What Monitoring, Reporting, Verification (MRV) Systems Can Reduce Costs and Enhance Scalability of Carbon Farming?

Vanderheyden, Lisa;Van den Broeck, Goedele
(2025) Belgian Environmental Economics Day 2025 — Location: Bruxelles (7.February.2025)

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With the growing emphasis on results-based payments in environmental monitoring of agricultural practices, developing reliable and cost-effective monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV) systems has become critical. This holds particularly for carbon farming, where existing methods to monitor soil carbon storage are often inaccurate or prohibitively expensive. This paper examines the factors driving MRV costs for results-based payments in carbon farming. We develop a cost model for four MRV systems: decision support tools, remote sensing-based models, process-based models and direct soil measurement. Using scenario and sensitivity analyses, we quantify substantial cost variations depending on the monitoring approach, project design, and protocol standards, indicating potential burdens on farmers. While process-based models may emerge as the standard in future carbon markets, concerns about economic viability and labour intensity persist. Innovations like digitalisation, long-term experimental sites and remote sensing hold promise for reducing costs, but policy support is likely required to ensure the scalability of MRV systems, especially for smaller farms. Our findings are relevant to ongoing policy discussions, such as the European Union’s Carbon Removal Certification Framework. From a methodological perspective, our generic cost model can be used to estimate the MRV costs across various environmental monitoring systems.
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Vanderheyden, L., & Van den Broeck, G. (2025). What Monitoring, Reporting, Verification (MRV) Systems Can Reduce Costs and Enhance Scalability of Carbon Farming? Belgian Environmental Economics Day 2025, Bruxelles. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/260281