The EU Climate Advisory Board’s advice on carbon removals: What it means for agriculture
The European Union’s climate change advisory board’s recent recommendations on carbon removals are relevant for the bloc’s agriculture sector. They stress the importance of restoring carbon storage in agricultural land, but also leave the door open to carbon markets — despite their well-documented risks.
Carbon removals — activities meant to take carbon out of the atmosphere and store it elsewhere — are gaining prominence in policy discussions. For Europe, the conversation is driven, in part, by the bloc’s legally binding target of achieving climate neutrality by 2050 and net-negative emissions thereafter.
To achieve neutrality, the EU will need to counterbalance all remaining greenhouse gas emissions by activities that sequester and store carbon from the atmosphere. After 2050, the EU should sequester more carbon than it emits. However, reaching these goals is challenging, especially as the EU’s natural carbon absorption capacity has been declining in recent years, largely due to forests under pressure from intensive harvesting and impacts of climate change.
The EU must also establish a 2040 emissions reduction target, which the European Commission will seek to set down in law shortly, and develop a set of policies to meet it, expected in early 2026.
In February 2025, the European Scientific Advisory Board on Climate Change, the body tasked with providing advice on climate-related issues to the EU, released recommendations on the role of both land-based and technological carbon removals, particularly in relation to the 2040 target. While the report does consider agricultural land — which makes up about 38% of the EU’s total land use — its primary focus related to land use is forestry. Exactly how its recommendations should apply to the agricultural context is not always clear. The Advisory Board will explore the agricultural context in a dedicated report due out later this year.
This blog unpacks the Board’s key recommendations as they relate to agriculture, how they stack up against current policy developments and how best the Advisory Board’s agricultural report later this year could advance action in the sector.
Reverse the decline in Europe’s land sink and restoring carbon storage in resilient agricultural soils
Historically, the EU’s land sector has absorbed and stored more carbon than it emits each year, due to its vast forests. Yet, this storage capacity has shrunk significantly over the last years, due primarily to overharvesting and natural disturbances. Agricultural land has been a net emitter throughout this period — though emissions have declined over the last decades — due to drainage of wetlands and peatlands for agricultural use as well as poor soil management. Climate change exacerbates this issue.
The Advisory Board underscores the urgent need to halt and reverse the decline of EU’s land sink, a concern echoed by the European Environmental Agency and the Joint Research Centre. For agricultural land, specifically, they noted that there is long-term potential to turn peatlands into a net sink again and increase the absorptive capacity in soils. Beyond restoring carbon storage, it is critical to preserve the remaining carbon stocks in both agricultural land and forests.
Improving the resilient land sink requires more than just a carbon-focused approach, but should also consider broader sustainability issues, like restoring biodiversity.
Price land emissions
To address the declining land sink, the Board recommends creating a pricing mechanism for land emissions and sequestration. Introducing such a system would necessitate a certification framework to measure and verify carbon storage accurately.
The Board recognizes that certification of land-based sequestration presents significant challenges, including accurately measuring carbon storage, setting correct baselines to certify only additional sequestration, and addressing the temporary nature and reversibility of carbon sequestration in soils and plants.
The report also highlights that there remain uncertainties regarding whether the Carbon Removal Certification Framework and its methodologies — put forward by the Commission as the policy framework to provide the rules for such certification — will adequately address the issues.
Addressing these issues is essential to ensure the environmental integrity of the system and are exacerbated if any certified removals are allowed to be traded on a broader carbon market, thus allowing carbon sequestration to offset emissions.
The problem is exemplified by the Board’s warning that storing carbon in soil or plants is often falsely presented as a cheap option when, in reality, relying on temporary offset credits to cancel out emissions creates a costly cycle of renewing or replacing offsets.
Researchers argue that offsetting with carbon storage in trees and soils is creating “a discourse that makes net zero seem like a relatively easy thing to accomplish at relatively low costs.” Yet, analysis from CarbonPlan further illustrates the high long-term costs of temporary offsets.
