The proposal, which will be the subject of negotiations between MEPs and Member States, focuses on carbon capture and storage (CCS) techniques: they involve capturing CO2 on industrial sites (steel, cement, chemicals, power plants ...) to inject it into hermetic geological reservoirs.

But alongside this "permanent" elimination, Brussels is also targeting agricultural and forestry activities that store CO2 in meadows, forests or peat bogs.

To achieve carbon neutrality in Europe by 2050, natural ecosystems and capture technologies "must contribute to removing several hundred million tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere per year (...) With current policies, the “EU is not in a position to achieve this”, underlines the European executive, in a draft of the text consulted by AFP.

The Commission therefore intends to set "a credible (...) certification framework" to encourage absorption projects - harmonized and stable rules paving the way for obtaining and selling credits on the European carbon market.

Removals could only be certified if the activity concerned "has a neutral or positive impact" on the environment, if the carbon captured is stored on the "long term" and under monitoring, and, for agriculture or forestry , if the volume absorbed is greater than the emissions from the same site.

Brussels provides for “appropriate mechanisms”, not specified, in the event of release into the atmosphere of the stored CO2.

He also wants to include "durable products" -- potentially wooden furniture or buildings.

- "Too vague" -

Certification is "a basic building block" guaranteeing farmers a sufficiently attractive financial incentive to encourage them to adopt practices allowing them to capture more CO2, notes Pascal Canfin (Renew, liberals), chairman of the Environment Committee at the European Parliament.

What "contribute to financing changes in agricultural practices", he judges.

"It's a first step for Europeans to take carbon storage seriously, but the proposed framework is far too vague when it comes to the fundamentals," said Wijnand Stoefs, of the NGO Carbon Market Watch.

The duration of "long-term" storage is not even specified, he explained to AFP.

As a safeguard, the expert recommends setting separate targets for carbon absorption and for reducing emissions, and focusing on "high quality" storage, that guaranteed for a "sufficiently long period ": geological reservoirs, but also peat bogs and complex ecosystems.

But Mr Stoefs criticizes the distribution of carbon credits to farmers: "How do you assess how much carbon will go into (agricultural) soils and for how long? From a climate perspective, it would have to stay there for at least 200 or 300 years . It's a promise no one can make."

- "Chimera" -

The change in use of land, the impact of floods or droughts, a forest fire can cause the disappearance of a "natural" carbon stock: "in this case, who will be responsible and pay the bill?", abounds Shefali Sharma, Europe director of the Institute for Agricultural and Trade Policy (IATP).

“Experience shows that it is an extremely temporary carbon storage and a risky activity for farmers,” she told AFP, noting that the “skeletal” text says nothing “of the enormous risks of speculation land tenure and agricultural land grabbing".

Agrochemical and fossil fuel giants could see "a gigantic opportunity to offset their emissions without fundamentally reducing them", she worries.

Giving priority to the capture of CO2 on a large scale "is a fantasy of + greenwashing +", thunders a declaration initiated Monday by several NGOs (Fern, Friends of the Earth ...) and signed by more than 200 organizations.

The project “is based on a dangerous and false justification, which legitimizes the continuation of emissions: the idea that someone in the future could remove from the atmosphere a ton of carbon currently emitted”, estimates this declaration.

"Such a chimera is the surest way to burn the planet."

© 2022 AFP