Soil Carbon Public Consultation Summary Fall 2025
During Fall 2025, BCarbon conducted a public consultation on Soil Carbon Protocol Version 3.0 to gather feedback from landowners, scientists, project developers, and other stakeholders. The consultation focused on strengthening scientific rigor, improving clarity for project participants, and ensuring the protocol supports credible and scalable soil carbon projects.
The key topics of discussion included sampling and stratification methods, additionality, laboratory methods, and monitoring.
Respondents emphasized the importance of avoiding sampling areas influenced by localized land management activities to avoid confounded results. Additional feedback recommended clearer guidance on stratification methods, including improved use of soil maps, geologic data, and statistical validation of sampling distributions. Several comments highlighted challenges in demonstrating additionality, particularly for landowners who have long practiced conservation or soil-building methods. Others asked for the BCarbon team to share its perspective on potential incorporation of new technologies.
Please see the section below for more detailed responses to key questions.
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BCarbon will continue analyzing how to implement new technology. For now, BCarbon remains committed to its measurement-first approach and will only accept laboratory results as part of the submissions for baseline and true-up measurements. Other approaches will be reviewed and potentially accepted for interim crediting.
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Yes, BCarbon has accepted recommendations to exclude certain areas influenced by land management actions such as input storage areas (e.g. fuel, fertilizer, oil), parking areas, livestock concentration (e.g. feeding areas, corrals), barns, and homesites. These changes can be seen in the latest version of the protocol.
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Validation and Verification Bodies (VVBs) approved by BCarbon will be publicly displayed on our website, and project developers will be able to choose from the available options. For more details regarding the validation and verification process, please refer to our Validation and Verification policy.
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Our full additionality framework can be found here. While we understand this framework can present some challenges, we have decided to align with international standards (which require a traditional additionality approach) to drive growth and marketability of the carbon credit projects under BCarbon.