The workshop was jointly hosted by FAO’s Global Soil Partnership (GSP) and FAO’s Office of Climate Change, Biodiversity and Environment (OCB), with support from the Technical Support Unit of the Task Force on Inventories of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (MAFF) of Japan. More than 60 experts (a combination of agriculture and environment officials and scientists) from 42 countries participated in the training workshop.

Ronald Vargas, Secretary of the GSP in his opening remarks, stressed that “soil can help all of us in achieving a more sustainable future” but that the key challenge is in managing it so that emissions are reduced and CO₂ is returned back underground. He encouraged the participants to share the main lessons learned from this webinar with their government to translate them into action. Gen Kunieda, Director of the Global Environment Office of MAFF Japan also highlighted the potential of carbon storage in soil, which was presented in the IPCC working group III report on mitigation, published in April 2022. In the policy context, he introduced Japan’s Sustainable Food System Strategy, and its willingness to support countries.

During the opening as well as throughout the webinar the importance, potential strategies and approaches to include soils in the GHG inventories were addressed. The advantages of soil carbon models as well as the need for continued sampling for monitoring, verifying and reporting were presented.

Building on the recommendations from the workshop ‘Estimating carbon stock changes from soil for climate-resilient and sustainable rice production systems’ held in June, the aim was to provide:

• technical guidance on basic approaches, methods and tools for reporting GHG emissions/removals under the Enhanced Transparency Framework (ETF) of the Paris Agreement.
• an introduction to the new version of the IPCC Software which was launched at COP27.
• opportunities for peer-to-peer learning of best practices
• an introduction to the activities and tools of the FAO’s GSP for data collection and management including the Global Soil Organic Carbon Sequestration Potential Map (GSOCseq), the RECSOIL initiative and the Global Soil Information System (GloSIS). 

The presentations dived deeper into the topics which were touched upon in the June workshop, hence providing a great variety of information. The participants were satisfied with the wealth of lessons and moreover were encouraged by Iordanis Tzamtzis, the FAO climate change expert’s key message “Reporting of carbon stock change (CSC) in mineral soil in national GHG inventories is mandatory for all countries under the ETF”. Collaboration between environment/climate change ministries and soil scientists is necessary for sound data collection and management.

The participants were pleased to learn that the FAO’s GSP offers a wide range of training opportunities to model and map soil organic carbon stock changes following the GSOCseq approach as well as a mechanism to kick-start projects aimed at scaling up SOC-centered sustainable soil management practices under RECSOIL initiative.

There is so much potential in soil as a solution to climate change and our sustainable future. 

Useful links:

• Workshop on ‘Estimating carbon stock changes from soil for climate-resilient and sustainable rice production systems’:  https://www.fao.org/koronivia/news/detail/en/c/1602965/
• RECSOIL Recarbonization of global soils | Global Soil Partnership | Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (fao.org)
• GLOSOLAN GLOSOLAN | Global Soil Partnership | Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (fao.org)
• GLOSIS Soil information and data | Global Soil Partnership | Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (fao.org)