PROJECT DESCRIPTION
BACKGROUND
Climate change is a well-known and urgent challenge for international, national, regional and local environment policies and actions. Reducing greenhouse gas emissions has been identified as a vital and shared worldwide aim to mitigate the effects of climate change. LIFE projects and many other initiatives across Europe have looked at ways to reduce such emissions from a whole range of human activities, industries and processes. In addition to reducing emissions however, efforts to remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere can also contribute to mitigating climate change. Plants can play an important role through their natural extraction of CO2 from the atmosphere via the process of photosynthesis. Reforestation of land leads to the capture of carbon by the trees through turning CO2 from the atmosphere into biomass. However, although agroforestry techniques could contribute significantly in the fight against climate change, they have not yet been developed in a meaningful way in the EU.
OBJECTIVES
The overall objective of the 'OPERATION CO2' project was to demonstrate the economic viability and environmental validity of agroforestry carbon sequestering projects in Europe. It aimed to demonstrate new agroforestry approaches at three different locations in Spain with a multinational team of nine partners from three Member States: Spain; the Netherlands; and the UK.
The first pillar of this project would promote active nature conservation and carbon management in natural forests over an area of 4 500 ha. This would seek to implement a series of targeted forest and carbon actions resulting in the long-term improvement of carbon sequestering in natural forests. The project thus hoped to deliver the certification of carbon credits for the forest area that would subsequently be released on the Voluntary Carbon Offsets Market.
The second pillar of the project would involve the transformation of two naturally degraded areas – each covering 25 ha - into integral agroforest ecosystems. It aimed to successfully plant a large variety of species on a range of soil types in degraded, non-irrigated agricultural lands that face the negative effects of climate change in the form of ever increasing dryness. It foresaw the planting of four components of integral systems: timber; biomass; cash crops; and fruit trees and shrubs.
RESULTS
The OPERATION CO2 project demonstrated that protecting existing forests and investing in integral agroforestry carbon capture projects is economically and environmentally beneficial. The five-year project was carried out in three regions of Spain, each with different climates and environmental challenges: a forest area in Catalonia (Espai Natura Muntanya d´Alinyà) and a naturally degraded and abandoned agricultural area in Castilla y León (Ayoó de Vidriales) and in Aragón (San Mateo de Gállego).
The forest and carbon plan, which was implemented in Catalonia, comprised two different approaches: improved forest management of a preexisting forest stand to increase biodiversity and carbon fixation in the long run; and afforestation and reforestation of abandoned terraces and eroded areas to increase biodiversity, carbon fixation in the short run and to reduce erosion. In the other two areas, the project carried out integral agro-forestry programmes based on the combination of crops and trees while taking into account the specific soil and climatic conditions. This integral land-use plan can be considered an agro-forestry system.
These measures were shown to increase carbon storage along with biodiversity in the project areas, while the economic benefits of the project techniques were demonstrated. Furthermore, new carbon credits were introduced to the market. However, the process of certification of carbon credits in Muntanya d´Alinyà highlighted the barriers that currently prevent the certification of many absorption projects in line with international standards. Difficulties arise in proving that there is no double counting between the carbon fixated in the project and the national inventories. Efforts must be made to address this challenge on a European level, such as the production of guidelines.
In addition, it was concluded that the current international standards are not adapted to the reality of the Mediterranean forests but to evergreen tropical rainforests. They do not consider the scenario of a forest improvement project that results in net fixation of carbon after a period of 30 to 40 years. In fact, thinning practices also reduce the high risk of forest fires, thereby reducing the risk of transformation of wood into CO2 should the project site experience fires.
Further information on the project can be found in the project's layman report and After-LIFE Communication Plan (see "Read more" section).
