Inclusive carbon markets to help smallholders
Solidaridad, an organisation helping communities to be more resilient, is exploring how to support local smallholder farmers, through the development of accessible and inclusive carbon market frameworks and through a mechanism called Acorn, which was developed and launched by Rabobank.
Eduard Merger, Climate Innovation Lead, Solidaridad Germany explained how Solidaridad cottoned onto this initiative during 2020. “Solidaridad had looked at many opportunities for smallholders to enter carbon markets. We explored many different options for smallholders and in 2021, we found an interesting initiative called Acorn,” he told The Sunday Times Business in an interview recently.
This mechanism was able to connect the right proposition or solution towards smallholder farmers. “It’s normally exceedingly difficult to aggregate and to connect many different smallholder farmers, such as reaching them and combining them into one bigger project. One of the areas this initiative has provided is an efficient way of certifying and connecting farmers with remote sensing-based technologies.” The carbon can be measured by remote sensing-based approaches rather than going inside a farm and measuring individual trees. Based on Solidaridad’s existing work with farmers, there is an opportunity for connecting smallholder farmers to first invest in cleaner production or more resilient, better production that helps farmers build their climate adaptation,” Mr Merger said.
There is a way to connect them to markets and to use the carbon money, the carbon markets as a way to find the transition towards climate resilience and climate adaptation. “We started this initiative about four years ago and today we have managed to connect about 90,000 farmers to global carbon markets, especially voluntary carbon markets. We obviously would like to achieve more which is one of the reasons why we’re here to explore opportunities for smallholder farmers sector in Sri Lanka,” Mr. Merger explained.
He noted that one of the promising solutions for the smallholder farmers sector across the world is the technology that’s practiced called agroforestry which integrates trees into say a tea production system or a coffee production system. “In agroforestry, trees have positive features. They can improve soil health, and they can increase and improve shade coverage, which is important and relevant for better yield. We’re focusing on this kind of carbon market programmes agroforestry, but there were other different mechanisms and practices such as bio charts, and other soil management practices.”
The major innovation in agroforestry is that you combine not only one production system but increase and diversify production. When integrating fruit trees, for example, they can be an additional source of food – not only the cash crop, such as black tea. Also fruits can be integrated. Depending on the tree species that were invented farmers can minimise and reduce the risks and at the same time improve the resilience of the production system, Mr. Merger explained further.
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