How CarbonSpace enabled Agatheia to measure vineyard carbon performance
By Lior Torenberg
July 8th, 2024
CarbonSpace, a leading digital monitoring, reporting, and verification (dMRV) solution, is proud to partner with Agatheia on two carbon monitoring projects for vineyards: Wine for Climate and NoiCompensiAmo.
Agatheia is an organization with the mission of supporting strong agricultural practices and sustainability education projects around the world. NoiCompensiAmo and the Wine for Climate initiatives focus on vineyard health and regenerative practices.
In September 2023, Agatheia and CarbonSpace initiated a collaboration to monitor the Collina dei Ciliegi vineyard in the Verona Province and the Vitevis vineyard in the Vicenza Province of Italy. Those projects included a greenhouse gas inventory of over 1,000 hectares of vineyards as well as fruit trees and woods for the 2020-2022 period. The primary purpose of this project was to provide select vineyard growers with ISO-certified greenhouse gas inventories. Directly measuring carbon sequestration enables vineyard owners to have confidence in their carbon neutrality claims.
“For millennia, vineyards have shaped landscapes, facilitated trade, and been integral to mythologies, religions, and cultural traditions. Vineyards are also sensitive ecosystems, and are vulnerable to climate fluctuations and the impacts of climate change,” said Emma Fourdan from CarbonSpace. “The collaboration with Agatheia makes it possible to understand the carbon dynamics of each vineyard plot through simple measurement tools that combine the rigor of an emissions inventory with the precision of carbon uptake measurement. We can measure the impact of sustainable practices and how much CO2 is absorbed by the vineyard, which is the ultimate indicator of the vineyard’s health.”
The Wine for Climate project was able to leverage CarbonSpace’s unique, ecosystem-level carbon data to conduct a greenhouse gas inventory of the aforementioned vineyard region. The development of a greenhouse gas inventory based on ISO 14064-1 methodology that uses net ecosystem exchange (NEE) input data is noteworthy. This novel metric — NEE — measures the impact of climate change directly where it happens: in the atmosphere.
Enabled by CarbonSpace data, Agatheia was able to successfully monitor and report on their vineyard performance.
“The Wine for Climate project was born to create a tool capable of spreading and valorizing good agricultural practices,” said Davide Raffaetà of Agatheia. “Historically, carbon accounting in agriculture has been focused on emissions, and has largely ignored the positive impacts from sustainable land management. We feel the need to recognize responsible wine growers, and the CarbonSpace tool for measuring net ecosystem exchange (NEE) enables us to measure and quantify this impact on a large scale.”
The resulting report from this project was validated and verified by ICIM, an independent consulting firm, resulting in a first-of-its-kind ISO-certified greenhouse gas inventory for vineyards using NEE data. This is a large stride forward for cost-effective, scalable, and high-accuracy carbon measurements.
Read more about Agatheia, Wine for Climate, and NoiCompensiAmo online.
Agatheia is an organization with the mission of supporting strong agricultural practices and sustainability education projects around the world. NoiCompensiAmo and the Wine for Climate initiatives focus on vineyard health and regenerative practices.
In September 2023, Agatheia and CarbonSpace initiated a collaboration to monitor the Collina dei Ciliegi vineyard in the Verona Province and the Vitevis vineyard in the Vicenza Province of Italy. Those projects included a greenhouse gas inventory of over 1,000 hectares of vineyards as well as fruit trees and woods for the 2020-2022 period. The primary purpose of this project was to provide select vineyard growers with ISO-certified greenhouse gas inventories. Directly measuring carbon sequestration enables vineyard owners to have confidence in their carbon neutrality claims.
“For millennia, vineyards have shaped landscapes, facilitated trade, and been integral to mythologies, religions, and cultural traditions. Vineyards are also sensitive ecosystems, and are vulnerable to climate fluctuations and the impacts of climate change,” said Emma Fourdan from CarbonSpace. “The collaboration with Agatheia makes it possible to understand the carbon dynamics of each vineyard plot through simple measurement tools that combine the rigor of an emissions inventory with the precision of carbon uptake measurement. We can measure the impact of sustainable practices and how much CO2 is absorbed by the vineyard, which is the ultimate indicator of the vineyard’s health.”
The Wine for Climate project was able to leverage CarbonSpace’s unique, ecosystem-level carbon data to conduct a greenhouse gas inventory of the aforementioned vineyard region. The development of a greenhouse gas inventory based on ISO 14064-1 methodology that uses net ecosystem exchange (NEE) input data is noteworthy. This novel metric — NEE — measures the impact of climate change directly where it happens: in the atmosphere.
Enabled by CarbonSpace data, Agatheia was able to successfully monitor and report on their vineyard performance.
“The Wine for Climate project was born to create a tool capable of spreading and valorizing good agricultural practices,” said Davide Raffaetà of Agatheia. “Historically, carbon accounting in agriculture has been focused on emissions, and has largely ignored the positive impacts from sustainable land management. We feel the need to recognize responsible wine growers, and the CarbonSpace tool for measuring net ecosystem exchange (NEE) enables us to measure and quantify this impact on a large scale.”
The resulting report from this project was validated and verified by ICIM, an independent consulting firm, resulting in a first-of-its-kind ISO-certified greenhouse gas inventory for vineyards using NEE data. This is a large stride forward for cost-effective, scalable, and high-accuracy carbon measurements.
Read more about Agatheia, Wine for Climate, and NoiCompensiAmo online.