm level but can be easily scaled up at a different scale. And this is part of a global soil partnership GSP carbon toolkit I will not take here but go on the website and you can find that they're working on the five pillars you can see on the bottom here, soil management, awareness, research, information, data and harmonization. They have developed a lot of relevant information as a scientific level, technical level or as a targeting policy maker. So please have a look. If we look at the project level here I'm just selecting one publication, perhaps a little bit older than the other but still valid. You have different tools, you have no days more than 25 to 30 different tools that you can, one has been developed by FAO, an exact tool you can see on the box here that there is also an FAO learning academy e-learning available on how to use the exact and you have here the link of the exact website. But look at the picture in the middle and this is here the conclusion that is also in that other publication that is more recent from the World Bank when those guys are counting for sustainable land management that most of those tools are based on IPCC guidelines. So the guidelines that are so recognized for National Greenhouse Gas Inventors are using default values but result might change according to the completeness on scope of the tool. All of them have embedded the methodology and you can see in the picture also in the middle of the screen certain tools account for biomass, land use change, account for soil land use change over a 20-year period, other not. So basically you will have to select the tool that fits your own need according to your proper objective but I would encourage you to move towards a more complete tool and a more simpler on incomplete tool. On a national level, just for you to be aware, FAO is developing an NDC expert tool where we will target here the really precise policy at national level based again on IPCC as all the tools are really existing but really targeting national commitment with here you can see the entry level will be the country. So we'll have to select first the country because it's NDC and then you will have at your disposition all the different climates soil agricultural zone crop livestock or corresponding to that country and you can play with different kind of calculation on having a result on an annual basis. So it will allow you to see how NDC can be improved and hence because the NDC process has to be reviewed every five years in enhancing the ambition and it can be also helpful to track and monitor greenhouse gas emission reduction. So it was really a snapshot and if I really go back to my three question here you have two big yes the first one is really a big consensus the last one it's sometimes people are saying that we do not have tools on the saying we should improve yes we can always improve but we already have enough to start what is missing this is a second question yes soil is under the UNFCCC still depend of a strong political signal and we hope that signal will be given by cornivia to show that investment should be should target soil lc soil on this will be really useful for a support country in their mitigation goal and also adaptation needs and I really want to thank you for your patience to having me for two two presentations one after the other on really thank you to all of you I will stop sharing my screen so on Christina it's over to you for thank you thank you Marcial thank you very much for this very interesting presentation and we certainly understand a little bit better about the importance and the role of soils in reducing the impact of climate change I would like to ask you Marcial while Valentin presents if you could have a look at the questions that have been asked to you on both on the Q&A and chat because after Valentin's presentation we will be opening a Q&A session where you will be having the opportunity to respond to some of these questions thank you very much Valentin the floor is yours you have 20 to 30 minutes for your presentations thank you the floor is yours thanks Cristina hello to everyone can you hear me well yes okay I'll open the video only after because I I prefer to to make it safe in terms of connectivity so thanks everyone for seeing here I've seen a lot of names from from colleagues of former colleagues sometimes I haven't seen for a long time so hi hi there the purpose of my presentation is actually to show you one of the the sequences of the of this MOOC rather on the economics and policy side and of course it's a bit sensitized compared to the material that's in the MOOC the the purpose of this sequence is actually to question the choice between the different approaches to monitor soil carbon that that Marshall has outlined so let's um let's start by taking the example of a regulator who wishes to remunerate farmers who store carbon in their soils intuitively the regulator faces two major constraints in monitoring storage one is the cost of monitoring which should not be too high and the other is the accuracy of monitoring which must be high enough to allocate payments efficiently and the objective of the of this sequence is to go beyond the intuitive trade-off between costs and accuracy of monitoring by understanding how to design effective monitoring procedures but let's start with three important definitions and three common misconceptions about carbon storage monitoring and uncertainty first is accuracy and precision a method is said to be accurate if the average of the measurements is close to the true value it can also be said then to be unbiased and this is