Validating Natural Climate Solutions with Better Data

[JENNY SOONG]

These nature-based climate solutions, regenerative agriculture can contribute to climate solutions, but we need to make sure that we're accounting for their impacts correctly with proper integrity so that we don't overhype or greenwash the impacts that they're having since they are so difficult to measure.

[J.B. WOGAN]

I’m J.B. Wogan from Mathematica and welcome back to On the Evidence.

On this episode, I speak Jenny Soong, a senior agriculture and forestry greenhouse gas scientist who is part of Mathematica’s interdisciplinary climate practice. Jenny is currently helping USAID and the international development firm ECODIT to develop a greenhouse gas emissions calculator for agriculture, forestry, and land use that would be free, online, and publicly available.

Jenny is among many recent hires at Mathematica who focus on aspects of climate change and climate resilience, which is a growing area of emphasis for the organization overall, and our Global unit in particular. Her career has included research positions in academia and management roles overseeing programs and product development in the private sector, always with a focus on soil and carbon sequestration. Earlier this year, Jenny participated in a panel about scaling regenerative agriculture with integrity that was moderated by former Vice President Al Gore.

During our interview, we talk about the panel with Al Gore, the challenges and opportunities with nature-based carbon sequestration programs, the greenhouse gas emissions calculator she’s helping to develop for USAID, the use of remote sensing data from satellites to estimate greenhouse gas emissions, and why it’s important to measure both the environmental and human impacts of nature-based climate solutions.

I hope you enjoy the episode. If you’re new to the show, please considering subscribing. More information on how to subscribe on your podcasting app of choice is available at mathematica.org/ontheevidence.

Without further ado, here’s my interview with Jenny Soong.

[J.B. WOGAN]

You know, one of my favorite parts about hosting our podcast is interviewing people with a wide range of research expertise. And that can include people in social work, economics, statistics, data science, information systems, but I don't believe we've ever featured a soil biogeochemist on the show before.

In fact, I have to confess, I wasn't familiar with that field of study before. So I was hoping for in case some of our listeners are a little in the dark as well. Can you just kind of give us a little 101? What does a soil biogeochemist study?

[JENNY SOONG]

Yeah, so biogeochemists and soil biogeochemists in particular really study the cycling of elements like carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus between soil, plants, and the atmosphere. So really all across the Earth's surface. So that's the chemistry part, right? That carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, often water is involved. And then the bio and geo parts refer to the interactions between living organisms like animals, plants, and microbes, with the non-living geological foundations of the soil, which control those elemental cycles. 

[J.B. WOGAN]

Okay. And so, you initially were in a more academic role with your research and you've since moved into directing products and programs in the private sector, and we can talk a little bit more later about specifically your role at Mathematica, but could you walk me through kind of that trajectory from academia to the private sector and what led to that turn? Like what, not just like the how, but why make that switch?

[JENNY SOONG]

Yeah. So the first decade plus of my career was really doing that scientific research, trying to understand under what conditions was more carbon stored in the soil and under what conditions was more carbon lost to the atmosphere, under warming or loss of biodiversity or fire management or nutrient interactions, you know, how can we store more carbon in the soil or under what conditions will it be lost? And that really helped to inform our understanding of potential climate change trajectories, what could happen to our predictions of climate change if we consider deep soil warming, which is often not considered, for example.

You know, my research was contributing more and more to our improved understanding of climate change. I think society at large was also listening to that and realizing that climate change is a serious issue and that we can start managing our lands or implementing programs in ways to address climate change and the trajectories that we're on. And so I wanted to use my scientific understanding to help inform programs and policies, that are based on that fundamental science, but are really having that more human component, in terms of impacting our economic and our social systems in ways that we can slow down the worst impacts of climate change.

[J.B. WOGAN]

So, in terms of the role of soil with carbon, what are some of the things that allow for soil to be more useful in storing, I mean, is, is this kind of like, is it analogous to the conversation around trees and how trees can be helpful at keeping carbon from entering the atmosphere, or is it a separate process?

[JENNY SOONG]

It's similar. So carbon storage in trees or in the soil would both be considered like nature-based carbon sequestration. So, carbon that's in the atmosphere, carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases like methane and nitrous oxide, those are essential elements and compounds in the atmosphere that are part of our functioning planet, but they cycle through plants as they photosynthesize and those plants suck in carbon dioxide into their biomass and pump it down into the soil through their roots. And as those plants die, some of that carbon is left behind in the soil. And so, soil carbon accumulates over time in the soil. And some of that carbon in the soil, in plants and trees in particular, the carbon can reside in the soil stored out of the atmosphere and out of that cycling back and forth to the atmosphere for decades or, some hundred year or long-lived trees, but in the soil, some of that carbon can stay in the soil for again, decades or centuries or sometimes millennia, if it's really stabilized really well.

