Introduction
Ronnie Cummins and I saw an urgent need to scale up agroecological, regenerative, and organic systems, the three main ecological agricultural movements, to regenerate our ecosystems, climate, and communities. We have been actively involved in organic agriculture in various ways for decades. I have been an organic farmer since the early 1970s.
We spent several years researching this and examining the markets, standards, and verification systems. The more we studied it, the more concerned we became about the credibility of carbon credits and biodiversity offset schemes. The media has been highly critical of these, and journalists and scientists have found many of these systems fraudulent.
Our book, The Regenerative Agricultural Solution, outlines the multiple benefits of regenerative practices. These benefits include increasing rainfall, improving regional cooling, reversing vapor pressure deficits, and increasing soil organic matter. These practices create tangible values that need to be paid for rather than taken for free, neglected, and therefore regarded as worthless. Paying the people who provide these services will give them real value.
Equally important is the need to regenerate our food and farming systems away from toxic monocultures. These systems destroy soil organic matter and reduce biodiversity, destroying the soil’s capacity to capture and retain water. This leads to vapor pressure deficits that heat the land, causing droughts and torrential flooding rains. The Regenerative Agricultural Solution explains the concept of vapor pressure deficits and their critical importance.
Even if the world transitioned to 100 percent renewable energy tomorrow, it would not stop the rise in temperature and sea levels since current CO2 emissions will persist in the atmosphere for over 1,000 years, heating the climate. It must be actively removed and stored in the soil, the largest terrestrial carbon pool.
It is critical to scale up diverse perennial agroforestry systems. The book provides many examples of agroecological systems based on perennial trees, shrubs, herbs, and grasses combined with annual crops. Permanent covers of photosynthesizing plants are essential to draw down CO2, increase soil organic matter, increase transpiration to cool regions, and reduce vapor pressure deficits.
The oceans’ heat, however, will continue adversely affecting the climate until it dissipates over hundreds of years. Our research shows that scaling up tree and forest regeneration is the fastest way to cool the planet. The world has become 1.5°C (2.7°F) warmer, and adequate tree cover would increase transpiration and provide regional cooling to compensate for this.
Forests moderate local climates by keeping their local environments cool. They do this by shading the land and releasing moisture from their leaves. This process, called transpiration, requires energy extracted from the surrounding air, thus cooling it. A single tree can transpire hundreds of liters of water in a day. Every hundred liters (25 gallons) has a cooling effect equivalent to two domestic air conditioners daily.
Temperature differences between forest and clear-cut land are up to 10 degrees Celsius (18°F) in parts of Sumatra. Research in the Amazon found a difference of 3 degrees Celsius (5.4°F) between the cool of the forested Xingu indigenous park and surrounding croplands.
Researchers have found the reforestation of the Eastern US over the last century has had a cooling effect that resulted in a lack of regional warming in the 20th century. This stands in contrast to warming trends across the rest of North America during the same period. Their study shows that forests across much of the eastern United States have a substantial adaptive cooling benefit for air temperatures. Ground and satellite‐based observations showed that these forests cool the land surface by 1–2°C (1.8 – 3.6°F)annually compared to nearby grasslands and croplands, with the strongest cooling effect during midday in the growing season, when cooling is 2–5°C (3.6 – 6.5°F).
Image: Mallory L. Barnes et al., “A Century of Reforestation Reduced Anthropogenic Warming in the Eastern United States,” Earth’s Future 12, no. 2 (February 2024)
This critical information shows that regenerating forests can reverse the warming of 1.5°C (2.7°F).
The regeneration of tree cover is one of the most effective strategies for climate change mitigation. The destruction of ecosystems contributes to global warming, whereas regenerating these forests and rangelands would cool the climate.
In The Regenerative Agricultural Solution, as well as other articles, we present strong evidence that regenerating ecosystems and farmlands by growing more plants and increasing soil organic matter can reduce emissions more than the current levels and cool the planet. Doing this will not only reverse global warming; it will stop the great extinction of biodiversity currently underway, reverse the global water crisis, qualitatively improve public health and nutrition, and eliminate poverty among the planet’s 3 billion farmers, farmworkers, and rural villagers.
A Framework for Rewarding Ecosystem Services
The trillions of dollars spent on carbon credits, environmental asset derivatives, and numerous other ineffective schemes, such as carbon capture and storage, primarily benefit traders, scheme owners, government bureaucrats, and consultants. Those of us who work on the front lines and visit the communities see few tangible benefits. The people who manage the ecosystems rarely see much of the funds. Most of it is spent before it reaches them.
We must redirect a percentage of the trillion dollars currently being misused into regenerative systems.
