MARVIC is a Horizon Europe Soil Mission project, launched in June 2023 to support the EU Carbon Removal Certification Framework (CRCF) regulation, a crucial step in scaling up carbon removal activities and boost faith in European carbon farming schemes.
The main goal of MARVIC is to develop and test a framework for the design of harmonized, context-specific Monitoring, Reporting and Verification (MRV) systems for assessing soil carbon stock changes and GHG emissions in agriculture. These MRV systems should include three core features: (i) Alignment with EU CRCF regulations, (ii) Balancing costs and accuracy, (iii) Accounting for non-permanence risks.
MARVIC approach
For achieving accurate yet cost-effective MRV systems with minimum administrative burden, MARVIC investigates how different building blocks of (farm) data, sampling strategies, benchmark sites, models and remote and proximal sensing technologies could efficiently be connected into operational processing chains (OPCs).
With our context-specific approach, we recognize that across Europe there is a large variability of farm types and land management activities, pedo-climatic conditions, data accessibility, existing data infrastructure and user needs, including desired geographical coverage. Therefore, MARVIC works with 29 test cases in 12 different countries to understand the impact of these different contexts on choices for MRV design.