The pathway to a carbon market for EU farming: Requirements for monitoring, reporting and verification

This paper aims to find the main regulatory challenges for integrating agricultural emissions in emission trading in the EU with a focus on Monitoring, Reporting and Verification (MRV). First, we will sketch the development of MRV within the EU ETS and discuss the main requirements (section 2). Second, we will focus on the specifics of MRV with agricultural emissions: what are the particularities and challenges, and what are the legal steps that need to be taken for MRV to be robust and reliable (section 3)? Third, we turn to the jurisdiction of California where agricultural emissions are included in a carbon pricing mechanisms to discover how MRV has been regulated and test our findings against the requirements for robust and reliable MRV developed in section 3 (section 4).