Key Objectives
The Eurasian Carbon Project concentrates at the following key objectives:
- Carbon Sequestration: To explore the potential of certain farming practices to sequester carbon in degraded soils across Kazakhstan. Practices such as no-till farming or reduced tillage intensity, residue retention, crop rotation, and cover cropping can enhance soil health and increase carbon capture in agricultural lands.
- Carbon Credit Trading: To work out a mechanism, through which negative emissions units can be traded in Kazakhstan’s Emissions Trading System (KAZ ETS) and international carbon markets.
- Rural Development: To create new income streams for farmers and rural communities from trading of carbon emissions units. This will offer farmers financial incentives to develop carbon farming projects while improving the resilience of their land to climate change impacts.
The benefits of agricultural carbon sequestration are twofold:
- Cost-Effectiveness: Arid ecosystems, such as Kazakhstan’s grasslands, are cost-effective to restore compared to afforestation or industrial carbon capture technologies. This makes carbon farming a viable and affordable option for large-scale carbon sequestration
- Resilience: Kazakhstan’s agricultural sector, which employs a large portion of the population, is highly vulnerable to climate change. By adopting carbon farming, farmers can secure alternative income streams while safeguarding their livelihoods and improving land productivity
By removing CO2 from the atmosphere and capturing it into biomass and soil, carbon farming can complement efforts to reinstate soil quality and agricultural productivity for other uses in the wider Asian Dryland Belt, where agriculture is still a sizable contributor to the GDP. Regionally, involvement in carbon farming could enable communities to attain diversified employment and create jobs within small and medium sized enterprises - particularly if international trading partnerships for negative emission units are established. As countries look for new pathways to mitigate their CO2 emissions, the need to understand carbon sequestration and subsequent trading of negative emissions will grow. This provides a remarkable and timely opportunity for Kazakhstan and the countries of the wider Asian Dryland Belt to develop carbon sequestration and removal initiatives which not only support the domestic land and ecosystem restoration but also produce a tradeable commodity which promises sustainable demand in the long run. Kazakhstan can provide a model for sustainable agriculture in the Asian Dryland Belt and beyond, where land degradation, loss of biodiversity, water scarcity, and food insecurity are pressing concerns. The Eurasian Carbon Project therefore aims to enlarge its partner network in order to foster regional cooperation and expand the project activities to neighboring countries.
