Take on a podcast episode from The CDR Policy Scoop, originally published Sun, 24 Ma. Listen: https://shows.acast.com/the-cdr-policy-scoop/episodes/lulucf-carbon-farming-and-the-crcf-review-with-asger-strange

TL;DR

  • Carbon farming side of the CRCF (Carbon Removal Certification Framework) lacks the buyer momentum permanent removals have — no offtake equivalent of the Buyers Club in sight.
  • Olesen pushes “performance certificates” as the right instrument for land that stays in production: an inventory-aligned reporting unit, not a credit. Useful framing.
  • Strong claim: leakage and permanence have no role in this tool, and only simple stock-change additionality applies. Will be controversial but internally consistent.
  • EU bottom-up inventory logic vs SBTi FLAG’s top-down benchmark is a real collision course — first time I’ve seen it spelled out this cleanly.
  • Wishlist for Q4 national targets & flexibilities proposal: shift the buy-side obligation from member states to sectors/companies, keep Article 6 out, give CSRD↔CRCF a legal hook.

The CDR Policy Scoop, hosted by Sebastian Manhart and Eve Tamme, brings back Asger Strange Olesen (International Woodland Company, EU Carbon Removal Expert Group) to walk through where the carbon-farming half of the CRCF actually sits after the recent CRCF Days. It’s a policy-mechanics conversation: methodologies adopted (soil, peatlands, afforestation), why credits are the wrong tool for most European farmland, and what the upcoming CRCF review and Q4 flexibilities proposal need to deliver.

The load-bearing argument: for the share of European land that will remain in production — “land sharing” — voluntary carbon credits are a bad fit, because what’s needed is a million small management tweaks consistent with national inventories, not a counterfactual-driven payment that “made the farmer do it.” Olesen’s proposed instrument is a performance certificate: a third-party-attested document, issuable only by the landowner, certifying that a calculated net removal is consistent with the inventory standard. Downstream companies would use it to substantiate Scope 3 land-sector claims under CSRD/ESRS. Critically, he argues leakage and permanence safeguards should be deliberately excluded — if they’re imported from the credit world, “they’re going to kill it” — and additionality collapses to simple stock change. For wild/unmanaged land restoration (the other bucket), he concedes a voluntary carbon market logic still applies.

The second useful thread is the structural mismatch with SBTi FLAG (Forest, Land and Agriculture). SBTi distributes a global carbon budget top-down to farm-level benchmarks; the EU LULUCF (Land Use, Land-Use Change and Forestry) framework builds bottom-up from what’s actually on the plot. Olesen flags the absurd-but-real outcome: two foresters in the same valley, one on a south slope, one on a north slope, get the same benchmark and therefore opposite “performance” signals. He’s on the SBTi FLAG timber pathway expert group and is clear this gap won’t close in the next iteration.

For context, this episode pairs well with prior CDR Policy Scoop coverage of the permanent-removals Buyers Club and with Eve Tamme’s blog — Olesen references a post they co-authored roughly two years ago that previewed much of what’s now landing in the review. The performance certificate concept is also worth comparing against how Scope 3 reporting frameworks are evolving for land-intensive supply chains (food, fiber, timber), where there’s no real demand signal yet for any of this.

Useful for: EU policy folks tracking the CRCF review, anyone building MRV (monitoring, reporting, verification) for soil/peat/afforestation, and buyer-side teams trying to figure out whether their Scope 3 land claims will need a CRCF-linked unit by 2030.