Abstract
The Paris Agreement calls for limiting global warming below 2°C. The “4 per 1,000 Initiative: Soils for food security and climate” was launched in 2015 to increase soil organic carbon sequestration with three objectives: mitigation of climate change, adaptation to climate change and improved food security. One of the challenges of the Initiative relates to its feasibility in contrasted biophysical, social and economic environments, questioning the adoption rate of required new practices. We conducted participatory multi-stakeholder workshops in France and Senegal to collect knowledge and perception of farmers, NGOs, agro-industries, administrations, donors and researchers on barriers and coping strategies for 4 per 1,000 innovations. Results in both countries reveal the predominance of social and economic barriers such as lack of knowledge or training, increased difficulties of fieldwork, workload, risk handling, funding and social pressure. Biophysical constraints such as limited potential of soil organic matter storage or rainfall scarcity and variability appear more important in Senegal. Identified actions to foster the sequestration of soil carbon call for an improved policy context leading to innovations in land planning, stakeholder communication, demonstration facilities, capacity building or financial support. Fewer constraints and coping strategies mention technical issues, showing that fostering agricultural soil carbon sequestration is more a question of enabling environment than technical innovations or farmers' willingness for change. We conclude that actions to support the 4 per 1,000 Initiative need to include a variety of stakeholders such as extension services, private sector, civil society, local institutions, policy makers, consumers, and not only farmers.
Highlights
The Paris Agreement, at the 21st Conference of Parties (COP21) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), calls for limiting global warming well below 2◦C, and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase even further to 1.5◦C
Even though this result might have been influenced by the technical knowledge of the participants, it is consistent with other analyses (e.g., Amundson and Biardeau, 2018) showing that while the 4 per 1,000 calculus is physically true, it is unlikely to be politically and economically possible everywhere, especially as the potential for additional carbon storage in the soil is different from one farming system to another, and one region to another
The inputs from two participatory multi-stakeholder workshops held in France and Senegal showed that most of the constraints to the adoption of innovations contributing to the objectives of the 4 per 1,000 Initiative were shared by both areas despite their differing environmental and socio-economic contexts
Summary
The Paris Agreement, at the 21st Conference of Parties (COP21) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), calls for limiting global warming well below 2◦C, and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase even further to 1.5◦C. Major greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reductions are needed together with technologies that result in net Boosting Soil Carbon Sequestration in Agriculture removal of CO2 from the atmosphere (Meinshausen et al, 2009; Lomax et al, 2015; IPCC, 2018) In this context, the “4 per 1,000 Initiative: Soils for Food Security and Climate” (http:// 4p1000.org) was launched with the objective of a net increase in soil organic carbon (SOC) stocks at an aspirational annual rate of 4%◦ (or 0.4%) to contribute to climate change mitigation while improving soils’ capacity for climate change adaptation and their contribution to food security objectives, known as a “3-fold objective.”. Retention time of sequestered carbon in the soil (terrestrial pool) can range from short-term (not immediately released back to atmosphere) to long-term (millennia) storage” (Olson et al, 2014)
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