Professor Alex McBratney, vice-chair of the GlobalSoilMap consortium and director of the University of Sydney's Australian Centre for Precision Agriculture, is helping to construct the world's first digital soil map.
The project aims to be a 'Google Earth' program for soil quality.
Professor McBratney believes it is possible to provide the type of soil information necessary to make carbon sequestration schemes in agriculture measurable. He will be presenting on the scientific and technical details at the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen.
"The soil technology being developed has an important role to play in improving current climate change models," Professor McBratney says.
"The soil information that we produce will help global climate models by providing more detailed information about soil, which produces a lot of CO2 and sequesters a lot of carbon. The current information about soils in those areas is pretty poor."
Professor McBratney says even though agriculture will be excluded from Australia's Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme and similar schemes around the world, farmers will still be allowed to sequester carbon as an offset. For this to work soil carbon measurements will need to be improved.
"Many scientists believe ensuring the accuracy of soil auditing on farms is difficult and expensive to do, but I think it is possible," he says.
"For it to be effective you need to be able to measure how much carbon farmers are sequestering rather than guess it, otherwise it looks too hard and we miss an opportunity for agriculture and soil to play a meaningful role in climate change abatement.
"At the moment we can tell the amount of carbon in soil with an accuracy of plus or minus 20 per cent. But by understanding the sentinel places where we should actually monitor through the creation of the digital soil map we will be able to measure this with much greater accuracy.
"I'm personally optimistic that most countries will be involved in this 'great project' in some way. However, I'm less optimistic that some of the targets that will be set will be big enough."
Visit http://www.globalsoilmap.net/ for information on GlobalSoilMap.
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