"Incentivizing farmers to shift from conventional to regenerative practices could help fulfil the United Nations Food Systems commitments to transform food supply chains — as well as reducing carbon emissions (see L. A. Schulte et al. Nature Sustain. 5, 384–388; 2022).
Regenerative farming is designed to increase carbon sequestration and storage in soil and plants. Farmers are remunerated accordingly, and stored carbon is converted into carbon credits that can be sold on the voluntary carbon market to carbon emitters, who use them to offset unavoidable emissions. But to avoid repeating past errors from changing the maximization of crop yields to maximizing carbon storage (A. Balmford et al. Nature Sustain. 1, 477–485; 2018), biodiversity metrics need to be included. Factoring in the composition of the microbiome and diversity of the soil food web, for example, would boost agricultural production and the provision of ecosystem services.
However, it will be hard to incorporate biodiversity metrics that work on large scales. One way could be to combine field surveys of environmental DNA with biodiversity indexes based on satellite data (A. K. Skidmore et al. Nature Ecol. Evol. 5, 896–906; 2021)." [1]
1. Carbon farming: integrate biodiversity metrics. Sylvain Coutu, Inbal Becker-Reshef & Loïc Pellissier, Nature 609, 467 (2022)
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