And so again, if we can minimize the loss of carbon from the soil and promote the input of carbon to the soil through more sustainable land management techniques, and that's a way that the carbon that the soil can serve as a sink of atmospheric carbon dioxide and help to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store it in that naturally occurring pool for longer than it currently is, or to a greater extent. But there is always this constant background cycling of carbon in and out of the soil between the soil and the atmosphere. And the goal is to store more of it in the soil.

[J.B. WOGAN]

Okay. The rainforests are seen as, as really important for trees in terms of keeping carbon from entering the atmosphere. Is the rainforest also a place where you would find really rich soil that does the same kind of thing, or are there certain kinds of, certain places that people should associate with carbon rich soil?

[JENNY SOONG]

Yeah, definitely. When I think of carbon rich soil, I think of, actually the poles more like the permafrost and the cold arctic areas. So carbon loss from the soil is promoted by decomposition and warmer temperatures, so those tropics actually lose soil carbon pretty quickly.

And so, relatively more of it stored in the trees than in the soil because decomposition is pretty quick there. Whereas in the Arctic, these permafrost or these frozen or cold systems still bring in carbon dioxide through the plant growth, but the carbon that ends up in the soil stays there for longer because decomposition is slower, because it's colder or frozen. So those are really the carbon-rich soils and that's why warming, you may hear about climate change and warming and loss of permafrost as really a significant driver of the climate change trajectory because of those really carbon rich soils that are cold and frozen, are being warmed at a higher rate than other parts of the world and store a ton of carbon in them and have a huge potential loss to the atmosphere as warming occurs.

[J.B. WOGAN]

So for Mathematica, you're currently working on a project for the Natural Climate Solutions Division of USAID to develop a user friendly, freely available, online tool to calculate greenhouse gas emissions and carbon storage associated with agriculture, forestry, and other land use. I know that data is a big part of that work, and that would be a through line through the different scientific disciplines represented among our staff at Mathematica. For this specific project, what kind of data are you dealing with? How is that collected, and then how is that analyzed?

[JENNY SOONG]

Yeah. So the online kind of decision support tool that we're building. We'll use a combination of user supply data on there. So you can select and enter in how you're managing your landscape, so how you're managing your forest, how you're managing your croplands, or those other land uses like wetlands and grasslands. So it’s the combination of that user supplied management data and also geospatial data collected using satellites and process using remote sensing. And so, the product that we're building this website, this online calculator, will really be, I think it's really exciting because we're integrating some pretty cutting edge, near real-time satellite imagery on land cover, land cover changes and forest biomass growth and loss with digital soil maps and also user-provided management details from all around the globe.

And so, we're combining these different data sources, the remote sensing and the user inputs, into a framework to estimate the greenhouse gas impacts of USAID's investments globally.

[J.B. WOGAN]

And we can talk a little bit later about online tools and how that features into your work and Mathematica's work. When I read or hear the words greenhouse gas emissions, the first images that come to mind for me are smoke stacks at a power plant or car exhaust fumes. But this project is yet another reminder to me that agriculture is an important source of emissions as well. So I was hoping you could give me and our listeners a sense of how big of a source the agriculture sector is for greenhouse gas emissions, and maybe give some concrete examples of the kinds of activities in agriculture that result in those emissions.

[JENNY SOONG]

So I think people often forget that when we hear about greenhouse gas emissions from human activities,  it's a new source of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that was otherwise buried in these fossil repositories underground for a long, long time, but actually, when we think about the natural cycling of carbon between the land and the atmosphere, that biogeochemistry I was talking about, that natural cycling of a greenhouse gases in and out of the atmosphere through photosynthesis of plants and decomposition from the soil. It's actually 10 times greater than the emissions of fossil fuel emissions from humans. And so that's why this understanding of the natural background cycling of carbon and greenhouse gases, I think, is really important to understanding the trajectory of climate change and the impacts that that humans are having on the planet.

