Towards Climate-Neutral Agriculture: System Insights From ClieNFarms

ClieNFarms: revealing the real-world challenges and opportunities of climate action in European agriculture.

With the newly adopted Implementing Regulation under the EU’s Carbon Removals and Carbon Farming (CRCF) framework, the European Union is taking its first steps toward a voluntary certification system that will shape how soil carbon, carbon farming measures and land-based removals are recognised. At the same time, farmers across Europe face increasingly unstable conditions, while value chains, advisors and policymakers all work under their own measurement rules, incentive structures and risk constraints.

Amid these pressures, a deeper structural challenge becomes clear as the systems designed to measure, finance and incentivise agricultural climate action do not yet align. This misalignment shapes what farmers can adopt, how companies invest, how advice is delivered and how progress is counted.

Over the past four years, the Horizon Europe-funded ClieNFarms project has served as a diagnostic tool for understanding these system interactions. Through its role in the project, Climate KIC helped bring together local farm experimentation and broader system-level analysis, revealing across twenty demonstration environments and more than one hundred outreach and replication farms where climate actions falter, where they succeed and what this means for Europe’s next steps.

Climate Measures Scale Only When Systems Align

ClieNFarms showed that climate measures scale only when the wider system supports them. In the project’s Innovative Systemic Solution Spaces (I3S), farmers and other key actors tested solutions in real decision-making contexts, revealing that adoption depends not just on technical performance but also on coherent advice, stable policy signals, supportive markets and shared financial risk. Across the network, even strong solutions struggled when these elements diverged, while alignment consistently enabled farmers to experiment, invest and maintain change.

The project demonstrated that many farm-level decisions hinge on relationships as much as data. ClieNFarms’ co-creation structures, particularly the Creative Arenas, allowed farmers, advisors, processors, researchers and local institutions to explore climate options together.

The Challenge of Conflicting Climate Metrics

ClieNFarms revealed a core challenge in agricultural climate policy: progress varies depending on the indicators used. The project identified about thirty measures, each influencing emissions, soil, carbon sequestration, resilience and biodiversity differently. Product-based indicators support supply-chain reporting but may drive intensification; per-hectare indicators help regional planning but may push extensification; farm-level metrics reflect management but don’t translate easily along the value chain. 

These perspectives often move in different directions for the same practice, making it difficult to define progress consistently across farms, markets and EU policies. ClieNFarms shows the need for assessments that recognise both immediate mitigation benefits and long-term resilience, for example, measures that strengthen soil structure even without immediate emission cuts.

Soil Carbon Models: Potential and Uncertainty

The project’s work on soil carbon modelling showed both potential and uncertainty. Models offer useful insights into carbon sequestration, but their reliability depends on input data, with sampling, calibration and local variation strongly influencing results. Many challenges arise not from the models themselves but from their application. Clearer guidance, consistent datasets and user-friendly tools are crucial to make modelling accessible for farmers, advisors and institutions. This is increasingly important as soil carbon gains prominence in European policy for mitigation, soil function and water retention. Strengthening data governance and model usability will be essential as the CRCF defines carbon farming methodologies from 2026 onward.

The Challenge of Attributing Climate Benefits

A recurring challenge was how to allocate climate benefits across complex farming systems and multiple outputs. Without a trusted attribution framework, companies struggle to integrate climate gains into procurement or reward structures, limiting large-scale private engagement.

Across the project, farmers consistently requested clear instructions, tested examples, demonstration sites and advisory support tailored to local conditions. They also highlighted the need for shared risk-management and stable policy signals, especially as CRCF methodologies are expected to take shape from 2026.

A Foundation for Europe’s Agricultural Transition

ClieNFarms leaves behind a substantial base of evidence, tools, case studies, policy briefs and co-creation methods. But its most important contribution is the clarity it provides about the systemic conditions that enable, or obstruct, climate-neutral farming. The project has shown where progress is possible, where structural barriers persist and how different parts of the agricultural system influence one another.

As the EU rolls out the CRCF framework and prepares new methodologies for carbon farming, the findings from ClieNFarms offer timely guidance. They point to the need for coherent advisory structures, clear evidence standards, stable policy signals and financial mechanisms that share risk more fairly across value chains.

Climate-neutral agriculture will require practical innovation and stable frameworks that reflect the realities of farm businesses. ClieNFarms has helped define how these elements can be aligned, and what Europe must address next to ensure that ambition is matched by workable, trusted and farmer-centred action.

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