The Soil Carbon Challenge, or World Carbon Cup, is an international prize competition to see how fast land managers can turn atmospheric carbon into soil organic matter. We're actively seeking partnerships and suggestions.

The Challenge is also an observatory, analogous to Keeling's observatory for atmospheric carbon concentrations on Mauna Loa which developed the iconic Keeling curve of rising atmospheric carbon dioxide since 1958. This "observatory" is dispersed over the world's soils, focusing on human management of the carbon cycle, via long-term monitoring of soil carbon.

Recognizing that the biological carbon cycle in a field or landscape has large variability over time, and that human decisions have an enormous impact on how this carbon cycle functions, let's seek out this variability, measure it accurately, and learn from it on a case-by-case basis.

Soil organic carbon has value above and beyond the needs of present or future carbon markets for offsets to fossil fuel consumption. The Challenge is not an offset market scheme, or a blueprint for particular strategies or practices. The greatest leverage (financial, social, and ecological) can be obtained through a monitored competition, where land managers (brought together by local groups) choose the strategies they will implement.

Scenario: One-page quick overview of what it's about.

Unscrambling the egg: Why we need a new policy model to deal with the "scrambled egg" of the biosphere.

Description of the prize competition; some background; why prize competitions can change the questions

Can policy build soil carbon?

The elevator discussion

A design draft

If you're still looking for more, try the links on the right hand side of the page.

An international prize competition to see how fast land managers can turn atmospheric carbon into soil organic matter. Open to any land manager, or group of land managers.

The purpose of the Challenge is to highlight in a thorough, localized, and public way the opportunity and the possibilities for turning atmospheric carbon into soil organic matter, and to get it happening.

An entry consists of a specific parcel of land, with geolocated boundaries (or shapefile), between 0.20 and 10 ha in area, whose perimeter may not exceed that of a circle three times the parcel's area.

The Challenge runs for 10 years. Entries in 2009 will be judged in 2015 and final awards made 2019. The World Carbon Cup will go to the land manager who sequesters the most tons of C per hectare per year at the end of 10 years. There will be an additional prize for percentage increase. Baseline survey at year 0, remonitor at years 3, 6, and 10.

Entry fee is US$2000, plus travel expenses for a Monitor. This covers your baseline or starter monitoring. (Additional nearby entry parcels can be added at a discount.)

The Soil Carbon Coalition can offer help in finding sponsorships for the entry fee, including some written, online, and video resources to highlight the benefits and the opportunity of building soil organic matter, as well as methods for increasing it, and a list of organizations and local government agencies with specific interests in your area.

To keep your entry in the contest, remonitoring is required at 3 years, 6 years, and 10 years. Each monitoring is also $2000, plus travel expenses for a Monitor. To keep your entry viable, you must request additional monitoring at these intervals, and find sponsorship funding for it if necessary.

Entries baselined in 2009 will be scheduled for remonitoring in 2012, 2015, and 2019. Each calendar year, a different "race" will be started. Intermediate prizes will be awarded based on the 6-year monitoring.

scenario for Soil Carbon Challenge (this is a projected future possibility; it hasn't happened yet)

The Soil Carbon Challenge is an unusual partnership between 54 nonprofit organizations and associations across the globe, many of whom have been competing with each other in advocating strategies for stewardship of land and resources. The activity of the Challenge is monitoring rather than advocacy of particular methods. Its purpose is to recognize land managers who do an outstanding job of turning atmospheric carbon into soil carbon, achieve positive change through monitoring, and tell the story of soil organic matter.

In January 2010 the 29-member Competition Committee for the Soil Carbon Challenge met to finalize rules and protocols. Committee member Wayne Beck admitted, "This isn't about science, at least in the sense we've become accustomed to. It's about systems that can enhance the living world. There's lots of people out there who are throwing mud against a wall, to see what sticks. We're going to help them gauge their soil organic matter. But a scientist will try to predict what sticks, and then tell us why some of it didn't stick, or why some that did stick should not have."

Seeing the carbon/climate problem differently: why we need a soil carbon challenge

1. Technology alone, or guilt over technology, won't fix climate change. Fossil fuel emissions are only 3.4% of the annual flux of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere (Lal 2008). Even with instantaneous and complete elimination of these emissions, it may take generations for atmospheric carbon dioxide to decline to what NASA scientist James Hansen calls safe levels (IPCC 2007a, 2007b).

Reducing fossil-fuel emissions may be a necessary part of long-term climate stability. But in the near term, emissions reductions would have little leverage on the factors of concern for IPCC scientists: positive radiative forcing caused principally by atmospheric carbon dioxide.

2. Taking responsibility means seeing the problem differently. The problem with carbon is that it's not a problem. It's a biologically driven cycle. It's a network of self-motivated creatures, most of them microscopic, powered by chemical energy from sunlight, who grow, strive, eat, multiply, respire, and die.

Most of our climate change ideas come from physical science. But biology runs the vast majority of the carbon cycle. Green plants take carbon from the atmosphere using solar energy and make the sugars and carbohydrates that fuel life and growth, and power every action, feeling, and thought. Most of this carbon is returned back into the atmosphere by oxidation, which releases energy: respiration, decay, and fire.

Fossil fuel deposits are the result of photosynthesis exceeding oxidation over a geological time scale. Soil organic matter—carbon compounds that are the residue of past life, the present habitat for underground biodiversity, and the substrate for future life—also stores a solar surplus, but on a shorter time scale.