By Abbas Nazil
Europe’s push toward climate-neutral agriculture is accelerating as the EU adopts its first Implementing Regulation under the Carbon Removals and Carbon Farming framework, introducing a voluntary certification system intended to standardise how soil carbon and land-based removals are recognised.
Farmers, however, continue to face unstable conditions, while companies, advisors and policymakers operate under misaligned rules, incentives and measurement systems, creating barriers to meaningful climate action.
The four-year EU-funded ClieNFarms project has emerged as a critical diagnostic effort, revealing across twenty demonstration environments and hundreds of outreach farms how climate measures succeed, where they break down and what Europe must address to advance its agricultural transition.
A central finding is that climate action falters whenever evidence, incentives and advisory guidance fail to align, with even strong technical solutions collapsing in environments where farmers receive conflicting advice, markets offer little reward or policy signals shift unpredictably.
Conversely, when these factors move in the same direction, farmers show greater willingness to test new approaches, commit resources and maintain long-term changes, highlighting the systemic nature of agricultural decision-making.
ClieNFarms also underscored the importance of co-creation, with project structures such as Creative Arenas showing that farmers’ decisions depend not only on data but on relationships, shared problem-solving and opportunities to explore challenges alongside advisors, researchers and supply-chain actors.
These collaborative settings helped farmers reassess established routines, understand wider system impacts and consider innovations they would otherwise not attempt.
A major technical challenge identified by the project is the conflicting nature of agricultural indicators, with roughly thirty climate practices showing diverging performance depending on whether indicators are measured per hectare, per product unit or at whole-farm level.
This divergence complicates how progress is defined across farms, markets and EU climate policy, especially when some measures offer long-term resilience benefits but limited immediate emission reductions.
Soil carbon modelling, a cornerstone of future EU methodologies, showed strong potential but also significant uncertainty, as model reliability hinges on data quality, calibration and usability, prompting calls for clearer guidance, improved datasets and practical tools accessible to farmers and advisors.
Value-chain allocation emerged as another persistent barrier, with companies unable to confidently determine how climate benefits from rotations, manure flows or soil improvements should be attributed across multiple products, limiting private-sector investment and integration of climate performance into procurement systems.
Farmers repeatedly requested clearer instructions, real-world examples, stable policy signals and shared risk mechanisms, stressing that transitions impose new costs and uncertainty they cannot shoulder alone.
The European Commission has acknowledged these concerns, particularly regarding soil carbon, which contributes not only to mitigation but also to long-term resilience ahead of CRCF methodology rollout beginning in 2026.
ClieNFarms concludes with a substantial evidence base, tools and policy guidance, but its most valuable contribution is its system-wide insight, demonstrating that climate-neutral agriculture can advance only when advisory frameworks, evidence standards, incentives and financial structures align around the realities of farm businesses.
The findings offer timely direction as Europe prepares new carbon-farming methodologies and seeks practical, trusted and farmer-centred approaches that make climate-neutral agriculture feasible, scalable and economically viable.
