Quels outils pour mesurer l’impact de la transition agroécologique au Nord et au Sud ?

To mitigate the climate change, one of the levers recognized by the IPCC consists of the adoption of agricultural production methods which promote carbon sequestration in soils, improve their health and resilience, thanks, in particular, to agroecology. The "monitoring - evaluation" systems (Monitoring Reporting Verifying, MRV[1]) are one of the keys to encouraging investment and financing for this agroecological transition. They enable project management, traceability of practices and/or products resulting from them and measurement of their impacts.  

What impact measurement tools are available today? For which stakeholders? What methods and indicators are they based on? The International 4 per 1000 Initiative and the FARM Foundation co-organized a multi-stakeholder day of reflection on November 14, 2023 in Montpellier to answer these questions. FARM and “4 per 1000” take stock of the exchanges between actors in the agricultural world, public policies, the private sector and research.

Impact Measurement Tools – Why Do We Need Them?

•  Tools to build trust

Trust between stakeholders in the supply chain, from upstream to downstream, is a prerequisite for building a balanced and attractive economic relationship for farmers. MRV tools could thus be a means of establishing or strengthening trust between farmers, certifiers, financiers, entrepreneurs and citizens. However, these systems must be reliable, usable in the field, transparent, consistent and affordable in terms of cost. These tools would then allow for recognition of the services provided by producers to society and in fine to support the remuneration of work at its fair value, thus promoting a virtuous circle of agroecological transition.

• Tools for transitions

Farmers, private companies working with agricultural sectors, public authorities, research organizations, and NGOs agree on the need to initiate an agroecological transition. The need to develop MRV tools to support this transition is shared by all. On the one hand, decision-makers need to monitor the progress of this transition through a consolidated vision. On the other hand, farmers, who are the first to be affected by the actions to be taken on their land, need much more operational management tools that provide results consistent with field observations.

However, the multi-criteria assessment (technical, environmental, economic, and social) of the transition, through a combination of agricultural practices, poses a methodological challenge. Can these be the same tools? Clearly, the answer is currently negative. While they share the same goal of general interest, the tools must necessarily be adapted to the strategies and objectives specific to each actor.

• Heterogeneous MRV tools serving actor strategies at different scales

The farmers are the basis of the value chain and agricultural sectors. It is essential that impact measurement tools translate and reflect the efforts and progress of farmers in their agroecological transition. These tools are expected to be means of support for farmers, the adaptation and resilience of their farms. To this end, they must be understandable, integrate operational indicators at the farm level, be accessible and easy to share among peers to demonstrate an economically attractive transition. In this regard, training that would allow farmers to appropriate the tools and concepts should be considered.

On a territorial scale, these tools are of interest for measuring progress or levels of soil performance, for example their fertility or resilience to drought.

Further downstream in the sectors, companies are also adopting MRV systems to manage their supplies and change their suppliers' practices. Examples include projects aimed at achieving carbon neutrality for dairy farms in the European Union. These are also ways for these companies to build roadmaps as part of their CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) commitments and evaluate their results. Generally speaking, within companies, there is an interest, particularly of an educational nature, in providing tools that allow employees and stakeholders to better collaborate around common objectives.

While MRV tools are necessary for evaluating practices, they are crucial for defining directions and taking action. They can be particularly powerful when they enable forward-looking thinking. The data and results acquired can serve as a basis for imagining new scenarios based on new agricultural practices and for simulating trajectories at the scale of the plot (or plots) or territories.

Transition actions and projects that involve public funding (those of multilateral or bilateral financing banks, or governments, for example) are subject to accountability, with regard to the sustainable development objectives. Evaluation methods can be shared between the different donors. However, their adoption at the field level by farmers, or even their financial advisors, is not a given.

Finally, to respond to the multiplicity of strategies and targets to which these tools are addressed, the methods and tools will, a priori, be different. Nevertheless, what would be the common determinants?

How to build a good tool for managing the agroecological transition?

• Involving farmers

If the vast majority of stakeholders agree on the common objective of agriculture fully fulfilling its role as a contributor to solutions to climate change, the agroecological transition is in itself a complex subject, where many factors come into play (technical, economic, social). Producers are at the center of this transformation. We must ensure that we build with them a development strategy to enable them to achieve economically viable results. This strategy must be comprehensive, systemic and consistent with the economic and technical dimensions, to avoid dead ends. The results of these strategies will be evaluated by the tool reporting, which involves involving farmers in the development of methods and indicators.

A relevant scale to implement and measure these transitions could be agricultural soil. because it brings together environmental issues (soil life, biodiversity, water management and carbon sequestration), economic and heritage issues (land, asset value for a farmer, transmission). But where to start? The market is clearly giving priority today to the climate issue, and therefore to carbon. Is this the only possible entry point?

• Drawing inspiration from carbon MRVs?

MRV tools have contributed to the progressive structuring of the carbon market and the results of this experience should provide food for thought to create tools to support the agroecological transition. It is, in fact, by relying on technical and environmental indicators that we can then assign a value to an action or a product to remunerate them. However, they only provide a partial answer. In France, the conditions for deploying these instruments have evolved since 2019 for various reasons: difficulties in setting up reliable and attractive carbon credit sales and purchases, regulations, downstream expectations, etc.

Today, cooperatives and downstream stakeholders are moving away from the production/sale of carbon credits and focusing more on diagnostic tools to supply reporting (SBTi standard Science-Based Target initiative for example). However, this path seems less motivating for engaging producers in a long-term change of practices. Especially since the other environmental issues of the transition (biodiversity, soil life) are relegated to the background, or even absent from these tools.

If we are considering an efficient transition management tool that can lead to action, we must look at other issues.

