Agriculture Reference
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and 'get-what-you-pay-for'. The less directly
visible the product quality is, the more
trust and brokers play a role. Soil carbon is
not directly visible, so we can expect trust
and brokers to play a large role. We will
structure this chapter around the follow-
ing three groups of questions.
environmental issues and willingness to
commit to serious overall emission reduc-
tion targets of the level needed to contain
global climate change.
B.
Sovereign states as negotiation and im-
plementation parties in the UNFCCC, balan-
cing economic growth and demographic
and economic transitions with environmen-
tal concerns and voter satisfaction.
C.
Subnational governments (provinces,
districts), implementing national policies
while meeting local ambitions for economic
growth, social movements and environmen-
tal integrity.
D.
Private sector meeting obligations for emis-
sion reduction in industrialized countries
only, but increasingly held responsible for the
global footprints of their value chains.
E.
Concession holders (forestry, plantation
agriculture, mining), managing large tracts
of land for economic benefit within rules set
by the government.
F.
Farmers and other land users, deciding
on land cover conversion and land manage-
ment affecting soil C storage.
G.
Plants responding to land management
by modified allocations to root and associ-
ated symbiont turnover and litterfall, and
soil biota responding to management by
modifying rates of decomposition and CO
2
release.
1.
What is the value chain involved? Can
soil C be separated from aboveground land-
use (LU) effects?
2.
Are market-based solutions feasible?
What can we learn from the pilots?
3.
Will the prices be worth it for land man-
agers once transaction costs are accounted
for? Are there better ways to provide effect-
ive performance-based incentives from the
public perspective?
We will interpret 'markets' as referring to
two out of four paradigms that are recog-
nized in the broader payments or rewards
for the environmental services (ES) debate
(van Noordwijk
et al
., 2012a): (ia) commodi-
fication of ecosystem services (ES) as such;
(ib) coupling ES to marketed commodities;
(ii) compensation for opportunity costs of
voluntary or mandatory LU restrictions that
enhance ES but reduce profitability; and
(iii) co-investment in environmental stew-
ardship. In earlier discussions, (ia) and (ib)
were jointly implied under commodifica-
tion (van Noordwijk and Leimona, 2010).
Only the first paradigm is fully aligned with
the payments for environmental services
(PES) definition of Wunder (2005).
Combinations of the four ES reward para-
digms (ia, ib, ii and iii) across scales (be-
tween E/F and A) are possible and form an
important part of the discourse, as has
emerged at the interface of Integrated Con-
servation Development Projects (ICDPs) and
efforts to Reduce Emissions from Deforest-
ation and Degradation (REDD) (Minang and
van Noordwijk, 2013).
Within the UNFCCC, however, na-
tional borders have special significance for
accounting rules of both area-based change
in C stocks and trade-based use of fossil en-
ergy, fertilizers, cement and other elements
of the national greenhouse gas (GHG) inven-
tories (IPCC, 2006). Such reporting, on a
5-
year cycle for developing countries, re-
quires different types of data to be com-
bined (
Fig. 31.2
) and has a major challenge
in harmonizing operational definitions across
Q1: What Value Chain is Involved?
Basics of Soil C Accounting
Before answering the market-related ques-
tions
2
and
3,
a basic understanding is needed
of the actors and multiple scales, and the
many cross-scale interactions, involved in
the value chain:
A.
Global citizens, experiencing climate
change, consuming goods derived from inter-
national trade and, through elections, deter-
mining the immediate political relevance of
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