And so, agriculture itself contributes about 10 percent to the United States total greenhouse gas emissions. And those mainly come from things like the livestock sector methane emissions. Fertilizer production and volatilization through less efficient applications and less efficient uses. But soil carbon, remember, is that storage of carbon in the soil that was deposited there through plants photosynthesizing and then depositing their biomass, their carbon, back into the soil through roots and through root exudates and so plants take in that carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Those are the straws sucking in carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. And some of that carbon is stored in the soil and stored in the land, while some is lost through that background cycling and some farming practices, what are now kind of called regenerative agriculture practices, are helping to build more soil carbon and lead to more soil carbon storage, things like increasing crop productivity, or reducing fallow periods using cover cropping. So increasing the number of photosynthetic days on your land, basically. So increasing that straw, sucking carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is one way. Or other things like, minimizing soil disturbance, like reducing tillage and that tillage stirs up the soil.

So it provides more oxygen to those microbes that are in the soil that decompose carbon and cause more of that loss back to the atmosphere. So there's some ways that agriculture management can help to reduce the impact of that that humans are having on climate change.

[J.B. WOGAN]

The first thing came to mind was to my mind was, I think I remember in high school learning that cows farting and releasing a lot of methane, that that's another contributor to greenhouse gas emissions.

Is that just sort of like,

[JENNY SOONG]

Yeah,

[J.B. WOGAN]

that truly a factor or, is that just something that high school boy would learn?

[JENNY SOONG]

No, definitely. The cow burps in particular are pretty high in methane. And so yeah, live animal production and livestock production. I mean, it's a huge part of our food system and agricultural livelihoods. I don't know that livestock production is going away, but there's incentives to reduce meat consumption or reduce our reliance

[J.B. WOGAN]

Hmm.

[JENNY SOONG]

On livestock and protein and looking for alternative proteins for human consumption and human nutrition. But there's also tools like the AFOLU calculator that we're building for USAID has a livestock component. And so, USAID, but also companies and, the yeah, the beef production industry, are looking at ways to, first of all, measure, the total greenhouse gases coming off of the livestock sector and then figure out ways to reduce or mitigate their impacts through things like manure management, managing the manure a lot better, or alternative feed sources, to reduce the methane production within cows or looking at breeding, and genetics of cattle that could lead to still high protein productivity, with lower, methane emissions.

[J.B. WOGAN]

Hmm. Okay. That's fascinating. All right. So I noticed that, and I was a little surprised by this, that your job title at Mathematica, it doesn't say anything about soil biogeochemist. In fact, what it says is that you're a senior information technology product manager, and I figured that reflects the work you're doing to develop this online tool for USAID, among other things.

So I just wanted to probe a little bit more about the role that technology plays or will be playing in generating and presenting data that can be used in the context of climate policy. For example, in a previous podcast of ours, Tulika Narayan, who leads our climate practice here, mentioned that we were using remote sensing data from satellites to estimate crop types and crop yields in some countries. So, in terms of new or unexpected technologies that could provide useful insights for shaping climate policy, what are some of the things that you're monitoring?

[JENNY SOONG]

Yeah, I'm also very excited about remote sensing, but I'm taking a cautious approach. You know, I think there's really exciting new projects coming out of NASA using Sentinel 2 and Landsat and JEDI products that we're integrating again into these greenhouse gas calculator tools that we're building at Mathematica. And there's also new exciting methane monitoring emissions that are just being launched that I think will provide a lot of great data that we didn't have in the past to help to constrain our estimates and provide better evidence for the climate impacts and improved management impacts that we can have on climate.

But all of these new tools need validation on the ground to get a better understanding of where and when they're appropriate and how good they are so that uncertainty or gaps in understanding are acknowledged and properly accounted for.

[J.B. WOGAN]

So the thing that you're working on, the project that you're working on for USAID, this AFOLU tool, is specifically kind of in the digital technology front and so I guess remote sensing that seems like it's more about like a hard technology that's providing a new source of data.

But what about online tools, like, do we need more online tools than we currently have? And are there specific kinds of online tools that we need more of?

[JENNY SOONG]

Yeah, so I think tools should be built to solve certain problems, not just to clutter up your garage or make it harder to decide between one or the other. So I think the right tool needs to be built to solve the right problem. And right now we're seeing a rise in the interest of these nature-based climate solutions and climate smart agriculture opportunities. And so I think there are tools to be built to address the specific—whether it's supply chain or government accounting or foundational approaches to climate accounting. But what I'm seeing is that they're often leveraging the same fundamental scientific tools underneath.

And so one thing that I've thought a lot about as, transitioning between academia and private industry is, are there ways that we can bring together different scientific resources to provide some fundamental, harmonized databases or model consortia, so that these tools and these decision support tools that need to be built to solve certain problems and meet certain customer or user needs are still foundationally based on the same high quality science and aren't kind of starting from scratch each time and building a new solution each time when the complexity of the science, I think we can work together to build in the right solutions kind of under the hood.

