Voluntary Carbon Market and Implications for Agriculture in the European Union

The theoretical study aims to define the main characteristics of the Voluntary Carbon Market (VCM) and to provide a detail on the current European situation and the implications for the agricultural sector. The European Commission’s current efforts to create a carbon certification scheme within the European Union’s boundaries are characterized only by a proposal that currently lacks suitable methodologies for quantifying emissions and potential sequestration from the agricultural sector. The lack of clear policy guidelines is also accompanied by a lack of scientific evidence on the real opportunities for farmers to participate in VCM. In contrast, the main barriers to carbon market access, which have been extensively analyzed by the research community, have been reported in the literature. The objective of our analysis is on the one hand to urge public institutions to propose easily implementable, monitorable and sustainable systems for carbon removal programs in the long term, and on the other hand to call upon the scientific community to focus its research lines on this topic in order to outline a favorable scenario for the agricultural sector.