Major farm carbon calculators commit to harmonisation

Three leading carbon calculator providers have agreed to harmonise their different methodologies for monitoring greenhouse gas emissions on farm.

Farm Carbon Toolkit, Agrecalc, and Cool Farm Alliance have all signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU), which will see the companies work closer together on their carbon calculation products.

NFU president Tom Bradshaw took to social media to welcome the initiative.

He said: “Harmonisation of carbon calculators is absolutely essential in delivering accurate, repeatable and representative results.”

See also: How Arable Insights farmers approach carbon opportunities

Defra released its Harmonisation of Carbon Accounting Tools for Agriculture report earlier this year, which featured the three carbon calculators and several other tools from industry.

The report was produced on Defra’s behalf by Adas and provided seven recommendations to encourage harmonisation between the different calculators.

All three parties will retain commercial independence, but will work in unison to address some of the Adas recommendations.

The focus will be on helping the agricultural industry to accurately measure and reduce emissions.

Farm Carbon Toolkit chief executive Liz Bowles said: “This commitment underscores our dedication to maintaining high-quality standards and ensuring environmental sustainability in our operations, and in calculation outputs.

“We are not seeking to reach a point where all three calculators will produce the same answer for any given dataset.

“Rather, we are striving to make it possible for users to fully understand why different calculators produce different answers.”

Agrecalc chief executive Scott Davies said: “It is intended that we agree on a common set of data sources which all three calculators will use.

“All calculators can go beyond these baseline requirements, and all parties to this MOU will retain their commercial independence.

“We will also involve the relevant government and other organisations’ teams with our work plan as we develop it.”

Cool Farm Alliance chief executive Richard Profit said: “We are looking forward to this collaboration, as it will help align methodologies where that makes sense and that will especially allow us to look into new areas that require attention.

“How we then incorporate the new information in our calculators will vary from calculator to calculator as a result of our different base approaches.”