different from precision a method is said to be precise if the standard deviation of the measurements is low therefore we can have methods that are accurate but not precise some methods that are precise but biased and some methods that are both accurate and precise the second important definition in the context of policymaking is information asymmetry so we say that there is information asymmetry between a regulator and an agent like a project developer if the agent has privileged information that is unknown to the regulator this is the case for example with croppy yields when they are used as a parameter in a carbon storage model the regulator may have of course an idea of the average yield in a given region but the farmer or the project developer may know the exact value for his plots and finally but that's already been introduced by Marcel Galle the last important definition is MRV which refers to the set of procedures for obtaining a reliable estimate of carbon storage or emissions M stands for monitoring R for reporting and V for verification now let's take let's test your preconceptions on three commonly held ideas the first one is carbon storage it's that carbon storage in biomass and the soils is the most uncertain part of greenhouse gas inventory well this is partly wrong if I take the French inventory as an example the uncertainty associated with fertilizer use is around 180 percent which is much higher than the 30 percent uncertainty associated with carbon storage of course we should note that for the time being the most carbon storage reported in greenhouse gas inventories are associated with land use changes which of course limits the uncertainty the second misconception is that measurement uncertainty is an obstacle to carbon pricing this argument has been put forward by the european commission for example for not implementing a carbon pricing system for the land sector and as I will show you this again is rather false as I will show especially in the case of information asymmetry then uncertainty may not be a large obstacle and finally the third preconceived idea is that when a measure is uncertain it is better to be conservative and to under reward carbon storage here again we shall see that this is only a good idea in cases where the agent has privileged information so where there is information asymmetry now let's turn to a decision tree intended to policy makers on how to design rules for monitoring carbon typically policy makers use three types of rules in in their systems and they sometimes coexist the first is prescription so the regulator prescribes the entire procedure for monitoring soil carbon and therefore prescribes the level of uncertainty the second one is threshold there the regulator prescribes a maximum uncertainty threshold and lets the agents choose a method that is that that is below this threshold so that results in an uncertainty that is below the prescribed threshold and finally the third type is the discount the regulator then lets agents choose a method but totally freely but discounts the storage payment in proportion to the uncertainty resulted from the method and now I will skip the detailed demonstration of of of how we built this this decision tree you can find this in the MOOC to go to the results so the first question that the policy maker should ask is is there information asymmetry if not then there is no strong need to regulate the accuracy of monitoring if yes then the second question that should be asked is can agents manipulate monitoring if they can then a fixed discount should be applied to the results of the MRV procedure if they cannot then the next question is that is the profitability of is the participation to the carbon pricing mechanism mandatory if it is and if the project profitability is close to zero then the best solution to maximize welfare is to apply a discount that is proportional to the the uncertainty that results from from the from the monitoring method if not then we should ask another question does the regulator have a reasonable idea of of abatement costs if yes then he should he can prescribe the entire method and thereby the uncertainty if not however then the proportional discount again is the safest option to conclude on this decision tree let's note that it responds to an objective of maximizing total well-being and of course this objective may be a little simplistic for example it neglects the fact that some agents may be greatly overpaid in relation to the effort they make if the regulator has other objectives such as limiting and do payments or limiting the unit cost of mitigation then the interest of precision is reinforced even in the absence of information asymmetry so to conclude on this first part in terms of the design of monitoring rules it is worth noting that first uncertainty is not a problem in itself first the land sector is not the most uncertain sector and second and more importantly the lack of precision does not undermine the economic efficiency of a carbon pricing mechanism secondly measurement bias and information asymmetry are the main problems they cause selection bias and willful effects that reduce the effectiveness of carbon pricing mechanisms and thirdly and I've not presented that in much detail today the economic literature offers a range of solutions to these problems to information asymmetry of course there is one option is to reduce uncertainty this we have discussed to some extent but other possibilities include offering a menu of contracts for example via top-down auctions to induce agents to reveal their so-called type contracts combine a quantity