[J.B. WOGAN]

So your work recently gave you a chance to participate in a panel moderated by former Vice President, Al Gore, who, of course, is an important figure in shaping the modern conversation around climate change. So tell me a little bit about how that opportunity came about and what was the subject of the panel?

[JENNY SOONG]

Yeah, so I was brought in to speak as a scientific expert on the topic of scaling regenerative agriculture with integrity. And I think I was invited due to my scientific research background in this area, but also due to my prior experience in leading a large carbon program in the agriculture industry. And so I thought it was a really great opportunity to have an in-depth conversation, you know, sometimes a debate, around how to scale the science that's often, which is often developed at fine scales or at plot level, kind of controlled research trials, scaling those insights into larger scale, executable programs, which are really what's needed to make a climate impact. And those programs will touch many farmers lives and livelihoods. And so I thought it was a great opportunity to talk to companies, who are investing in this space, but also large institutional investors and impact investors on what they should be looking out for and what they should be considering both from a, a human livelihoods perspective, but also from a scientific rigor and integrity perspective.

[J.B. WOGAN]

Obviously you had some interaction with him as the moderator of the panel, but did you get a chance to have a sidebar or anything? How much were you able to talk to him outside of the official setting?

[JENNY SOONG]

Not a ton. I mean, we like shook hands at the happy hour, you know, and said, hello, snapped a picture, but, it was kind of cool to be called on by Al Gore, you know, he'd be like, Oh, and on the topic of scaling science with integrity, Jennifer, you know, what would you like to say about it?

So, that was pretty cool.

[J.B. WOGAN]

Yeah. Well, speaking of that snapping a photo, I did see the photo with him on LinkedIn, because you posted after the panel and you shared some really nice takeaways about the discussion and a couple of elements from your post caught my eye. One was that you mentioned an information gap at the moment that is limiting our ability to develop carbon soil solutions and two, you use the phrase, “with integrity” in the context of monitoring, reporting, and verification of soil. I noticed you use that phrase “with integrity” a couple of times. And so I want to ask about both of those things. So, first, what kind of soil data are we missing right now and why does that gap matter?

[JENNY SOONG]

I think that what we're missing to some extent is some of this, this ground truthing data, these unfortunately long-term experiments that are, are needed to measure and remeasure soil carbon under different management scenarios to be able to really claim that certain management increases soil carbon under some conditions or not under others to really build that evidence base for trusting model predictions that are cheaper and more scalable, but without any comparison to real measurements and remeasurements of soil carbon change over time, we don't really know how to build confidence in those model-based estimates. And so there's these, this network of, USDA is working a lot on this, on building a network of measure and remeasure kind of soil monitoring sites. There's the folks in the private industry and, and academia who are kind of all a lot of people are talking about how to harmonize or bring together different data sets to provide that ground truthing of model-based approaches that, again, are needed to scale these programs with efficiency.

You know, an example would be like weather data, right? If there was, if there are weather models out there, we know that there's some uncertainty to them. We know they're not always 100 percent accuracy, but without having that evidence of where they were correct and where they were not, we don't really know how much to trust them. And this is pretty critical, I think, to understanding the climate impacts of these nature based solutions like soil carbon and regenerative agriculture because these nature-based solutions are not permanent, they could be reversible if management practices are changed, or there's a lot of disturbance and so, to some extent, I thought the conversation on the panel was really interesting because to some extent it's a scientific question of how to ground truth or to provide evidence and uncertainty bound around your model predictions. But to another extent, it's really a programmatic question of how do you implement these programs with people? Do you require them to sign a long-term contract? Do you require buyers to pay for and buy buffer credits to account for any potential reversals or loss of carbon over time. How are these programs implemented in kind of a business context?

So we're, we're kind of at the precipice, I think of like applying the science and having enough data to be confident in it and then applying it really at a programmatic scale and, you know, working with people and businesses. 

[J.B. WOGAN]

Is there anything else you want to add about why it's an important condition? Why making sure that it's with integrity, that's an important condition of any model or program assessing soil emissions?

[JENNY SOONG]

I think to me, we just need to know how to account for these greenhouse gases that are much, that are very difficult to measure, so that we know that we're not overhyping or greenwashing these solutions. To me, that's the integrity point. Like, these nature-based climate solutions/regenerative agriculture can contribute to climate solutions, but we need to make sure that we're accounting for their impacts correctly with proper integrity so that we don't overhype or greenwash the benefits that they're having or the impacts that they're having since they are so difficult to measure.