Incentive to Change
Farmers are only paid for their yields, not their ecosystem services. This system favors farmers who can produce the cheapest commodities using economies of scale. This rewards a race to the bottom—the owners of CAFOs and large-scale industrial monocultures with their damaging environmental, health, and social effects reap the benefits. The true cost of damaging the climate, biodiversity, human health, and communities will be paid later—by future generations.
These systems are stealing from our children, grandchildren, and those yet to be born.
The current system treats carbon as a tradable commodity—with arbitrary and, in many cases, illogical rules around permanency and additionality. Many climate change meetings and academic and political discussions are tantamount to walking in endless circles. Participants fiddle over academic, political, and financial disagreements while Rome burns. The fact is climate change indicators are worse despite decades of meetings.
Instead of treating carbon as a tradable commodity that rewards financial markets, commodity exchanges, traders, scheme owners, and consultants, the approach Ronnie and I discussed before he passed away involves paying a fee for service. This would change the focus. When we pay for a plumber, dentist, lawyer, doctor, mechanic, or accountant, we aren’t buying specific commodities. We pay them for the results of their service.
Paying for the services of removing CO2 and regenerating ecosystems, such as biodiversity and climate, would result in a massive financial incentive for changes in land management practices. Instead of a race to the bottom to produce commodities for profit, there would be an incentive for regenerating ecosystems and food and farming production systems. By paying farmers to adopt practices that draw down CO2 and cool the regions, we would transform agriculture from one of the most significant emitters to the leading climate change solution.
Agroecological, Regenerative, and Organic Ecosystem Services (AROES)
Ronnie and I developed the initial draft of the Agroecological, Regenerative, and Organic Ecosystem Services (AROES) framework to pay landholders for ecosystem services, refined through appropriate worldwide consultations over several years.
Regeneration International is setting up AROES as a registry and secretariat to validate and coordinate all the primary services and payments. It is based on payments to farmers, traditional owners, and land managers for:
- Conserving and/or regenerating biodiversity
- Removing carbon dioxide through aboveground biodiversity and/or soil organic carbon to reverse climate change
- Improving gender equity
- Improving fairness in labor, production, and marketing
Regeneration International and our partners can achieve multiple objectives through public education, market demand, farmer-to-farmer training, grassroots lobbying, and policy reform with adequate funding. This registry will develop, clarify, and channel financial incentives and investments into ecological goods and services.
Monitoring, Reporting, and Verification (MRV)
Emerging stories of fraudulent carbon offset schemes have damaged the credibility of the carbon offset markets. Companies now demand a reputable monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV) framework as a top credit purchasing criterion. (Over 90 percent of buyers consider MRV a significant factor in credit purchase decisions.) The certificates must have a transparent verification system to show their impact, which can be used to defend their credibility against the ever-growing claims of greenwashing.
Organic certification systems are the world’s oldest, most reliable, and most trusted agricultural verification systems. They are based on internationally accepted best practices. Regeneration International will use credible organic certifiers and PGS verification systems to verify our ecosystem projects, combined with our own purpose-developed AROES standard to suit the precise purposes of regeneration. Certified operators will also have the option of being certified to national organic standards for market access, including major standards such as the USDA National Organic Program (NOP), the EU regulation, the Japanese Agricultural Standards (JAS), and so on.
The AROES standard is short, simple, and straightforward rather than a lengthy or complex regulatory document. It is designed to be easy for farmers and landholders to use. Most farmers in the developing world have limited education and cannot understand complicated certification standards. The standard prohibits degenerative practices and inputs. These include animal cruelty, CAFOs, hydroponics, GMOs, chemical fertilizers, synthetic pesticides, and damaging tillage. It uses guidance rather than mandated practices so that farmers can select the most appropriate. The success of these practices will be measured using evidence-based results as part of the MRV processes.
Trained experts will conduct measurements and provide technical expertise and objective results. These measurement systems will be simple and practical and will not employ highly complex scientific methodologies. New technologies such as Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) are being used to improve accuracy, save time, and reduce MRV costs.
The use of proxies is a key component of reducing costs and workloads. Soil organic matter levels are a good proxy for soil health and carbon sequestration. They are easily measured and can be used to determine how well a farmer is regenerating soils. Tree and plant diversity and bird calls are good proxies for biodiversity. Increases in plant species and bird calls are signs of healthy ecosystems and biodiversity. These proxies can be used as the basis for ecosystem service payments.
A Worldwide Network
As a worldwide network of 600 partners in 80 countries on every arable continent, Regeneration International will multiply the number of certified farmers and acreage by using financial and agronomic incentives to encourage and motivate producers to adopt the best organic, regenerative, and agroecological practices. Our network building is designed to be scalable. We expect it to multiply, especially in the Global South, as farmers and land managers learn the benefits of adopting agroecological, regenerative, and organic best management practices, verifying them, and then getting paid for them. The first pilot projects have started and will become catalysts for change in their communities.
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