Opportunities and potential for carbon projects and markets to support large-scale rangeland restoration through investments in rangeland carbon value chains

Rangeland ecosystems cover approximately 50% of the terrestrial Earth surface and store approximately one‐third of the world’s soil carbon. Restoration of degraded rangelands can significantly enhance soil carbon storage, potentially benefitting up to 2 billion people globally. Financial incentives to restore rangelands can help reverse degradation, support the livelihoods of rangeland producers and communities, and provide investors with profits as well as social and environmental impacts. Rangeland carbon projects face unique challenges: they are context‐specific, take place either on aggregated private properties or on large lands of people in communities who may or may not have secure land tenure, and experience highly variable rainfall, especially in deserts or other climatically unpredictable rangelands. These characteristics of rangelands and rangeland carbon projects can be overcome through evidence‐based technical preparation, durable social and institutional engagement and arrangements, and due diligence. This report reviews carbon projects focused on soil carbon storage or other land‐management‐based techniques to store carbon or reduce greenhouse gas emissions from rangelands around the world, from semi‐deserts with less than 300 mm rainfall annually to more than 2,000 mm in tropical rainforest areas. The projects are reviewed according to criteria including technical quality, the fit of methods and management practices to local conditions, local engagement and ethics, especially on community lands and in contexts with significant poverty or vulnerability, additionality, permanence, leakage, costs and risks, and impacts, economic and environmental.
The projects reviewed showed generally strong technical excellence and wide variations in the quality of social engagement and in the nature and magnitude of costs and risks. These factors significantly affect the quality of the carbon credits these projects generate. The ability of these projects to operate, generate income for producers, and deliver climate mitigation benefits depends significantly on the presence and quality of regulatory frameworks, especially at national and local levels. Addressing these enabling conditions and undertaking due diligence, technically as well as socially and institutionally, can reduce uncertainty and improve the quality of carbon credits, which should ultimately help maintain carbon credit market prices and build the value of carbon markets.