Soil carbon sequestration under certified organic management in Albania, Serbia and Ukraine within SECO funded organic projects

Soil carbon sequestration is an indicator for the climate change mitigation performance of agricultural land management. Already in the SECO-funded programme ‘Higher Value-Added Trade from the Organic and the Dairy Sector in Ukraine (Quality FOOD Trade Program)’, which started in 2020, soil carbon sequestration has been chosen as an impact indicator. The same applies for the SECO-funded project Organic Trade for Development (OT4D), which started in September 2019. Based on the statistics of certified organic farmland and a rough formula, FiBL calculated the net soil carbon sequestration effect under certified organic management for the period from 2011 to 2021. Given the focus on crop production on these areas and the large areas concerned, FiBL suggests to use an average soil carbon sequestration value from the literature to get a gross picture on the sequestration potential without incurring huge measurement costs. This value is taken from a meta-analysis from 2012 mainly covering temperate zones, thus largely being adequate for the climatic situation in Eastern Europe.