Milestones
Carbon Farming in the Dry Land Belt of Northern Eurasia: Unlocking Win-win Opportunities
December 12th, 2024
Blue Zone, Boulevard Riyadh City, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
Land-based carbon sequestration is a promising strategy to scale up climate action through enhanced carbon removal in many countries of Northern Eurasia, including countries of Central Asia, such as Kazakhstan, with their largely underutilized, vast areas of steppes and semi-deserts. Carbon farming refers to land management practices at the farm level, which either increase absorption of the atmospheric carbon by soils and plant biomass or reduce emissions from activities in the Agriculture, Forestry, and Other Land Use (AFOLU) sector. With proper incentives in place – notably, carbon offset trading – the adoption of carbon farming by countries of the Dry Land Belt (DLB) of Northern Eurasia may simultaneously generate significant environmental, economic, and social benefits. This side event will involve leading experts and policy makers to discuss how carbon offset trading could be set up to scale up carbon farming activities in the DLB countries of Northern Eurasia, focusing, in particular, on Kazakhstan and other countries of Central Asia. The adoption of standards for developing & assessing carbon credit projects and for activities involving carbon removals from the atmosphere at the UNFCCC COP29 in Baku in November 2024 promises to ramp up demand for carbon credit projects and enhance their commercialization. This side event will explore how Kazakhstan and other Central Asian countries can proceed towards robust frameworks and strategies for implementing carbon farming initiatives. It will focus on leveraging the newly adopted standards to enable international carbon trading under Article 6 of the Paris Agreement, while also capitalizing on opportunities in voluntary carbon markets (VCMs) and national compliance carbon markets (CCMs). The objective should be to foster socio-economic development while making communities more resilient and supporting the countries’ commitment to combat land degradation and climate change.
Moderator and Speakers:
- Moderator: Elena Rovenskaya, Advancing Systems Analysis Program Director and Principal Research Scholar, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), Austria
- Welcoming remarks: Ahmed Alghamdi, Head, Department of Research and Innovation, National Center for Vegetation Cover Development and Combating Desertification (NCVC)
- Michael Obersteiner, Director, Environmental Change Institute, Oxford University, UK and Principal Research Scholar, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), Austria
- Alexey Ivanov, Director, BRICS Competition Law and Policy Centre, Russia and Scientific Supervisor, Carbon Testing Site ‘Pokrovsky’, Russia - online
- Barron Joseph Orr, Lead Scientist, UNCCD
- Murat Temirzhanov, Chairman of the Committee Land Resources Management, Ministry of Agriculture of the Republic of Kazakhstan
- Olga Andreeva, Program Officer Scientific Affairs, UNCCD
- Alexander Martusevich, Guest Research Scholar, IIASA, Austria – online
- Naif Alqahtani, National Center for Vegetation Cover Development and Combating Desertification
- Aiman Esekina, Director, Greenhouse Gas Inventory Department of JSC Zhasyl Damu, Kazakhstan – online
- Alexander Golub, Adjunct Professor, American University, USA – online