of emission reductions and a unit price and by forcing agents to choose between either a high unit price associated with a small quantity or a low unit price associated with a larger quantity one forces agents to reveal whether it is easy for them to reduce emissions and thus limit windfall effects alternatively or the regulator can use a baseline scenario which is more demanding than the average performance of agents and finally the regulator can force each agent to enroll large rvs so that way that that's it for the kind of theoretical and general part of this sequence and now let's turn to what regulator of the main existing carbon pricing mechanism as are asking in terms of monitoring reporting and verification rules in practice this sequence draws heavily on the results of the mrv sector project which were published in a book accounting for carbon and summarized in a 2015 paper in nature climate change for this work a broad definition of the term pricing system was adopted we have studied systems that directly put a price in carbon such as taxes or carbon markets but also carbon management systems that rely more on transparency such as the climate convention or the granule two laws in france we've studied 15 common pricing systems for this overview and they are classified into three categories so the first category is the jurisdictional scale that is the emissions management systems of a territory the main example is the national greenhouse gas inventories under the united conventions that marshal have mentioned but we have also covered territorial inventories and national or regional scale red plus programs the second category is the scale of the industrial facility or company the main example is the european carbon market or uts but we have also covered similar schemes in other geographical areas as well as company-wide carbon management schemes and finally the third category is the scale of the project often carbon offsetting the main example in this category is the clean development mechanism or cdm but we have also looked at several types of projects governed by different public or private standards we've done and we've drawn six main conclusions the first is that monitoring costs decrease sharply with the size of the perimeter where emission or storage are measured this can be seen on this graph which plots the costs of monitoring per ton of co2 as a function of size these you can see there are large economies of scales and and these are caused by the large share of fixed costs in mv costs indeed when you monitor and emission reduction projects for example you have to write a project document and monitoring reports and these documents they are roughly the same length regardless of the size of the project yet most priestly system applies the principle of materiality materiality means concentrate concentrating resources on monitoring the largest sources of emissions in other words it means being more demanding for large projects than for small ones but clearly as you can see with the economies of scales on this graph the the materiality principle is less effective than then the economies of scales and and the fixed costs finally it should be noted that for a comparable quantity of emissions the costs of emission is lower at the scale of industrial sites than for the scale of carbon offset projects here in green and it makes sense the participation of agents is voluntary in carbon offsetting so you can be more demanding whereas it is mandatory in carbon in cap and trace system the second conclusion we drew is still related to costs it can be seen that for the same type of offset projects the monitoring costs can vary by a factor of one to three depending on the standard chosen to certify storage and of course this is probably not unrelated to the quality of monitoring demanded by each standard thirdly it appears that a vast majority of system require verification of or audit by an independent third party this brings credibility of course but it is also a major cost driver for offset projects verification represents about a third of of total mrv costs and the verifier is as we have seen an independent third party so this cost cannot be internalized as a result the cost of verification falls more heavily on smaller organizations this can be shown in this bar chart from a survey of irish sites that participate to the european carbon market the fifth observation is that the incentive to reduce uncertainty within the rules is weak measurement uncertainty is rarely rewarded by monitoring rules and when it is rewarded it is in an indirect or limited way such as respecting a maximum uncertainty threshold as i mentioned in the general part and finally we have studied a common place which is usually taken for granted namely the so-called conservatism of estimates this common place which we could also call the precautionary principle should result in overestimating emissions or underestimating storage when monitoring is uncertain in practice this is almost never the case at the jurisdictional scale nor is it the case at the scale of industrial sites where participation in the pricing system is often mandatory and there may be good reasons for this conservative estimates would increase the imbalance in monitoring costs between large and small sites which as we have already seen is important and finally at the project level the principle of conservatism does exist in the rules but it is not applied systematically for example in the clean development mechanism this principle is only applied to some of the parameters or variables that are being monitored and