Recently, CIBO’s Director of Enterprise Sustainability, Grant Ivison-Lane, led a webinar on best practices in inventory and project-based greenhouse gas (GHG) accounting in agriculture. If you haven’t watched the webinar yet, you can check out the replay here.
Grant received many great questions from passionate sustainability professionals. Since he didn’t have time to answer every one, we wanted to use today’s blog post to dive deeper into the topics that matter most to you. Below, you’ll find answers to queries we heard in the webinar and in other conversations with industry professionals about lifecycle assessments (LCAs), dynamic LCAs, and combining project-based and inventory-based approaches for Scope 3 reporting in ag.
LCAs and Dynamic LCAs
#1. Can you use the standard LCA approach to establish a baseline?
GHG Inventory accounting exists to help companies reduce their emissions and track their progress. With this goal in mind, accuracy and comparability matter; it’s important that the formulas you use to calculate your baseline are consistent with the formulas you use to calculate your interventions.
In the presentation, we defined “static” and “dynamic” approaches to try and capture the spatial and temporal variation in agricultural production. Part of the challenge here is that there isn’t an exact standard in how to quantify the carbon intensity of commodities (though a lot of this work is underway) that is sensitive to these factors, in addition to regenerative practices.
What we called “static” LCAs in the presentation are often more general to a broad region or were calculated over a longer time horizon, and might also include different assumptions, emissions boundaries and methodologies. Overall, this variation makes it challenging to compare LCA carbon intensity to the modeled carbon intensity of interventions where farmer data has been collected.
LCAs are a useful starting point if you are not yet implementing intervention projects. However, CIBO wouldn’t recommend that companies compare an LCA-derived baseline to an intervention field emission factor. We do not consider this approach to be consistent with the emerging guidance from the GHGP standards. We would instead recommend consistency between the intervention and inventory quantification methodology (for example, using the same IPCC Tier 3 model and input data when possible) to quantify soil carbon emissions in the base year as the current year where interventions are reported.
#2. What if you implement a project, but do not have baseline data for the project region?
In the presentation, we discussed “dynamic” LCAs as an approach where we establish the baseline for the project region using our IPCC Tier 3 modeling approach (this calculation excludes any project field data). Then, we calculate the carbon intensity of the intervention project fields using the same IPCC Tier 3 modeling approach as the baseline, but this time using farmer-provided data from the project, to provide a comparable emissions factor for the intervention fields.
Quantifying the baseline for the project region without farmer data requires an inference database of weather, soil, and agronomic information that is sensitive to space and time. As discussed in the webinar, in the U.S., this relies on a large amount of public information that may not be found in other geographies. A potential solution to maintain inventory accounting principles when this is the case is using control fields. There are also various workstreams to evaluate market-based solutions to this challenge that groups like the Value Change Initiative and Verra are facilitating. Given this, while we see having a “dynamic” LCA baseline as a best practice, it is not a prerequisite for working with CIBO. We are happy to work with our customers to put all of this into context and identify the best option to calculate their supply shed baseline carbon intensity.
#3. What is the best practice when there is a dynamic LCA available?
We see dynamic LCA methods (whether using inference databases, control fields, or both) as best practice for inventory accounting when the goal is to compare the carbon intensity of projects to a reference geography (supply shed, project region, etc.) from the current inventory year back to the base year/period of a company.
This best practice leverages quantification approaches (IPCC Tier 3 modeling) often used in project GHG accounting to generate emissions factors for projects and contextualize them to surrounding geographies or previous years. This best practice can help measure emissions in the supply shed both within the year, and over time, and is consistent with CIBO’s interpretation of the Draft Greenhouse Gas Protocol Guidance Land Sector and Removals Guidance (GHGP LSRG).
Note this solution is not something that replaces evaluating the impact of adopting conservation practices using consequential project GHG accounting protocols (Verra VM0042, Climate Action Reserve Soil Enrichment Protocol, and others) at a project scale.
#4. How do carbon removals factor into this discussion? Are any companies currently able to count those towards goals?
The Draft GHGP LSRG requires that companies quantify Scope 3 emissions and removals separately, which is why CIBO recommends and offers an inventory accounting approach that disaggregates emissions and removals reporting.
Additional safeguards to report removals within the inventory boundary need to be met as well, which include using primary data, reporting uncertainty, and monitoring for reversals. Companies can count removals that are reported within their Scope 3 inventory towards their goals if they meet these GHGP requirements.
#5. How do you feel about Product Carbon Footprints as a comparable and investment decision tool, as long as social impacts are still considered?
In the presentation, we discussed the need for a more comprehensive evaluation of social benefit, where water use, water quality impacts, biodiversity impacts, and regional social impacts are evaluated (rather than just carbon) to inform decision-making. Assuming all non-carbon attributes are comparable, product carbon footprint may be valuable here as long as (related to the webinar topic) the quantification approaches and assumptions to estimate the carbon footprints of individual products are similar.
Combining Project-Based and Inventory Accounting
#1. What is the definition of a project emissions factor (EF)?
The GHGP corporate standard defines an emissions factor (EF) as “a factor allowing GHG emissions to be estimated from a unit of available activity data (e.g., tonnes of fuel consumed, tonnes of product produced) and absolute GHG emissions.”
In this context, for agriculture, a project EF is determined by quantifying the mass of impacted goods and the amount of emissions it takes to produce a unit of those goods. Project EFs are just relevant for the amount of commodity produced in the project geography. This emissions factor is useful to include in a company GHG inventory when the methods to estimate the project EF are comparable to the EF used for the supply shed or “non-project” commodities. Dynamic LCA approaches can be useful in establishing that comparability.
#2. When using an inventory accounting approach, do you remove all project fields from the supply shed?
When modeling supply shed carbon intensity for GHG inventory accounting, CIBO will remove project fields from the supply shed calculation in years when those fields are enrolled in a carbon program for a given company.
#3. Does it matter that impacts can be attributed to more than just one practice change, like cover cropping? Other sources should still be incorporated into a calculation, correct?
Assuming we are discussing estimating the impact of conservation practices using project GHG accounting, it depends on the goals of the quantification approach and how a counterfactual baseline is defined. That being said, in general, since combinations of practices can have additive/interactive impacts, it can be challenging to isolate how much project impact is from each individual practice. Project accounting protocols (Verra VM0042, Climate Action Reserve Soil Enrichment Protocol) also define the required sinks, sources, and reservoirs beyond soil organic carbon that need to be quantified when completing this evaluation.
For inventory accounting (GHGP LSRG, SBTi FLAG), there are additional sources of emissions that may not be included in project accounting protocols. For example, to report towards SBTi FLAG targets, each emissions source to include is defined within that protocol. CIBO’s Scope 3 quantification of carbon intensity values is structured around these requirements. These may include, but are not limited to:
- Yield
- Soil organic carbon flux
- N2O flux:
- Direct
- Indirect
- Crop residue
- Electricity use for irrigation
- Fuel consumption for irrigation/tractors
- Land use change
- Enteric fermentation/manure management
- Manufacturing of inputs (nitrogen)
Still have questions?
If you want to learn how companies are going beyond traditional LCAs to drive positive environmental change at scale, we recommend this blog post as your next read.
And if you want to set up a time to meet with our team so we can learn more about your goals and answer your questions about Scope 3 in ag, we invite you to contact us.
