Scaling up Climate Actions in Asia Pacific

Wednesday and Thursday,
29 – 30 June 2022
15:00 – 17:00, GMT+7, Bangkok time

Registration: https://bit.ly/3zQTjJb

Climate resilient agrifood systems is a key for strengthening food security and nutrition in Asia and the Pacific region. Soils play a key role in food production and climate change adaptation and mitigation.

Soil conservation benefits efforts towards achieving biodiversity targets, land degradation neutrality objectives, and the Paris Agreement’s long-term temperature goals through carbon sequestration. Soil carbon and fertility are recognized as major topics in the Koronivia Joint Work on Agriculture (KJWA) under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, where there is a growing recognition that investing in soil health could be a ‘no-regrets’ option.

The FAO supports country actions by providing technical support to adapt to and mitigate climate change. FAO also hosts the secretariat of the Global Soil Partnership (GSP) which is the recognized mechanism aiming at positioning soils in the global agenda.  FAO also supports countries’ efforts to address the reporting requirements of the Enhanced Transparency Framework (ETF) of the Paris Agreement by strengthening their capacity to report on soils.

Despite the growing global support for capacity building to improve soil management, estimation and reporting of greenhouse gas emissions and removals from mineral soils in national GHG inventories is still very limited, even though the IPCC Tier 1 methodology is available, and requires only basic data.

FAO and the Institute for Global Environmental Strategies (IGES) jointly conducted a survey in 2021 to understand the reasons for these reporting difficulties, with view to provide targeted support toward filling developing countries’ reporting gaps. A total of 139 experts from 102 countries responded. The findings of the survey suggest that improved data collection coupled with enhanced collaboration between Greenhouse gas inventory experts and soil scientists are key for estimating carbon stock change (CSC) in soils.

Recognizing that this is a challenge in some countries, this workshop will provide guidance and serve as a gateway for capacity building toward estimation of soil CSC in countries in need. This would help countries fulfil their ETF reporting requirements, provide insights for developing targeted policies to encourage ambitious nationally determined contributions, boost capacity to track the results of climate policy actions, and ultimately to scale up good soil management for climate-resilient and sustainable agrifood systems in the region.

The ASEAN Climate Resilience Network (ASEAN CRN) supports AMAF in developing several climate policy guidelines, and the outputs of this concept note are envisioned to contribute to these.

Focus will be on rice paddy soil, which has unique dynamics of soil, water, crop and microorganisms, and prevailing in the Asia monsoon region. Especially in the paddy production system, it is important to pay attention to effects on methane and nitrous oxide emissions from anaerobic soils when increasing input of organic matters.

Objectives:

1. Participants learn the benefits and opportunities of estimating soil carbon stock change (CSC), and how it can be used to track the policy implementation (NDCs).
2. Highlight the dynamics of carbon in the rice paddy system, and potential synergies and trade-offs with greenhouse gas emissions (methane and nitrous oxide).
3. Participants learn about the kind of data necessary as the first step, and available tools as well as opportunities of support to supplement lack of data.
4. Share experiences including major challenges related to estimating CSC as well as overall measurement, reporting and verification (MRV) of emissions from paddy soils.
5. Discuss and identify “ways forward” for countries to estimate and report on carbon stock change.