Carbon Farming: An Expository, Inter-Disciplinary Survey

V. Priyanka, Geetha Charan, Rohit P. Suresh, Thandava Sunkara, Manojkumar Patil, Kartik Sagar, Aashman Trivedi, K. Soumya, Subir Paul, Parashuram Hadimani, Ganesh Babu, Ravi Trivedi and Yadati Narahari

Papers from arXiv.org

Abstract: Carbon farming is the collection of agricultural best practices specifically designed to maximize the capture and long-term storage of atmospheric carbon dioxide in soils and plant biomass, while simultaneously reducing greenhouse gas emissions from cultivation practices. Carbon farming can be viewed as a promising pathway to simultaneously address climate change mitigation, soil degradation, and farmer welfare. For example, if the entire agricultural cropland in India practices carbon farming, this will spectacularly offset about 50% of emissions from the country's annual transport-sector emissions. However, practical deployment of carbon farming is constrained by scientific challenges, inherent complexity, and fragmented understanding across disciplines. This inter-disciplinary, expository survey offers the first unified treatment of carbon farming for practitioners, policymakers, and researchers. The survey integrates insights from agronomy, soil science, climate science, measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV), economics, carbon markets, and policy design. We begin by establishing the conceptual foundations of soil organic carbon dynamics and agricultural carbon sequestration, and compare carbon farming with the paradigms of sustainable, regenerative, and organic agriculture. We then present a comprehensive landscape analysis of carbon-farming best practices, including both generic and crop-specific interventions, and systematically examine their co-benefits and trade-offs. The paper offers a rigorous review of MRV frameworks, emerging digital MRV technologies, and the carbon-credit project life cycle, followed by a structured analysis of voluntary and compliance carbon markets...

Date: 2026-03, Revised 2026-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Published in Journal of the Indian Institute of Science (2026)

Downloads: (external link)
http://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.20674 Latest version (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:arx:papers:2603.20674

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Papers from arXiv.org
Bibliographic data for series maintained by arXiv administrators ().