Abstract
The number of countries with carbon pricing has increased five-fold over the last 12 years. Carbon markets that constrain big emitters and allow offset purchasing and trading are also increasing. Agriculture is recognized as an emitter of greenhouse gases (GHGs) as well as an economic sector that can store or sequester carbon. The Canadian province of Alberta is both the country’s largest source of all GHGs and agricultural emissions as a consequence of its big industrial and agriculture sectors. It was the first province with a climate-change policy, and with amendments to that policy in 2007 to include GHG offsets, it became the first jurisdiction to implement agricultural offsets. The conservation cropping protocol is used by aggregator companies to assemble large projects to attract the big final emitters. This voluntary market rewards farmers for no-till practice if they comply with the protocol requirements including a third-party audit. Since 2007, about 14 million tonnes of offset valued at 143 million Euros have been supplied to market by this one protocol.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Alberta. 2020. Technical guidance for offset protocol development and revision. Version 2.0. Edmonton, Canada: Alberta Government. https://open.alberta.ca/publications/9781460140611.
Alberta Government. 2012. Quantification protocol for conservation cropping, version 1.0, Apr 2012. https://open.alberta.ca/publications/9780778596288.
ECCC. 2019. Carbon pollution pricing: Options for a federal GHG offset system. Ottawa: Environment and Climate Change Canada. https://www.canada.ca/content/dam/eccc/documents/pdf/climate-change/pricing-pollution/Options-GHG-Offset-System.pdf.
Hamrick, K., and A. Goldstein. 2016. Raising ambition—State of the voluntary carbon markets 2016. Washington, DC: Forest Trends’ Ecosystem Marketplace. https://www.forest-trends.org/wp-content/uploads/imported/2016sovcm-report_10-pdf.pdf.
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. 2019. Climate change and land. Summary for policymakers. Geneva.
Lal, R. 2008. Carbon sequestration. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences 815–830.
Lal, R. 2021. Managing chernozems for reducing global warming. In Regenerative agriculture. What’s missing? What do we still need to know?, ed. D.L. Dent and B.P. Boincean. Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland.
Paustian, K., S. Collier, J. Baldock, et al. 2019. Quantifying carbon for agricultural soil management: From the current status toward a global soil information system. Carbon Management 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/17583004.2019.1633231.
Smith, P., D. Martino, Z. Cai, et al. 2008. Greenhouse gas mitigation in agriculture. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 363: 789–813. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2007.2184.
Swallow, B.M., and T.W. Goddard. 2016. Development of Alberta’s greenhouse gas offset system within Canadian and international climate policy contexts. International Journal of Climate Change Strategies and Management 8 (3): 318–337. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJCCSM-04-2015-0040.
Swanson, D., S. Barg, S. Tyle, et al. 2009. Seven guidelines for policy-making in an uncertain world, Chap. 2. In Creating adaptive policies, ed. D. Swanson and S Bhadwal. Newbury Park, CA, Winnipeg: Sage, IISD.
VandenBygaart, A.J., B.G. McConkey, D.A. Angers, et al. 2008. Soil carbon change factors for the Canadian agriculture national greenhouse gas inventory. Canadian Journal of Soil Science 88: 671–680. https://doi.org/10.4141/CJSS07015.
VandenBygaart, A.J., E. Bremer, B.G. McConkey, et al. 2010. Soil organic carbon stocks on long-term agroecosystem experiments in Canada. Canadian Journal of Soil Science 90: 543–550. https://doi.org/10.4141/cjss10028.
World Bank. 2019. State and trends of carbon pricing 2019. Washington, DC: World Bank. https://doi.org/10.1596/978-1-4648-1435-8.
World Bank. 2020. Carbon pricing dashboard—Interactive website graphics and data repository. https://carbonpricingdashboard.worldbank.org/map_data.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Goddard, T. (2021). Climate-Change Policy for Agriculture Offsets in Alberta, Canada. In: Dent, D., Boincean, B. (eds) Regenerative Agriculture. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72224-1_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72224-1_8
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-72223-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-72224-1
eBook Packages: Earth and Environmental ScienceEarth and Environmental Science (R0)