Given these limitations, the Board advises against integrating land-based sequestration with fossil emission reduction targets or emission trading markets — unless all challenges can be properly addressed. However, it acknowledges that resolving these problems may never be feasible.
Additionally, the Board reaffirms that the EU should meet its climate targets domestically, rather than relying on international removal offsets, a critical point as the European Commission’s 2040 climate proposal may allow the use of international offsets.
Expecting the CRCF to deliver is a risky strategy
While tackling soil carbon loss is undoubtedly a critical task — not only for its climate benefits, but also as good soil health is a critical resource for producing food — the Board’s policy recommendations raise several questions.
The Advisory Board recognizes that the details for the implementation of the Carbon Removal Certification Framework — the supposed basis for any pricing system — are still being developed and leave room for uncertainty around whether the guidance will meet the outlined requirements.
Doubts remain about whether the framework will deliver on its promises. Independent assessments from organizations such as the Oeko-Institute and CarbonPlan have flagged shortcomings in the draft methodologies. These include the risk of overestimating carbon sequestration — a problem that has plagued carbon markets since their inception.
Building on the Advisory Board’s recognition that restoring healthy and resilient ecosystems requires standards that go beyond carbon, the report also criticizes the EU’s new Carbon Removal Certification law for its lack of measurable sustainability indicators.
Relying on the CRCF to address the challenges is a risky strategy.
Additionally, while the Board recommends keeping temporary removals from forests separate from emissions trading until certification issues are resolved, it is less clear whether it would also apply this principle to an emissions trading system for agricultural emissions. Potential options for an emissions trading system for agriculture that could include sequestration are already being studied by the European Commission. The Advisory Board simply notes its past advice on considering such options and points to its forthcoming agriculture report.
While setting up an emissions trading system for agricultural emissions comes with its own challenges, integrating sequestration is a risky decision, not at least because it could result in delayed emission reductions in a sector that is yet to show progress in cutting its emissions level.
The Board highlights its alignment with the IPCC on its stance that removals should not replace emissions cuts, yet its recommendations leave room for ambiguity.
Rather than pursuing an overly complex certification and offsetting system, a more effective approach would be to directly fund soil management practices. The German Environment Agency, for instance, recommends avoiding integration into offset markets and instead providing targeted financial support for sustainable farming.
The Board’s recommendations were anything but clear that a market-based approach would be the silver bullet to address the agricultural land sink. The Board’s chair, Ottmar Edenhofer, emphasized that the discussed options are far from being a blueprint ready for implementation, requiring careful consideration to not undermine existing systems.
Looking forward: Build on its own advice in a comprehensive manner
The report also reiterated the Board’s 2024 recommendations on actions needed to achieve the EU’S 2030 and 2050 climate targets. These included a broad policy mix for the agricultural sector, centered on measures to reduce livestock production, shift to healthier diets based on plant-based foods, and reform the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) to better support climate-friendly farming while eliminating subsidies for highly polluting practices.
As part of its recently released Vision of the Future for Agriculture and Food, the European Commission will launch a new work stream on livestock. It will also present its proposal for the next CAP framework later this year.
The Board should use its upcoming report on agriculture to elaborate on its past recommendations and provide guidance on what a sustainable livestock strategy would look like and the elements for a just transition to more extensive and climate friendly livestock production, how to create new farm products markets, especially for pluviculture, as well as on possibilities to better support climate-friendly agriculture through the CAP to ensure a just transition of the sector. The Strategic Dialogue on the Future of EU Agriculture made several recommendations that the Advisory Board could build on.
It should also heed its own advice on all of the requirements to ensure the environmental integrity of any certification framework for agricultural soils and avoid mitigation deterrence when considering any pricing mechanism for an agricultural emissions trading system.
A single emissions trading system for agriculture would be inadequate to address the sector’s complexity. Denmark’s recent agricultural transition agreement demonstrates that different challenges require different solutions — no one-size-fits-all policy can work.
As the EU moves forward, policies must ensure that land-based carbon removals support biodiversity, soil health, and just transitions for farmers — without being used as an excuse to delay emissions cuts.
