| | Now that the rules for Canada’s emission trading system are getting finalized, we realized that there was a need to bring agricultural producers up to speed and give them some tools to start getting engaged in it,” says Dr. Carol-Ann Brown of Climate Change Central.
So Climate Change Central hosted Carbon Connections: Climate Change Opportunities in Agriculture, on November 21 and 22, 2005, in Calgary. Other conference sponsors included a variety of government agencies, private companies and other organizations from across Canada, including the AESA program.
Producers, aggregators, buyers, brokers and others attended the conference, providing the opportunity for people from the different parts of the trading system to meet and make connections. The first day, attended by 150 people, included overviews of policy and the various components in the system, as well as examples of projects that producers are undertaking that would likely be eligible for offset credits.
On the second day, 115 people participated in Canada’s first Mock Contract Negotiation Workshop for selling offset credits from agriculture. Brown says, “We structured the workshop around real-life rules as much as possible, but we couldn’t apply all of the process because it’s just not possible in
three hours.”
To help minimize the risks related to selling credits, various mechanisms are available, such as working through an aggregator. At the workshop, producers chose to form a selling block. Brown says, “At the mock negotiations, we had 10 groups of producers, each with their own producer profiles, giving them the kinds of options they had and the costs per tonne of greenhouse gas emissions of the different projects. They didn’t know what the other groups had. We had six different buyers with different numbers [of credits] that they had to buy, and we had aggregators and brokers. Trading started out really slowly ...Then about halfway through, someone stood up and said ‘I want all of the producer groups to come join us here.’ And they formed a consortium to increase their selling power. They sold a big block of the tonnes available at $45/tonne to the industry buyer.”
Climate Change Central plans to make the conference’s workbook available to the public, after it is updated with any final changes in the trading rules. For more information, visit www.climatechangecentral.com.
Barriers & incentives
Sten Lundberg, a forage producer and chair of the Foothills Forage Association (FFA), was a speaker at one of the sessions at the conference. He says, “When I started down this trail four years ago, I said, ‘I’ve seeded all my place down to forages. That ought to be good for some carbon credits.’ And I went trudging down the road to find out about that. Since then, it’s all been a learning curve for me, learning about why [the Kyoto Protocol] was created, and more importantly, the potential significance to our whole society ...for how we manage energy and other resources.”
Lundberg says, “Foothill Forage Association is skeptical about receiving much dollar val ue reward from [offset credits]. We don’t see that there’s going to be a lot leftover for producers by the time they get through all the brokerage and aggregating and verifying and validating in the trading process.”
Instead, FFA’s main interest is in the benefits and costs for producers of the practices that reduce net emissions. Lundberg explains, “When we reduce emissions, we are more efficient on our farms. And if we put the carbon back into our soils, it should increase productivity.” Also practices that store soil carbon provide other benefits, like protecting water quality.
Lundberg says, “Growing perennial forages and managing them well could be one of the most advantageous ways to reduce emissions and sequester carbon, but much of it needs scientific verification.” So FFA is planning to conduct studies to more clearly determine the relationships between growing forages, storing soil carbon and reducing emissions.
Despite the long-term benefits, the initial costs of converting to agricultural practices that reduce net emissions can be a significant barrier to adoption, notes Lundberg.
Lundberg’s own interest in this issue goes beyond economics. “Once you learn about [the global impacts of rising greenhouse gas levels], you have a responsibility to respond. ... No one player can affect climate change unless the whole world does it. Does that mean we just sweep it under the rug and ignore it? ... Let’s clean up our own backyard and demonstrate the value of [reducing net emissions].” |
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