Wear Rivers Trust

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Carbon Connects

 

High Hall Farm Tour 26th Oct 2021

 
An overview of High Hall Farm, Croglin, Cumbria.

 

Chris Clark Discusses Maximum Sustainable Output

 
When farming is at maximum profitability, Nature is at maximum value!

 

Marketing Farm Captured Carbon to the Corporate Sector

 
WRT Director Peter Nailon discusses the possibilities and barriers around marketing carbon to the corporate sector.

 

An update on the Environmental Land Management Schemes (ELMS)

 
Andy Dyer of the Eden Rivers Trust provides an update on the current state of ELMS.

Carbon Connects – Because peatlands have a huge untapped pot

Carbon Connects is a project funded by the Interreg North-West Europe Program which aims to reduce the high carbon footprint of peatland soils in Northwest Europe by introducing new bio-based business models developed for sustainable land management practices.

Project Summary

 
3% of the world’s land surface is covered by Peatlands, which are large concentrations of organic matter having accumulated over centuries. They store 2x as much carbon as all of Earth’s standing forests. Europe contains 265,000 km2 of various peatland types and if dried out, will go from being a carbon sink to a massive, unstoppable carbon emitter. This is the current cause of one-third of global CO2 emissions. However, these effects on climate change are mostly ignored.
 
Carbon Connects (CConnnects) will reduce C02 emissions by 50% in agricultural peatlands where traditional practices have unnecessary high emissions (20-40ton C02/ha/y). The land practices drain and strip peatland for energy use, crop production, and animal husbandry. CConnnects will promote an alternative practice of wet agriculture land use that reduces carbon by raising water levels, introducing new crops (eg. Cattail, reed), and isolating carbon in land outputs (biomass, building material)
 
CConnnects will also develop financially viable business models by developing value chains & use blue and C-credit schemes to enable widespread implementation and scaling-up without public subsidies.
CConnnects delivers 8 pilots of 3-10ha in NL, FR, BE, UK, IE, jointly representing all peatland types in NWE.
 
Solutions are scalable in NWE to 4,500,000ha peatlands (Larger than NL). CConnnects can reduce 90-180M ton emissions in NWE, equivalent to removing 40-80 million cars. CConnnects’ transnational Farmer-2-Farmer learning programme allows land users to directly share and scale experiences, while actively targeting new adopters with a transnational toolbox of state of art land use and farming practices.
 
CConnnects has all 6 NWE peatland countries each with 10-20% of the budget, with 50% of budget for purely transnational activities of international innovation and network partners and for the innovative transnational exchange programme. Partners are from government, business, research and landowner groups.
 
After four years, the project has now entered the capitalisation phase, with a full focus on providing
new financial incentives to facilitate peatland restoration. Many private companies today could
invest in peatland restoration to meet their carbon offset targets, but lack connections, financial
mechanisms and a sufficiently reliable framework for certifying carbon credits. A Market
Acceleration Board has been set up within the project to initiate a dialogue on this subject.
Through this approach, the Carbon Connects project has effectively established a direct connection
between investors, brokers, and land managers

WRT on BBC Look North Sept 2021 discussing MSO

Peter Nailon discusses Maximum Sustainable Output (MSO) Farming with BBC Look North’s Luke Walton.

Carbon Connects Storymap