With the second delegated act adopted on July 10, 2026, the European Carbon Removal Certification Framework (CRCF) finally extends to agriculture and forestry. This does not create a new credit market, but rather a quality standard intended to reshape the way projects are designed, measured, and verified.

What is meant by carbon farming?

Before delving into the regulation, it's worth clarifying its scope. Carbon farming refers to agricultural and forestry practices that increase the amount of carbon retained in soil and biomass, or reduce greenhouse gas emissions generated by the land itself.

These range from crop rotations and cover crops to minimum tillage, from agroforestry to the restoration of drained peatlands, and even the creation of new woodlands. These are activities that agronomy has long been familiar with: the novelty of recent years is that the climate benefits they produce can be quantified, certified, and—potentially—remunerated, transforming an agronomic practice into an economic asset.

This is precisely the point where the issue ceases to be merely environmental and becomes a question of the business model for agricultural and forestry companies. And it's where, historically, the market's mistrust has been concentrated: how much is biological absorption really worth? How long does it last? Who verifies it?

The CRCF Regulation: why it was created

The European Union has responded to these questions with the Regulation (EU) 2024 / 3012, known as CRCF (Carbon Removals and Carbon Farming Certification Framework): the first voluntary EU-wide certification framework for carbon removals.

The regulation covers three families of activities:

• permanent absorptions, obtained with geological capture and storage technologies;
• carbon farming, that is, removals and emission reductions related to land and forest management;
• carbon storage in products, typically in building materials of biogenic origin.

The stated objective is twofold: to build trust in a sector that has so far been fragmented by disparate private standards and, at the same time, to curb greenwashing by establishing common quality criteria, monitoring and verification requirements entrusted to independent third parties, and publishing the information in a European register.

The implementation stages: from the regulation to the methodologies

A framework regulation, however, is not enough: technical rules are needed. The implementation process unfolded in three closely spaced steps.

November 2025 (?) — With Implementing Regulation (EU) 2025/2358, the Commission defined the technical rules on certification schemes, certification bodies, and audits. Among the most relevant provisions for the Italian manufacturing sector is the admissibility of group certification for carbon farming, designed to reduce the administrative burdens that would make access prohibitive for small agricultural and forestry companies.

February 2026 —The first delegated act introduced the methodologies for permanent removals: DACCS, BECCS, and biochar, i.e., solutions with multi-centennial storage horizons.

July 2026 —The second delegated act extended the methodological framework to carbon farming itself, dividing it into three intervention categories: agriculture and agroforestry on mineral soils; restoration and rewetting of peat bogs and other organic soils; and afforestation.

With this latest step, the CRCF also becomes operational for Nature-based Solutions, providing a harmonized methodological framework where until now disparate approaches coexisted.

The quality criteria

The system is based on some pillars that each project must demonstrate it respects:

• robust quantification and additionality, to ensure that the climate benefit is real, measurable and would not have occurred anyway;
• independent monitoring and verification, with third-party audits throughout the project life cycle;
• reversal risk management, that is, strategies to deal with the possibility that stored carbon may return to the atmosphere (fires, changes in intended use, extreme events);
• ecosystem protection, with the obligation not to cause damage to biodiversity and ecosystem services.

A recurring misunderstanding: standard, not market

It is useful to be clear on this point, because confusion is widespread. The CRCF does not establish a European carbon credit market and does not replace existing voluntary international standards. It is not a trading system similar to the EU ETS, nor a register of credits immediately available for offsetting purposes.

Rather, it is a reliability benchmark: it defines when a removal can be considered certified according to European criteria. The methodologies adopted are rigorous, but they do not immediately eliminate the historical criticalities of nature-based solutions—permanence, reversibility, baseline construction, leakage, and long-term monitoring. The regulation, not surprisingly, maintains a substantial distinction between permanent removals and biological removals, the stability of which depends on the preservation of ecosystems over time.

It should also be clarified that the credits currently circulating on the market do not automatically acquire a "European" qualification: the certification schemes will have to be recognized by the Commission and operated by independent verifiers, with certified units destined to gradually flow into a Union register.

What it means for businesses

For agricultural and forestry operators, consortia, project developers, and companies looking to removals as a lever for decarbonization, a repositioning phase is underway. Designing a carbon farming initiative today means working from the outset on elements that the CRCF makes crucial: defining the baseline and collecting historical data, testing technical and regulatory additionality, quantification models, monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV) systems, natural risk analysis and related mitigation measures, and co-benefits for biodiversity.

There's also an aggregative dimension that deserves attention. Group certification opens up concrete opportunities for producer organizations, cooperatives, forestry consortia, and business networks, which can build regional pipelines and distribute the costs of due diligence, monitoring, and audits among multiple operators that would otherwise be unsustainable individually.

The adoption of the first methodologies marks the beginning, not the end, of the European journey. The challenge for the coming years will be the system's ability to combine scientific rigor, project economic sustainability, and large-scale deployment—without raising expectations that the current regulatory framework is not yet capable of meeting.

For more information: info@iniziativa.cc