Next month, Ireland will host the second European Carbon Farming Summit.

The summit will bring together leading policymakers, researchers, industry representatives, and farmers to explore new farming strategies. The three-day event will take place from March 4-6 at Dublin Castle.

Last year, over 600 experts attended the summit in Valencia, Spain.

This year the event will focus on carbon farming practices for land managers as well as monitoring and verification tools.

There will also be a focus on rewarding mechanisms for impactful climate actions, and cross-cutting topics.

Over the course of the summit, there will be speakers from the European Commission, as well as leading research institutes, and industry stakeholders.

Some of the keynote speakers include:

Christian Holzleitner and Valeria Forlin, from the EU Directorate-General for Climate Action;
Emanuele Lugato, Mirco Migliavacca, and Panos Panagos, the Europeam Commission's Joint Research Centre;
Tsjerk Terpstra, from the EU Directorate-General for Agriculture and Rural Development;
Saskia Keesstra, senior researcher at Climate KIC;
Caroline Ploux, senior manager of public affairs Europe at Mars Inc.;
Michael Ehmann, founder of Natais popcorn;
Hugh McDonald and Julia Pazmino, Ecologic Institute.

The summit will be split into three main sessions.

The first session will focus on which practices are best for European soils. It will focus on regional agro systems, farmer acceptance, the co-benefits, trade-offs, and value chains.

The second session will focus on standards and certification mechanisms. This will look at quality criteria, baselining, overlapping schemes, additionality, and offsetting and claims.

The final session discusses carbon fluxes, and how to monitor them. This will touch on data harmonisation, model calibration, emerging technologies, remote sensing, and monitoring initiatives.

Meanwhile, scientists at the University of Leeds conducted research on the carbon storage potential of different soil types, discovering that soil under hedges stored an average of 40t more carbon per hectare, than soil located under managed grassland.

The researchers analysed soil samples taken from nine farms located across five locations in Yorkshire, Cumbria and West Sussex, to find out how carbon storage under hedgerows compared to that of adjacent pastures.

The research, which was was published in the Journal of Agriculture, Ecosystems & Environment, was the first to identify that hedgerows’ increased soil carbon stocks were the same, irrespective of differences in soil type, rock formation and climate.