Forem: Open Geospatial Carbon Registry (OGCR)

Laimonas Noreika – From FinTech to Farms: bridging the €60B loan gap for Europe’s small farms

Open Geospatial Carbon Registry (OGCR) — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 15:35:46 +0000

Laimonas Noreika, founder of InSoil (formerly HeavyFinance), is tackling one of the biggest barriers to regenerative transformation in Europe: access to finance for small and medium-sized farms. With traditional lenders stepping away due to regulatory constraints and perceived risk, an estimated €60 billion annual loan gap has emerged across the sector. InSoil’s answer is an innovative “Green Loan” model: zero-interest financing that helps farmers adopt practices such as no-till, cover cropping, and soil-restoring equipment. Instead of repayments through interest, the company earns back investment through future revenues from verified soil-carbon credits, aligning financial incentives with long-term climate benefits. Early results from Eastern European farms suggest that regenerative management can yield around 20 % higher profits compared to conventional systems, even before carbon-credit revenues are included.

By directly linking access to finance with the creation of measurable environmental outcomes, this approach unlocks opportunity for farms typically excluded from carbon markets and mainstream credit systems. It supports farmers in reducing input costs, stabilising yields, and building resilient soils, while at the same time generating high-integrity carbon-removal credits that help strengthen the wider carbon-market ecosystem.

Original interview published on Investing Regenerative Agriculture.

Julia Kasper - Rewetting peatlands is the biggest climate opportunity to cut CO2

Open Geospatial Carbon Registry (OGCR) — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 13:00:09 +0000

In her recent interview, Julia Kasper, co-founder and CEO of Zukunftmoor, argues that rewetting drained peatlands represents the single biggest climate opportunity in agriculture today. Although peatlands cover only about 3 % of the global land surface, they store more carbon than all the world’s forests combined. When peatlands are drained, a common practice for agriculture, they don’t just release CO₂ once; they leak carbon continuously, year after year. Restoring peatlands thus stops that “constant leak,” and rewetting them can turn a major source of emissions into a long-term carbon sink.

But rewetting alone is not enough: farmers need viable, sustainable livelihoods. That’s where Zukunftmoor’s innovative approach comes in. They propose combining rewetting with cultivation of Sphagnum moss — a natural plant of peatlands — which can serve as a sustainable substitute for extracted peat in horticultural substrates. This turns rewetting from a purely ecological restoration act into a market-driven, economically viable land-use model. By using drones or hand-seeding methods, and developing harvesting and substrate-supply chains, the approach offers farmers a low-input, long-term pathway to maintain income while restoring degraded peatlands.

With this combination of climate mitigation and practical agriculture, Kasper’s vision offers peatland regions across Europe a concrete alternative to drainage-based farming — one that aligns environmental restoration with economic viability.

Original article published on Investing in Regenerative Agriculture.

Europe Launches OGCR: A New Open-Source Carbon Registry for Agriculture and Forestry

Open Geospatial Carbon Registry (OGCR) — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 13:24:45 +0000

In September 2025, the Intergenerational Open Geospatial Carbon Registry (OGCR) was officially launched under the funding of Horizon Europe, marking a major step forward in the creation of an open, transparent, and scientifically robust framework for carbon accounting across the EU. The initiative brings together more than thirty partners, including universities, research institutes, SMEs and NGOs, and aims to run through 2029, with an investment of €11.5 million.

The project’s ambition is broad: to offer Europe’s 9.1 million farmers and forest managers simple, affordable tools to measure, verify, and certify carbon sequestration and ecosystem-service benefits from their land-management practices.

At the heart of OGCR’s innovation is the creation of harmonized, updateable baseline data on soil carbon along with biomass and peat carbon. These geospatial carbon baselines, scalable from local to pan-European level, are intended to underpin fair, transparent certification and remuneration under the upcoming framework of Carbon Removals Certification Framework (CRCF).

Original article posted in Italian on Materia Rinnovabile

Building an open source foundation for the EU Carbon Registry

Open Geospatial Carbon Registry (OGCR) — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 12:46:01 +0000

In August 2025, the Intergenerational Open Geospatial Carbon Registry (OGCR) was officially launched, marking the start of a major new EU-wide initiative to build a transparent, accessible, and scientifically rigorous carbon registry that supports both farmers and forest managers across Europe. With a consortium of more than 30 partners spanning research institutes, NGOs, SMEs and universities, OGCR aims to establish updateable, high-resolution geospatial baselines for soil, biomass, and peat carbon at parcel level. These baselines will serve as the foundation for a registry aligned with the Carbon Removals Certification Framework (CRCF), enabling fair and verifiable carbon removals accounting.

Beyond baseline mapping, OGCR seeks to combine cutting-edge data science tools, from machine learning and remote sensing to participatory monitoring to deliver cost-effective, accurate carbon accounting across the EU. The project will validate its approach through business demonstrators covering diverse farming systems. By doing so, it intends to prove that carbon farming can be economically viable for landholders, requiring minimal upfront investment while offering long-term benefits. With its open-source, transparent, and harmonised methodology, including unified uncertainty metrics and hybrid measurement-modelling frameworks, OGCR aims to build a robust infrastructure that supports carbon markets, biodiversity, climate policy and rural livelihoods simultaneously.

Original article posted on Differ.blog