even in the most demanding monitoring methodologies the proportion of variables to which a discount is applied in case of uncertainty doesn't never exceed 25 percent so with this you've had the overview if you want more details of some of the aspects of this talk i've put you here a short list of interesting references and i will be happy to answer your questions thank you thank you very much valenta and this was a very technical presentation thank you very much so while i give the floor to marcial to respond to some of the questions he had i would like to ask you to have a look at the qna and also maybe the chance to see if there are specific questions to your presentations because you will then have the chance to to respond thank you very much so marcial the floor is yours if you can answer some of the questions that that were asked to you by by participants thank you thank you christina so i'm going to tackle several questions some have already typed a short answer on n dc so there was a question what means n dc so nationally determined contribution french it's a contribution determinate niveau national uh this is a commitment that come from countries what they can do in term of mitigation on adaptation uh on this is on December of the paris agreement and basically this is uh what the country are putting on the table to reach the goal of two degrees c uh and i provided a so tooling where you can find so some repository of all n dc so your country has an n dc on so if you was providing some analysis of some n dc uh not not all in order related to the tools some aspect free yes most of the tools are free i would say 95 percent are free so some need uh registration just for the developer to follow who is using the tool and if there is some update to inform you but the most of them are free simply because they're based on a pcc method that it's a free and available method also there was a specific question on how to consider a deeper layer in most of the tool you you have what i pcc call a default factor at tier one level at first level that it's uh consider only the first top 30 centimeter but most of the tool allow you to put the number you have either from scientific publication from your own analysis and here you are not limited to 30 centimeter so you can use more than that on just i pcc is saying that you should consider more than 30 centimeter when your management system is impacting below 30 centimeter so it's it's a needy uh then there wasn't one question remark from a farmer uh it was uh that how to to involve a farmer the on that uh have you been in touch with any farmer uh yes uh different colleagues on FAO is working also on the ground with uh sometimes with other stakeholders civil society organization NGO not only with government and technical organization so there is for instance a farmer field school uh this is involving farmer on the ground and for sure we need to have an adequate a level of presentation of the tool because the farmer do not want to most of the time to understand the science behind he need to understand how to use the tool what mean the different result of the tool and what are the implications for for him but we are trying to involve also farmer because at the end this is a farmer that will implement the different action on the ground there is a very technical question on c-13 so stable uh this is mostly to research level but you can follow for instance when you have moving for vegetation that is called c-3 like a forest to a c-4 vegetation like sugarcane or corn for instance you can follow the on split the organic matter in organic matter that is with the origin from the forest biomass and the organic matter with the origin from the new introduce for instance a pastor sugarcane so in specific situation you can follow on this is useful to develop on to validate models for instance that can be used and more widely and more easily because the c-13 measurements are quite expensive and not so easy to to do so this is one example then there is an interesting question from from cassiano de soza on more simple methods so here visual it's really difficult it's really difficult and it will be really context-specific because only the color of the soil can hardly be related straightforwardly with the soil carbon stock it is dependent on other factors that influence the color but just to be aware you have not only the visible that is useful you have no apparatus that can also use infrared or visible on near infrared and here you have a method with some calibration that can allow you to have some estimation on that can lower the cost of the estimation when you have different or bigger areas or thousand of sample for instance to analyze but visual method on the ground it's really difficult I guess perhaps I don't know if you want to take over for some question and I will go back later just not to manipulate maybe one of them or two of them which are related to the role of farmers in all this and I think it's it's important to realize that in practice it's not the farmers themselves most commonly that either use the tools or or enroll or I mean or make the paperwork of MRV in offset projects or other schemes and it's probably more efficient the way it works that there are some intermediaries between the regulator who grants the common credits or or regulates the cap and trade system and the farmers in the form of either project developers or interprofessional organizations and and then so in in my work I've been I've been more involved with these inter intermediaries and in particular in the in the design of the of the label Bacarbon which