Abstract
Global carbon trading may present a unique opportunity to change the rural landscape by allowing landowners to make an environmental impact with financial incentives. By enticing point source polluters to trade to an optimal level of pollution by offsetting their emissions with compatible carbon reduction projects, markets are able to facilitate a cleaner environment. Agroforestry provides a set of practices that can sequester carbon with managed tree and crop plantings. However, the initial lack of financial resources has been an obstacle to its adoption in the United States. This paper explores the potential for carbon offset trading to provide an added incentive to adopt agroforestry practices. Chicago Climate Exchange carbon sequestration projects are used as a baseline assessment, and the requirements that Missouri landowners would need to do in terms of contracting and ownership are identified. Data from landowners in central Missouri and the Ozarks (353 individuals) are used to determine characteristics of potentially interested landowners in agroforestry. A model to evaluate agroforestry profitability scenarios is used to compare the added carbon credit trading revenue to traditional alternate uses for the property. The findings from this analysis indicate that in the current context carbon trading does not provide an added incentive value for Missouri landowners to adopt either silvopasture or alley cropping practices because of the low magnitude of annual return.
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Notes
An earlier version of this article was presented for The 12th North American Agroforestry Conference - A Profitable Land Use, Athens, GA. on April 29, 2011. More detail on the interviews conducted for this article are reported in the proceedings paper.
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Acknowledgments
In order to develop an understanding of the process personal interviews were conducted with two of the most relevant aggregators for Missouri. David Miller is Director of Research and Commodity Services for the Iowa Farm Bureau Federation and runs the AgraGate program. M. Crist is a partner in Tatanka Resources, a Missouri based carbon management firm. Jason Holderieath would like to thank the participants of The 12th North American Agroforestry Conference—A Profitable Land Use, Athens, GA for their helpful comments and questions. Partial funding for this study was provided through the University of Missouri Center for Agroforestry under cooperative agreements 58-6227-1-004 with the ARS and C R 826704-01-2 with the US EPA. The results presented are the sole responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the view of the USDA.
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Holderieath, J., Valdivia, C., Godsey, L. et al. The potential for carbon offset trading to provide added incentive to adopt silvopasture and alley cropping in Missouri. Agroforest Syst 86, 345–353 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10457-012-9543-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10457-012-9543-3