• Identify the right indicators and build the right models

Prior to building a monitoring tool, it is necessary to identify indicators keys, shared (if not harmonized) and allow comparisons on an international level.

– First, the data used for the evaluation must be measured and acquired. Scientific rigor in data production is a guarantee of confidence for stakeholders. It is necessary to know the margins of error or uncertainty in order to identify the limits of use. The work of making the data reliable, correcting biases, and cross-referencing sources internationally will make it possible to determine their scope and framework of use. To date, field measurements are not widely available because they are expensive to obtain. Those that do exist are often based on the conventional agricultural model and must necessarily be contextualized (agropedoclimatic conditions, crop history, etc.). These limitations explain why many transition tools today rely on declarative data, which is less objective (which limits its scope) but just as useful.

– Secondly, based on the data, and because it is not always possible (technically or economically) to measure everything everywhere, it is useful, even essential, to develop models. Satellite imagery, remote sensing and artificial intelligence technologies open up complementary modelling perspectives. However, on a global scale, the lack of relevant models, particularly those adapted to the specificities of developing countries, remains significant.

– The question of the articulation of the different models between them also arises.

Finally, let us remember that indicators are defined according to the levels of requirement that will be expected of them by the protagonists. When one (or more) of them accepts a higher level of risk, a lower level of requirement can be considered. Farmers, who today assume the majority of the risks associated with the agroecological transition, want simple and operational indicators.

• Harmonize the tools?

Many MRV tools exist, developed by public, financial, industrial or startup stakeholders.[2]. Considering a harmonization of these MRV tools seems ambitious given their significant differences and specific purposes. They are particularly related to the contexts of use (carbon market, public policies, CSR policies, etc.), the scale at which they apply, the geographies and the agricultural systems concerned. The inventory work undertaken by Deloitte (accessible on the “4 per 1000” website from 1^er quarter of 2024) is an interesting first step.

Transparency of the methodologies used, particularly for the tools built in open source, will also constitute a condition for their dissemination and appropriation. It will thus allow us to move towards a certain harmonization.

• Managing complexity

The agroecological transition involves mechanisms complexes, both technical, economic and social, over a long period of time.

We can already list the difficulties to be overcome:

– Farmers' mastery of tools. The tools deployed to monitor this transition require specialized skills; farmers are now dependent on external stakeholders who possess this expertise.

– The need to design dynamic tools. It is important not to set fixed criteria, and to establish collaborative governance that allows these tools to evolve and adapt, with farmers.

To understand the complexity of the agroecological transition and implement relevant MRV tools, several conditions must be met:

– Work in partnership : Multi-stakeholder networks are more effective than isolated and compartmentalized initiatives.

– A good MRV tool must be based on science. Researchers have a key role to play in clarifying and ensuring the rigor of the measurements on which the models will be based.

A need for regulation is also felt in the face of the complexity of the agroecological transition. public authorities must be guarantors of the executives of application and use, via the regulations, the separation of roles between actors (for example between accounting, auditing and certification) and mobilizing aid or incentives to guide the market. However, it is also important to recognizethe role of private actors who know how to build tools adapted to the needs of beneficiaries.

• Building viable economic models for financing the transition

The deployment of impact measurement tools currently faces high implementation costs. It must meet a demand: without a market, it is difficult to envisage sustainable financing for new agricultural production systems. But it often happens that the cost of the monitoring tool exceeds the amount of financial incentive offered to farmers by the market or public authorities to secure their agroecological transition. If information and reporting are necessary, they cannot be done at the expense of financing training, investments in farms or the implementation of mechanisms to cover the risks of yield loss, for example. The cost of supporting transitions – and in particular MRV tools – and the difficulties of accessing financing, present a real obstacle to scaling up.

To ensure that the conditions for transition are met on farms, several levers must be combined:

– It is essential that all players in the value chain contribute to the co-construction of the economic model of the transition.

– The establishment of regulatory mechanisms by public authorities to establish a framework conducive to the agroecological transition.

– Fair remuneration for the efforts and results obtained by producers, which involves taking into account real production costs and achieving a decent level of income.

– Payment to farmers for ecosystem services provided to society through public subsidies or through remuneration on the markets (in the framework of the carbon market for example or another market to be created on other common goods), in addition to and not as a substitute for their basic income.

• Finally, the redefinition of investment criteria for financial players who have the power to direct efforts towards the most virtuous agricultural practices and curb the development of negative impact agriculture.

Conclusion

The key to building tools to measure the impact of the agroecological transition lies in the ability of stakeholders to collaborate and build partnerships that transcend their operational frameworks and constraints. Scientists, public authorities, private stakeholders, and producers share the goal of addressing the problems of climate change and biodiversity loss through agriculture while feeding a growing global population.

MRV tools will help to effectively support transitions as they enable both restore confidence between these protagonists and to increase their capacity for action. For this, the transparency in the construction of these tools and the regulation of their uses are essential. These are areas for mobilizing all stakeholders, including producers who are the first to be affected. This is the condition for these tools to be adapted to agriculture and farmers around the world.

Discover the complete summary of this Conference: Impact measurement tools for the agroecological transition

[2] For example:

• THE Carbon Benefits Project offers tools for assessing carbon stocks in agricultural and forest soils and greenhouse gas emissions (developed by the University of Colorado as part of a project co-financed by the Global Environment Facility (GEF) and implemented by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP)).
• The tool proposed by Genesis, a pioneering company in measuring the sustainability of agricultural practices, environmental impact and soil health.
• ABC Map, a geospatial application for holistically assessing the environmental impact of projects, policies, national plans and investments in the agricultural and forestry sector (developed by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) with support from the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and AfD).