Isometric has announced the certification of its Improved Soil Management Protocol, which raises the bar on quality for soil carbon removal.
The protocol lays out rules for measuring, certifying, and monitoring carbon dioxide removal (CDR) and reduction from improved land management.
It requires for the CO2 removal to be measured through direct soil sampling, alone or combined with validated modelling approaches, with projects accounting for all associated greenhouse gas emissions.
It also demands that projects adhere to strict environmental and social safeguards, including a minimum 20% revenue share for enrolled landowners.
By outlining stricter quality requirements, this protocol can increase the demand for soil-based CDR, which is stated to have the potential to remove up to 430 million tonnes of atmospheric CO2 every year.
Soil is the largest terrestrial CO2 store on Earth, and a 2022 study states that through better management of croplands and grasslands, our planet could remove up to 430 million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year, an amount that surpasses the annual greenhouse gas emissions in the UK.
“Soil has enormous potential as a climate solution, and quality is the way to unlock it. When buyers can trust what they’re paying for, demand and investment follow,” said Stacy Kauk, Chief Science Officer of Isometric. “That’s why Isometric set out to raise the bar for soil carbon, to increase demand and to help this pathway scale,” she added.
Relevant: Perennial’s New Peer-Reviewed Study Supports Digital Soil Mapping As Reliable MMRV For Soil Carbon
Isometric provides protocol users with support through its Certify certification platform, whose AI agents work alongside project developers and independent verifiers to make certification faster and more accurate.
So far, the protocol has attracted three major project developers, who have registered to generate CDR certificates under it.
One of them is Great Yellow, who is focused on making landscape regeneration investable across the UK. Other users include US grassland regeneration specialist hectares Cultivo and HGX, who is working with more than 1,000 US farmers to restore soil health and sequester CO2 across 3M acres of farmland.
Read more: Isometric Secures $40M To Bring AI Certification Beyond Carbon Markets