is which is the offset standard that was put in place two years ago in France and and that is beginning to that now has several validated methodologies that take into account the benefits from soil carbon sequestration so I guess I guess maybe to conclude on this point some bits that are in the MOOC maybe maybe too technical or useless for for at least some farmers but but but certainly useful for intermediaries that that are willing to to actually help farmers in getting benefits from soil carbon sequestration in existing schemes okay Christina if I can take another question yes yes please please go ahead okay so there is a the question with a lot of like speaks like from Francisco Xavier from MRAP as you so it's a complex question because we have three questions in one first all to these with soil carbon sequestration strategies first you will need a political will and all the rest will follow it does not mean that it will be easy but you need yes for sure science your first question is limited capacity of the soil carbon storage we know that most of you have certainly limited capacity but a lot of soil at a level that is really below the optimal capacity so here we have a potential and we have a billion of hectares of soil so if we apply some techniques that even have an increase of several or just a hundred of kilo of carbon per hectare per year if we scale up that it can have a big impact and it's not only increasing it's avoiding losing carbon this is also I would say as important as increasing carbon so here we can also have a policy on strategy to avoid losing because better than to to fix it's better to avoid creating the problem so this is to the first one on the first decomposition of recently sequestered carbon yes it's a it's a it's a matter of different fluxes on its equilibrium but basically if we are able to implement a system where you have more input through biomass than output basically we will have an increase even if slowly but we will have an increase so you might increase the fresh organic matter that will decompose faster but in total that it's we should not look only at the short term scale but looking at a longer duration on end content yeah you need to produce biomass to to observe and you need to in biomass you not only end but you need phosphorus or the element and so this is more I would say an economic aspect there are some implications also the more n if you have the more carbon probably the more n you have a risk of more n2 emission so but there is a recent paper I can share the link that was looking if n2 emission from any increase when you have more solar organic carbon can offset the benefits of solar carbon sequestration and the answer was in most of the case no so only still valuable increase solar gas matter as I explained for fertility fighting erosion for instance it's not only climate concern but on that question we would need a full day to discuss there was a question easy to answer from Remy Cardinal so the next tool will be available the first prototype in June July so mid of this year and we are really testing and trying to use on supporting country mostly in Africa applying that tool and it's part of the toolbox but only that we will provide more detailed answer in writing and there is a question from Gabon if there is some work on equatorial context on a related to another question that was for all type of agriculture from Florence do we have quantification for all kind of cropland, arboriculture or charge and so on yes you have method that you can tell off to any different context and we have research on information related for tropical context or all context even if most of the research so far was quantitatively done for temperate countries who still have a lot of research information for tropical region I guess the last question is for you Valentin there is on the cost of monitoring I can I can answer that so I think how can you use solar carbon stock as a tool to increase carbon in Cameroon I think the first thing I would do would be to go to visit the website of Vera which is a carbon of states standard that applies worldwide and which has several methodologies that allow to put it simply to transform solar carbon sequestration to voluntary carbon credits and that so would be applicable in Cameroon and then of course the cost of monitoring well I guess it depends just the methodology you select but it's difficult to answer quickly so I think you would have to go there browse through the methodologies and and select the one that is most relevant to the activity you're planning and there was also another question for which I can offer a few elements from Tian Chang on the on the role that Afolu has been playing and can play in the commitments of countries to carbon neutrality I guess a factual answer that I have is that it varies in the French carbon neutrality strategy for example Afolu really dominates I mean after reducing fossil fuel emissions of course then within the sequestration part of the strategy Afolu clearly dominates there is only I think 15 percent of total removals that that is planned to be obtained from more technical ways such as carbon capture and storage but the at the EU level the share that is envisioned for CCS is much larger I don't I don't think I remember exactly the number but I think it's between one third and half of total sequestration needed to achieve carbon neutrality at EU level that that is planned to be obtained through CCS okay and all this you can find in the in the all this information detailed you can you can find in the in the strategies of of the relevant countries