🌾🇺🇸What could carbon dioxide removal (#CDR) offer the 2023 Farm Bill?🇺🇸🌾

Today the Carbon Business Council published a policy brief for the 2023 Farm Bill on opportunities to incorporate carbon dioxide removal (CDR). Led by Toby Bryce and co-authored by Ben Rubin and Isabella Corpora, I took part in the working group that made it happen and look forward to seeing its impact.

What is the Farm Bill?

🏛️The #FarmBill is a $700 billion critical omnibus legislation that governs the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (#USDA) administration over an array of agricultural and food programs. It is updated every five years and represents a tremendous bipartisan opportunity to beneficially incorporate carbon management and carbon dioxide removal (CDR) into our food, farm, and forestry systems.

🌱 It can authorize and implement strategic changes at the USDA to enable more farmers and forest landowners to engage in conservation, adopt climate smart practices, implement climate resilience solutions, and climate proof their livelihoods.

⏰Agriculture contributes to around a quarter of all greenhouse gas emissions globally and the upcoming Farm Bill is coming in the context of a much more climate conscious administration in which CDR presents a huge opportunity to limit the emissions of this sector.

What opportunities does this pose for CDR in the U.S.? Many elements in the Farm Bill intersect with CDR:

💵Funding for improving biomass conservation research - such as the Biochar Research Network Act (#BRNA)- would provide the investments necessary to expedite implementation of regenerative agricultural practices.

🌿Hundreds of millions of tons of tonnes of crop residues are burnt, or left to decompose, in the U.S. annually — representing a significant re-emission of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Using this biomass to create biochar could remove 100s of megatons of CO2.

🌳 Creating new conservation standards and direct-payment incentives for adoption of CDR pathways - such as projects from biomass energy with carbon capture and sequestration (#BECCS) or biomass carbon removal and storage (#BiRCS) - would have many co-benefits, ranging from job creation to soil health.

The Farm Bill presents a timely and tremendous opportunity to accelerate the adoption of a more diverse range of CDR technologies that support regenerative agriculture practices across the US. Using various CDR pathways provide an exciting opportunity to please both sides of the ‘aisle’ by improving farm and forest economics while accelerating the adoption of climate friendly practices that bring us all closer to net-zero targets.

Read the policy brief here: https://lnkd.in/dBwQxRhG

What opportunities or inclusions do you think are the most important to include in the upcoming Farm Bill?