Pilot 6 Locale: Why Global?
- Food Industry: Our actual food chains have been following the same globalised trend as their figurative versions in industry, retail, trade etc.. Almost nowhere is self-sufficient in food, so we all rely on international, cross-border networks.
- Agriculture: Even farmers, at the top of the food chain, are obliged to be connected to the rest of the world. Rich-nation farmers buy their feed from overseas and/or sell to foreign markets. Poor-nation farmers import their seed, fertilizer and machinery, and expert their cash crops.
- Carbon focus: Agricultural policy differs widely from country to country, usually usually driven by local political and cultural factors. Climate considerations are starting to enter the mix, but useful data is scarce. A molecule of methane has the same climate impact wherever it is emitted, so building a global dataset using the same metric will help us all plot a shorter route to a sustainable future.
Pilot 6 Scope: Why Farming?
- Emissions: Our food system generates around a third of total greenhouse gas emissions. We can live without, say, aviation or AI (both around 3% of total emissions), and we survived for all but 200 of our 300,000 years without fossil fuels, but we all have to eat. Any sustainable future must tackle food chain emissions.
- Practicality: Any complex supply chain makes it hard to know where best to start measuring any individual entity’s carbon footprint. Chains are, by their nature, interconnected, and every link of the chain from field to fork has its own suppliers and customers network. The food industry is particularly complex, so starting at the growing end of the food chain is pragmatic.
- Technical: Farming presents a particularly difficult challenge for carbon footprint calculation, meriting its own Pilot. An entity’s carbon footprint is ‘simply’ the net weight of greenhouse gas, in tonnes, it sends into the atmosphere. Most farms would technically qualify under Pilot 1 as SMEs, but farming’s complex, organic nature makes calculating their footprints — and coming with solutions to reduce them, radically different.
- Generic Methodology: See Through Carbon describes the methodologies it uses for different Pilots in detail on its website, and our Expert Panel updates them as new best practice, research or data emerge. Most regulators, like the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive or the UK Government’s Carbon Reduction Plan are based on the Greenhouse Gas Protocol (GHGP) carbon footprint model.
- Specialist Methodology: Most farms require more specialised data collection for accurate and fair emissions calculation. Our Expert Panel is reviewing the best available models to determine which one, or which elements of different models, to integrate into See Through Carbon’s Pilot data collection form.
- Insetting: A good example of farming’s unique reporting challenges is carbon insetting. Farmers have far more insetting potential, than, say, a steel trader, school, fashion brand, or café.
- Dynamic improvement: As a free, open, transparent ecosystem, See Through Carbon makes all its methodology public, publishes correspondence with regulators regarding compliance, and encourages public scrutiny. The Expert Panel determining STC methodology is motivated purely by accuracy, not commercial concerns about arriving at ‘acceptable’ outcomes. This enables STC to incorporate best practice, and new research, and give participants confidence they’re ‘ahead of the game’ when it comes to carbon reporting.
Pilot 6 Partners: Who might collaborate?
- Farmers’ Collectives: neighbouring farmers routinely have formal or information arrangements to share or swap machinery, mutual support during holidays or emergencies, or bulk buy. These provide a natural vector for expanding participants, and the fact that they are geographical neighbours, likely involved in similar sectors (arable/livestock/horticulture/forestry etc.) will add a useful level of nuance and granularity to researchers accessing See Through Carbon’s public database.
- Betting The Farm: See Through Carbon has unique, exclusive access to other resources of sibling See Through network programmes See Through Together (social media content) and See Through News (journalism and outreach). This See Through News article How To Get Farmers To Reduce CO2 When They Don’t Have To explains See Through Together’s innovative idea to use Pilot 6 participation as a prize in a reality TV game show being developed by STT. Farmers are usually wary of more paperwork, especially if it’s not (yet) a legal requirement. Betting The Farm’s
contestants, selected randomly in the UK and Japan, so far has a 100% take-up rate. - Ben Law’s Woodland Year: Trees, whether agroforestry, silviculture, clear-fell forestry or coppicing, play a critical role in our path to sustainability. This See Through News article Ben Law’s Woodland Year — a documentary seed matures describes how the Ben Law’s Woodland Year Playlist on See Through Together’s YouTube channel can provide both significant reach is advertising the Pilot, and in targeting tree-intensive participants.