or geographical groups such as the EU excellent thank you I don't if there are other questions however I just wanted also to inform participants that in the in the FAE learning academy there is a section dedicated to webinars where you can find of course the recording of this event you can also find the presentations of the of the of the speakers as well as the the answers of all the questions that participants have asked to uh to to the experts so this is all available in the webinar section of the FAE learning academy and if uh Marcial and Valentin you have covered more or less everything or you wanted to add something else just to add several questions and there was a question I guess from North Africa context uh I share I tap at the answer link of a book that has been published together by FAO and the network of French scientific research center in Africa it's a carbon desolone Africa impact is used as desol and the practical so it's a solar carbon in Africa it's in French and you have an example of numbers on research results for north and africa also Morocco on I can see online you have a lot of colleagues working from sirat on a French research institute for development IRD that used to work in Tunisia Morocco Algeria so here you have a plenty of information I see the TREMI put on the chat the link with the article with the stock storage with the offset of N2O and perhaps just to add there was a question on effectiveness effectiveness of e-perspective imaging so it has to be combined with other because here it's just you will have to combine with other proxy but it's interesting on tooling with what Valentin was saying on Cameroon is depend of the scale on some time remotes and things can be really helpful to lower the cost at least in terms of having some approaches in terms of splitting the land on different categories it can be a character basis a really interesting cost so because you can cover hundreds of square kilometers that's it on perhaps the last one on livestock from Arthur do some of the protocol taking to extend duration livestock most of them yes they are quite holistic it's not only the soil component it's all that is above on the management of the soil so some of the tool is the exact tool on the next fostering tool you will have also livestock that is linked with also sometime manual production on return organic matter to the soil other but we will I guess Christina will respond also in writing most of the question providing links yes also because what we're trying to do is to document these webinars because yes we want to capitalize on this expertise and make it available then for everyone anyone at any time through the through the FAE learning academy so this is really also the purpose of these webinars not just to do a one-off but also to gather statistics about our participants about their interests also in order to better target our program for the year I wanted to just before we conclude I wanted to also mention that when we talk about environment and sustainability there are a number of courses that were mentioned just before that we have so in the FAE learning academy all the courses have a common thread and the common thread is sustainability so we had just before listed a number of courses that are relevant to the webinar of today among which courses on on soils on soils restoration and also on how to estimate carbon emissions and also on green yeah exactly thank you Fabio on on also so I was mentioning so some of these courses are highly relevant to the to the thematic area of today and especially the one on climate smart soil and land management but also sustainable land management and land restoration and also of course all the national greenhouse gas inventory courses on land use for agriculture etc so these are among the courses that we have selected for you but we would like to invite you to go for yourself and visit and and basically pick and choose the ones that are more relevant to your area of expertise and work Fabio maybe the next screen please I would like to conclude before we conclude I would like to mention that FAO together with with our partner Future Food Institute we are organizing next week to celebrate the 51st anniversary of the food earth we are organizing a 24-hour global marathon for sustainability and we are trying to allow to have a common space for everyone to share their experiences their challenges they're also there they're good practices related to sustainability so we have involved indigenous people farmers also policymakers but also young entrepreneurs we are trying to gather to gather the the experiences of all these different stakeholders to share with us their experience on sustainability so if you can join us for the marathon we will be sharing with you the link of the 24-hour marathon that will take place 22nd of April I would like to conclude by thanking really by expressing my our appreciation for our speakers thank you very much Marcel and and Valentin I would like to thank also the organizers so Future Food Institute UNS CAP and Agrinium of course for the organization and special thanks to Fabio Piccinic and Philippe Trevon who are behind the scenes supporting and helping and special thanks I would like to thank very much all our participants thank you very much for being here with us thank you and stay tuned because very soon we have another webinar for you on 12th of May and this time we will be talking about how to transition to nutrition sensitive sustainable food systems thank you all very much and we look forward to having you with us on the 12th of May thank you bye bye