Svensk Kolinlagring: Sequestering Carbon Back into Soil

The alarm bells have been sounding for a long time around climate change. Less widely recognized is the growing concern about declines in soil health. While these issues may seem separate, they are deeply interconnected. But for now, let’s focus on climate. As a global community, we have less than seven years to halve our emissions to avoid the worst climate change effects—and even that won’t be enough. We need to immediately start sequestering carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.  

Svensk Kolinlagring is on a mission to help us. The initiative is presented as Sweden’s first carbon farming program, transforming the food system towards agroecological farming. They have built a ​​system that pays farmers for sequestering carbon from the atmosphere and storing it in the soil. Their business model aims to create a regenerative economy that contributes positively to the environment and society, by using carbon as a proxy to address a range of interconnected challenges. The solution shifts the focus away from mere compensation and carbon offsetting; instead, it emphasizes responsibility. Partners won’t be able to just “offset” their carbon—they will have to actually make a change. 

The initiative functions as a living lab, where through economic incentives, knowledge sharing, collaboration, and research, participants work towards carbon-sequestering agriculture with added values such as increased soil health, biodiversity, and improved conditions for Swedish farmers.  

Soil carbon is an indicator of soil health, and necessary for growing food. Adequate levels of carbon in soil provide better water retention, increased fertility, and resilience. Moving carbon from the air to the soil is the initiative’s entry point, a way to also work with biodiversity, nitrogen and phosphorus cycles, water issues, climate adaptation, resilience, and favorable economic conditions in agriculture. The initiative started in 2018, launched their first pilot round in 2020, and are currently setting up five-year harvest cycles on an increasing number of farms.  

Svensk Kolinlagring claims that the biggest hurdle is that farmers do not have enough incentives to transition to carbon sequestering practices, nor is there a process of collaboration that facilitates the transition. Since the infrastructure—farmers and arable land—is already in place, Svensk Kolinlagring focuses on creating the incentive. Unlike other organizations working on carbon sequestration as a revenue for impact investors, Svensk Kolinlagring states they have a mission-driven approach and work with inclusive stakeholder collaboration. They have also developed their own framework to ensure credibility and effectiveness, which includes a set of criteria to measure and verify the impacts of various practices over time on a systemic level.  

Around 40 farms across Sweden are already active with 100 waiting to join. By 2024, roughly a hundred companies had committed to make contributions by buying carbon credits and transformation credits, or by financing the initiative’s educational platforms or the establishment of new research sites.  

Where many others focus on reductionist methods and models, the initiative is convinced that the farming system needs to be treated and modeled as the complex living system that it is. Their standards are designed to be additional, ensuring that sequestration efforts provide and long-term benefits for all stakeholders. Finally, Svensk Kolinlagring employs the “doughnut economics” framework, which combines planetary boundaries with social foundations. Ultimately, Svensk Kolinlagring works for a long-term transition to agroecological, carbon-storing, and regenerative farming practices—a food system within planetary boundaries. 

Learn more about Svensk Kolinlagring.

Written by Sarah Souli
Images provided by Svensk Kolinlagring

Photo by Jesper Sandström

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