Exploring Climate-Smart Land Management for Atlantic Europe

Core Ideas: Managing soil organic carbon is an essential aspect of climate-smart agriculture. Combining component research, we derive a soil carbon management concept for Ireland. Optimized soil carbon management is differentiated in accordance with soil type. Existing policy tools can be tailored to incentivize climate-smart land management. Soils can be a sink or source of carbon, and managing soil carbon has significant potential to partially offset agricultural greenhouse gas emissions. While European Union (EU) member states have not been permitted to account for this offsetting potential in their efforts to meet the EU 2020 reduction targets, this policy is now changing for the period 2020 to 2030, creating a demand for land management plans aimed at maximizing the offsetting potential of land. In this letter, we derive a framework for climate-smart land management in the Atlantic climate zone of the EU by combining the results from five component research studies on various aspects of the carbon cycle. We show that the options for proactive management of soil organic carbon differ according to soil type and that a spatially tailored approach to land management will be more effective than blanket policies.