The Second European Carbon Summit took place in Dublin from 4 until 6 March 2025, bringing together over 500 experts, policymakers, farmers, and stakeholders in person, plus 600 online. The event focused on advancing carbon farming, strengthening enabling policies, and securing funding to support the transition to more sustainable agricultural systems across the EU.

Key takeaways from the summit

• Carbon farming delivers multiple benefits for farmers and society: Many farmers reported on implementing carbon farming. Financial incentives help, but farmers were motivated by much more – farm resilience and soil health, decreased input costs, social responsibility, price premiums, and in some cases increased yields. The agri-food industry mentioned resilient value chains and the motivating factor of clear climate targets.
• A role for public and private funding: The transition to carbon farming requires financial support. The discussions highlighted the need for both public and private investments to work together with policy frameworks, ensuring that carbon farming adoption is financially viable and beneficial for farmers.
• A common language for carbon farming: One of the major challenges discussed was the lack of standardized terminology when discussion carbon farming. This can minimise the collaboration between policymakers, farmers, and industry players.

Ecologic Institute's Hugh McDonald and Julia Pazmino organised a breakout session titled "Ensuring sustainability outcomes from carbon farming: Recommendations for the CRCF and voluntary carbon markets". In addition to a farmer presentation on regenerative farming, the panel featured a panel of voluntary carbon market experts, agri-food industry, and farm association representatives to discuss how carbon farming certification can promote sustainability benefits beyond climate mitigation, considering agri-food value chain context and farmers' needs.

Ecologic Institute also featured in other events across the agenda: 

Hugh joined a panel on "Policy areas relevant to carbon farming: Synergies and trade-offs," where experts reflected on how EU policy can encourage and enable carbon farming.

Julia presented initial findings from the Climate Farm Demo project on the available rewarding mechanism for farmers in the session, "Rewarding mechanisms: Insights from farmers, agri-food companies and researchers for a successful approach".