On the 12th of February, the AgriDENZ project hosted a webinar on farm-level greenhouse gas (GHG) accounting where Koen Deconinck from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Trade and Agriculture Directorate presented ongoing work including insights from a new comprehensive database of 200 tools for farm-level GHG estimation.
Key takeaways:
- Farm-level GHG accounting underpin many initiatives to disclose and mitigate emissions in the agri-food supply chain as a large share of most agri-food products arise at the farm-level.
- Different farm-level GHG accounting methods can lead to different results which can cause confusion and conflicts. An increasing number of countries are taking action to reduce fragmentation by providing nationally coordinated methodologies.
- At the OECD, work is ongoing to create a database of farm-level GHG accounting tools and so far over 200 tools have been included. Some preliminary findings are that most tools focus on one country and that many tools follow the GHG protocol or ISO standards as well as the IPCC guidelines. The scopes included in the tools range from scope 1 emissions (on-farm emissions), purchased energy, to also including upstream emissions. Downstream emissions are less common.
- There is ongoing dialogue among OECD member states on how to reduce fragmentation of approaches to farm-level GHG accounting also within and between countries.
Following the presentation, there was a lively Q&A session where over 200 participants were curious to hear what Koen Deconinck had to say about ways forward to reduce fragmentation, how a set of international best practice recommendations might look like and to what extent harmonization of approaches is possible.
Please find the video recording HERE.
In AgriDENZ, the webinar series on farm-level GHG accounting will continue on the 19th of March at 9am CET / 9pm NZDT where we will present ongoing work in AgriDENZ on comparing farm-level GHG accounting approaches developed in Germany and New Zealand - more information on this will follow.