[J.B. WOGAN]

In a planning call for this conversation, you had shared with me a recent Wall Street Journal article about some efforts from Microsoft around reforestation. One of the things that I thought was really interesting about that piece is I didn't appreciate.  The complexity of counting greenhouse gas emissions and whether you're able to reduce them, it sort of incentivizes whatever is like the simplest, like, it's easier to say, I planted a new tree and I know how much that pulls out of the atmosphere versus I've protected existing trees and based on a counterfactual that I've developed, I'm saying it's pulled out greenhouse gas emissions that otherwise would be in the atmosphere. It just made me appreciate how the complexity of measuring greenhouse gas emissions under these different tactics really can kind of have material effect on what tactics you pursue.

[JENNY SOONG]

Definitely. And a lot of these programs to me, like there's these terms around additionality showing that these programs are incentivizing are leading to additional carbon sequestration than would have otherwise naturally occurred is a big one. So again, carbon is constantly cycling in and out of the atmosphere, you know, between the atmosphere and the land. But are these programs leading to additional carbon sequestration that would not have otherwise occurred under some baseline scenarios? So a lot of the forestry projects have run into challenges due to their, how they accounted for baseline deforestation rates. So they’re may be claiming that deforestation would have occurred at a higher rate, had their program not been implemented and, and how you, what assumptions you make around that baseline deforestation rate or, or baseline typical agriculture management even, can really affect the amount of greenhouse gas improvement these programs are claiming.

[J.B. WOGAN]

Okay, then that can, that has financial implications, right? Because if you say that you've saved this amount of greenhouse gas emissions. You can actually get financial credits. So, where do you think data-driven organizations like ours and our clients too can make the biggest contribution? Like what is the role that we can play and what gaps could our industry and our clients help fill?

[JENNY SOONG]

Yeah. So one of the reasons I came to work at Mathematica is because of our focus on people and how we can use evidence to inform policies aimed at improving human well-being, which, that's pretty different than the work I've done in the past, which has been a lot more focused on the longer term climate trajectory, from that biogeochemical perspective. But now that I've been working on nature-based climate solutions and carbon financing for the past several years, I've really seen interest picking up and, in these types of programs, but for soil carbon or forest or land management, climate solutions to have the, the climate solution, you know, climate change mitigation impacts that they could potentially have, they need to be done at really large scales and that will affect people who are managing those lands all around the world. And so I think Mathematica can play an important role in helping makers to account for both the climate and the human impacts of these programs as they continue to grow.

[J.B. WOGAN]

If I could ask one follow-up about that. I remember, I believe it was an interview with Tulika in the past, it may have been with Anu who used to lead our global team, but one of them had talked about, you know, try to find climate solutions that don't limit economic opportunities for farmers and in Sub Saharan Africa, and it was something I, I guess I hadn't thought as much about before, but it is, you know, you've got to come up with solutions that realistically aren't going to limit economic opportunities for people if they're going to buy into them. I think I'm hearing that's, that's kind of what, what attracted to you is that kind of thinking that kind of mindset.

[JENNY SOONG]

Yeah, definitely. And one thing that I'm really interested in now is climate change resilience. So a lot of these carbon programs are built around providing financial incentives for farmers to adopt these climate smart practices that store more carbon in the soil so that agriculture can help to the agriculture industry can move towards climate change mitigation and reducing the impact of agriculture on the climate.

But as you build carbon in the soil, you're not only storing it out of the atmosphere, but you're also but you're also building soil organic matter, which helps with soil structure, biological activity, water infiltration, nutrient retention. And so what we're thinking a lot about now are the co-benefits of carbon sequestration from a climate change mitigation perspective, but also carbon sequestration in the soil and how it builds soil health and how it builds resilience to the increasing frequency and intensity of extreme climate events like drought or flood, and how there could be these co-benefits that either increase yield, you know, some, some, in some cases, soil carbon could, is associated with improved yields, but not always, but are there other resilience or yield stability benefits that building soil carbon has as well.

So again, bringing in that more, that human focused, local perspective as well, along with the global scale climate impacts that these practices can have.

[J.B. WOGAN]

Thanks to Jenny Soong, and thank you for listening to On the Evidence, the Mathematica podcast. This episode was produced by my colleague Rich Clement. If you’re fan of the show, help others discover our podcast by leaving us a rating and review. To catch future episodes, subscribe by visiting us at mathematica.org/ontheevidence.