The top 30 centimeters of the world’s soils contain nearly twice the carbon of Earth’s atmosphere.

Sustaining and restoring soils can mitigate GHG emissions through enhanced carbon sequestration. These practices have the added benefit of promoting habitat conservation, sustainable food production, and flood resilience. BCarbon’s Soil Carbon Protocol provides a measurement-based approach to quantifying and crediting increases in soil organic carbon while safeguarding soil’s other essential functions.

Read our Protocol here.

This document defines methods for quantifying the increase in soil organic carbon achieved over time on a property with the necessary statistical reliability to support the issuance and sale of carbon credits. The 6-step process, addressing site selection and stratification, quantification of the accrued carbon mass, and interim credit estimates, is summarized in the graphic below. Equivalent methods not included in this standard may be applied subject to approval by BCarbon.

Supplementary material

For projects that aim to measure both soil and forest carbon, please review our Soil & Forest Guidance Document.

Have questions?

Click here to access our Soil Carbon Protocol FAQ.

Sources/further reading: FAO; EEA; Smith 2012; Bossio et al. 2020; Oldfield et al. 2022

Thanks to GSI Environmental Inc. and the BCarbon Soil Metrics Subcommittee for their support in the development of this Protocol.