Assessment Challenges
Additionality
Additionality is a well established concept in the field of greenhouse gas reduction and carbon offsetting. It became prominent as a key concept of the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) and Joint Implementation (UNFCCC, 2010). Additionality means that for assessing a specific intervention, only those outcomes should be considered that are additional to what would have happened without the intervention. For example, to evaluate the benefits of a campaign to save energy, only behavioural changes caused by the campaign should be considered, while reductions in energy consumption caused by technological progress should be ignored.The concept is fundamental for designing and evaluating result based payment schemes, such as carbon farming schemes or payments for ecosystem services.
The assessment of additionality can be a challenging task. In the following sections, an overview of the concept and some assessment tools are presented.
A project to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is considered additional, if the greenhouse gas emission reductions or removals would not have occurred in the absence of the associated policy intervention or activity (IPCC, 2022).
An example for this could be a policy intervention which awards financial benefits to farmers applying no-till management methods. This effect of the intervention is the additional amount of farmers applying no-till methods compared to a scenario without the intervention. Possible reasons why farmers could also shift to no-till practices without an intervention include: attractive offers for no-till machinery, high energy prices, or unsuitable soil conditions for tilling.
Overall, additionality is a matter of causation (World Bank, 2016). Does a specific intervention cause the desired effects and if so, how much of the effect is due to the intervention and how much due to other factors. Therefore, additionality is not a comparison of before and after the intervention, but rather a comparison of scenarios ‘with’ and ‘without’ the intervention (Thamo & Pannell, 2016).
Additionality is a key criteria for results based payments, including the application of carbon credits, carbon farming (Paul et al., 2023), or payments for ecosystem services. Essentially, the concept of additionality ensures that interventions are not accredited for effects that would have occurred anyway.
Analysing additionality is essential for realistic assessments of benefits and trade-offs of agricultural management options. Where payments are involved, assessments of additionality help to ensure the efficiency of these payments (II-AMT 2023).
In practice, additionality is often poorly addressed. In the context of soil carbon certificates, it is sometimes claimed that interventions were additional if they exceeded legal requirements and would be economically unviable or unattractive without funding support (Paul et al. 2023).
This is an oversimplification based on the assumption that farmers’ management decisions are solely guided by economic short-term considerations, whereas long-term planning for and adaptation to future developments such as climate change (Mitter et al., 2020), as well as social consideration (Bartkowski and Bartke, 2018; Thamo and Pannell, 2016) have been established as significant factors influencing decision making.
Furthermore, it is important to consider the temporal dimension as additionality is not static. Measures that are additional today, such as payments motivating the rewetting and a specific artificially drained organic soil, may lose the element of additionality if rewetting becomes common practice in the future due to changes in market, technologies or policies.
For the assessment of additionality in the context of agricultural soil management, the three steps of Thamo & Pannell (2016) can be applied. At first, it is important to identify whether a practice is additional or not (Thamo & Pannell 2016). The second step involves to pinpoint the benchmark practice that would be displaced by the activity under assessment (Thamo & Pannell 2016). For instance, the additionality of soil organic carbon increases of soil carbon certificates can be evaluated by a comparison with a counterfactual scenario without them (Bartkowski et al. 2021).
Within the last step it is determined how much of the change compared to the baseline-scenario from the new practice is actually additional (Thamo & Pannell 2016). In comparison to the first two steps, this process is less frequently addressed and includes the measurement and monitoring of both the new practice as well as the benchmark practice (Thamo & Pannell 2016). Even if the first two steps remain unchanged, the result of the last one can vary in space and time (Thamo & Pannell 2016).
For doing the assessment, the tool of the demonstration and assessment of additionality can be used (II-AMT 2023). It provides a general framework for projects to determine whether activities can be considered additional as defined in Article 6 of the Paris Agreement. The pre-step ensures that the management practice is in-line with the climate goals of the Paris Agreement and does not lead to the lock-in of emission levels (e.g. due to the prolongation of the lifetime of an emission intensive practice). Before the first financial commitments are made, a public notification has to be undertaken to show that carbon market revenues were considered in the investment decision. Step 2 involves a regulatory analysis to check if the practice is already mandated by law or other legal requirements in the present (step 2.1) or will be in the future (step 2.2). If this is not the case, the risks to financial additionality are assessed in step 3. This is done by evaluating whether the practice was already implemented without incentives and if any non-monetary barriers exist to the implementation (e.g. unavailability of the technology). If barriers could prevent the realisation of the practice and/or the activity was realised without incentives already, an investment analysis has to be done in step 4. In this way it is tested if the practice would be unattractive without financial support.
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UNFCCC - United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. 2010. The Kyoto Protocoll Mechanisms - International Emissions Trading Clean Development Mechanism Joint Implementation.
World Bank. 2016. Carbon Credits and Additionality: Past, Present, and Future. PMR Technical Note 13. Partnership for Market Readiness, World Bank, Washington, DC.