In Europe, four regulatory revolutions are coming for environmental reporting related to agriculture.
These regulatory revolutions are having an impact on the extra-financial reporting of companies, consumer law, land law and the common agricultural policy. All of them require the implementation of information and performance measurement tools.
- CSRD (Corporate Sustainable Reporting Directive), requiring full reporting of the environmental impacts of agricultural supplies.
Challenges of the tools: measure the sustainability of supplies, make agricultural practices evolve to improve the impact. Inform stakeholders.
Main users: the 55,000 largest European companies initially. - Farm to fork, setting the rules for informing consumers about the real environmental impact of agricultural products.
Stakes of the tools: to give the consumer verified environmental impact information and avoid greenwashing.
Main users: farmers and the 55,000 largest European companies initially. - Soil Law, generalizing a diagnosis of soil health agricultural at the time of land transactions (purchase-sale, lease, succession).
Stakes of the tools: make farmers aware of the need to respect their land assets and better value land in good condition.
Main users: farmers, landowners, holding funds and banks that finance. - Carbon Farming Directive, which directs part of the CAP subsidies to farmers under the condition of a real positive impact on the climate and biodiversity.
Stakes of the tools: remunerating the real impact of agriculture on the climate but also on biodiversity and water quality.
Main users: farmers, buyers of carbon and environmental credits.
All these regulatory changes must be coherent since they often affect the same actors (farmers, industrialists, financiers), and converge towards a measurable impact on the environment, since this is their raison d'être.
These regulations require efficient and affordable measurement and information tools that are also convergent between the various users:
- Limited, the ideal is to have a common tool for these different requirements, with identical indicators and shared costs
- Real, by measuring the results achieved and not only the means used, as is generally the case in agriculture,
- Actionable, by not only measuring results but also identifying levers for improvement,
- Comprehensive, taking into account the full impacts on the environment (biodiversity, climate and pollution) to avoid negative collateral effects or windfall effects on one aspect to the detriment of the others (e.g. carbon vs. biodiversity),
- Consistent, by mobilizing all value chains around clear and shared objectives,
- Fair, by taking into account the different pedo-climatic contexts, and avoiding a structural preference for one European region,
- Deployable, on a large scale, both from a technical and economic point of view,
These are precisely the characteristics that led to the design of the measurement tools and the Genesis platform. The state measurement of soil health is the only way to meet all these requirements.The Genesis platform is the first tool capable of simultaneously reporting, from the same high quality data, on :
- real and certified reporting of the environmental impact of agricultural supplies,(CSRD)
- information to the consumer on the environmental impact of his product (generally 60 to 90% for a product from agriculture),(farm to fork),
- Soil diagnosis at the time of a transaction(soil law),
- measuring the real impact of the farmer's practices on the environment(carbon farming).
and to provide levers for improving these impacts by correlating them with data on agricultural practices.
