Agriculture has a huge contribution to make towards our collective climate goals, but the mechanisms that recognize and reward these contributions are in their infancy. The international Carbon Credit system is not a good match for small and medium food producers, and science-backed outcome assessments are made more difficult by the infinite variability of a live landscape.

This project began by hiring the David Suzuki Foundation to explore the creation of a local, farmer-focused brokerage for the carbon market, hoping that perhaps functioning as an aggregator was a solution to problems of scale. Out of this consultation grew the realization that instead of a brokerage, a new system of value exchange was needed.

The Climate Smart Agriculture Platform (CSAP) has been designed to harmonize the on-farm practices, their climate-friendly outcomes, and the incentive programmes intended to support this practice shift. It serves as a checklist and rating system that evaluates climate-aligned best management practices and determines a proof of practice metric for each. This tiered achievement scale makes it simpler to attract a range of financing mechanisms that have a variety of benchmarks to meet: municipal, sector-based, scope 3 insets, nature-based solution funders, and so on.

The CSAP is being developed in partnership with Ivey Business School and the CSA Group and is being beta-tested in 2023. The platform is non-proprietary and intended to scale beyond the Our Food Future region.