The main objective of BIOservicES is to understand the interconnection between soil organisms (virus, bacteria, archaea, fungi, protists, nematodes, microarthropods, earthworms, isopods, millipedes, insects and spiders) and the delivery of multiple soil ecosystem functions and services at different scales (field vs landscape), identifying the pressures and drivers resulting from different land uses and climate change, and performing an economic valuation of the contribution of soil organisms to ecosystem services. BIOservicES will also deepen in the relationship between soil organisms and soil structure, and how this interaction is affected by land use and management intensity, to contribute to the Soil Mission objective 6 “Improve soil structure to enhance habitat quality for soil biota and crops”. BIOservisES will thus deliver new knowledge, new indicators based on soil organisms and the ecosystem functions and services in which they are involved and digital decision-support tools and models to help design climate resilient management practices and monitoring/conservation/restoration programmes adapted to a range of environments (land uses and biogeographic regions) across Europe, to maintain and foster the multiple soil ecosystem functions and services in which soil organisms are involved. It will also give relevance to soil health and soil ecosystem functions and services delivered by soil organisms in the update of EU and National legislations. For this, BIOservicES is using experimental sites across 8 land uses and 5 biogeographic regions from Europe, as central hubs for co-creation and co-design (multi-actor approach, responsible research and innovation (RRI) and open science)

The European Commission is developing the first EU-wide voluntary framework for certifying carbon removals, carbon farming and carbon storage in products across Europe. By establishing EU quality criteria and laying down monitoring and reporting processes, the CRCF Regulation will facilitate the adoption of carbon farming solutions, while addressing greenwashing, and provides a "result-based" (quantified) remuneration system for farmers and foresters' climate performance. Key to the CRCF regulation are robust cost-effective Monitoring, Reporting and Verification (MRV) systems and a geographically explicit registry. Therefore, the main goal of CAFAMORE is to develop an EU-wide parcel level monitoring approach for Carbon Farming, with harmonisation and automation of data collection, robust and cost-effective quantification of activities and baselines, a spatially explicit registry and a robust market place. This will be accompanied by an in-depth assessment of the carbon markets and business strategies for carbon farming. CAFAMORE will facilitate certification schemes by providing tools for the quantification and monitoring of Carbon Farming activities through providing operational processing chains that connect earth observation data, soil and management data and models, including changes in SOC stocks, woody biomass and soil N2O emissions. This parcel-level data collection infrastructure can also serve companies for their CSRD reporting and member states for their National Greenhouse Gas Inventories. The MRV approaches and tools will be tested with farmers and certification actors in seven pilot countries, covering the main climatic zones and the diversity in European agriculture. The digital infrastructure and MRV tools will reduce the administrative burden for land managers, provide transparency over collected data and certificates and trust to the Carbon Farming market, which should increase the attractiveness of carbon farming.

The EC has set the ambition to become climate neutral by 2050. As not all greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions can be avoided, such as GHGs from biological processes in agriculture, carbon removal will become increasingly important to meet the neutrality targets set. Besides carbon capture and storage by industry, carbon sequestration in the land use sector will need to compensate for the remaining emissions. In this respect, reliable yet cost-effective systems to monitor, report and verify efforts by land managers become increasingly important. This is particularly relevant for the international GHG inventory reporting, and for the development of payment systems to reward land managers for sequestering carbon and reducing GHG emissions by carbon farming (CF). The interest in CF schemes is substantial, as illustrated by the large number of (pilot) payment schemes that have been initiated in recent years. Most of the schemes are experimenting on relatively small geographical areas with a relatively small number of land managers involved. In the ‘Sustainable carbon cycles communication’ that was launched in December 2021, the EC has expressed the challenging ambition that ‘every land manager should have access to verified emission and removal data by 2028 to enable a wide uptake of CF’. MARVIC has been specifically designed to generate instruments and knowledge that enable fulfilling this ambition. The main goal of MARVIC is to develop and test a reliable Framework for the design of harmonized, context-specific MRV systems (‘MRV Framework’) for assessing carbon stock changes in soils and woody biomass and soil GHG emissions. The development of a generic MRV Framework, applicable to all agricultural land-use activities, is essential for boosting faith in public and private CF schemes in Europe.

The main goal of the CREDIBLE project is to build momentum and trust for the implementation of carbon farming in the EU. This will be primarily achieved by setting up and moderating a network of initiatives/projects/stakeholders (referred to here as the Network of Networks - NoN) for favouring transparency, environmental integrity, and methodology standardisation in soil carbon accounting. Such a NoN will be responsible for pushing forward multiple discussions (articulated around three main themes: which practises; what standards; how to monitor) and is expected to evolve from a mostly technical/scientific network at the onset of the project, into a process catalysing policy making and business innovation toward its end. The transparent, open access, multi actor dialogues required to build trust and co-create solutions will be orchestrated around three annual European Carbon Farming Summits, which will present opportunities for the NoN to interact with the broader stakeholder community and grow to the point it would attract further fundings for long term sustainability. Through the action, four specific objectives will be achieved: O1) to build and disseminate a practical toolbox for promoting carbon farming, capable of taking into account local land uses, best practices, and multi-actor interests; O2) to identify options for benchmarking and selecting standards, certification mechanisms, and policy instruments for carbon farming; O3) to favour the establishment of a network of soil carbon data collectors and repositories to improve measuring and monitoring carbon dynamics; O4) to build up processes and tools to drive conversations for the upscaling of carbon farming. CREDIBLE’s ambition is to support the European Commission and the Expert Group on Carbon Removal in the identification and upscale of solutions for soil carbon farming.