Global agricultural soils have lost, through plowing and chemical inputs, a massive fraction of the carbon they contained before agricultural modernization. A 2025 Springer review of 214 time series from 23 long-term agricultural experiments shows that regenerative agriculture can reverse this trajectory, but with a precise biophysical limit that carbon markets have long overlooked.

Gains can slow as a new equilibrium approaches, but their timeline depends on soil, climate, history, and practices. IPCC estimates for agriculture and associated sequestration are on the order of 1.8 to 4.1 GtCO2e/year in its economic scenario, within a broader AFOLU potential of 8 to 14 GtCO2e/year, but it is capped, and this cap changes everything about climate strategy.

The essentials

  • Regenerative agriculture stores carbon in soils, restores biodiversity, and strengthens food resilience: its benefits are documented and multiple.
  • According to the 2025 Springer review, saturation is possible, but no universal ceiling at ten to fifteen years can be attributed to this study, which focuses on long-term experiments in temperate to cold regions.
  • Estimates of agricultural sequestration potential cover a range too wide to serve alone as a basis for reliable climate accounting.
  • Relying on agricultural sequestration to offset maintained fossil emissions exposes climate policies to a plateau that arrives before carbon neutrality deadlines.
  • The right strategy combines soil regeneration for its real co-benefits and direct reduction of fossil emissions: the two levers are complementary, not substitutable.

Degraded soils, a stock to rebuild

Agricultural land covers roughly 40% of global land surfaces. The IPCC estimates that approximately 20 to 30 billion tonnes of carbon have been released through desertification processes, notably associated with deforestation, overgrazing, and conventional plowing. This carbon oxidized and transformed into CO2. Regenerative agriculture aims to reverse this flux.

Concretely, the practices involved—permanent plant cover, no-till seeding without plowing, diverse rotations, agroforestry, crop residue return—feed organic matter to a soil that can reduce losses or increase organic carbon in certain combinations and contexts. Soil microorganisms play a central role: they aggregate particles, create porous structures, and produce humic compounds that repeated plowing destroys.

The mechanism is well documented. What was less documented, until the 2025 Springer meta-analysis, was the precise temporal dynamics of this storage. The study brings together 214 time series from 23 long-term agricultural experiment sites in temperate to cold regions. The result is clear: sequestration rates are highest in the early years, when the soil is still far from its new equilibrium. Potential slowdown depends on context and cannot be set uniformly.

A soil can approach a carbon equilibrium, with highly variable timing and no guaranteed net halt to gains at ten to fifteen years. Potential plateauing results from both biophysical constraints and management and environmental factors. It does not disqualify regenerative agriculture. It requires thinking about it differently.

The 8-43 gigatonne range calls for cautious reading

Figures of around 12 and 43 GtCO2/year correspond to two distinct and highly hypothetical scenarios of global conversion of crops and pastures. Studies arriving at high and low estimates rest on different assumptions concerning the feasibility and adoption of certain practices at large scale.

Low estimates start from effectively degraded and eligible land, practices already documented under real conditions, and long-term retention rates rather than initial peaks. IPCC assessments place the economic potential of agriculture and associated sequestration between 1.8 and 4.1 GtCO2e/year.

That is already substantial. Promoters of agricultural carbon offset often cite high estimates without specifying the conditions they presuppose. High estimates must be distinguished according to whether they describe technical, economic, sustainable, or feasible potential, and should not all be qualified as theoretical maximum.

For national climate plans, the distinction matters. A country that inscribes agricultural sequestration calculated from high estimates without anticipating potential plateauing takes a risk to climate accounting.

Co-benefits that hold beyond the carbon plateau

The sequestration plateau does not erase other gains. Carbon accounting has probably impoverished the debate by reducing regenerative agriculture to this single dimension.

A regenerated soil retains water better, 10 to 30% additional retention capacity according to field studies published in Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems in 2025. In areas subject to more frequent droughts, this gain in hydrological resilience is worth more, over the long term, than the few tonnes of CO2 sequestered per hectare. It translates directly into yields maintained during heat waves that degrade crops on bare soils.

Microbial and faunal biodiversity follows the same curve. Work published in Nature Food between 2023 and 2025 shows that the diversity of soil microorganisms, an indicator of its functional health, continues to progress beyond the carbon plateau. Living soil better degrades pathogens, fixes atmospheric nitrogen better via legumes, reduces input needs. These ecosystem services are not measured in gigatonnes, but they have real agronomic and economic value.

There is also the question of erosion. Bare or sparsely covered soils lose on average twice as much matter as soils under regenerative agriculture. At the global scale, erosion destroys each year the equivalent of several million hectares of arable land. Regenerative agriculture slows this process. It is a permanent benefit; it does not plateau with carbon.

Hannah Ritchie, whose book review is available in this journal, poses an analogous question for other climate solutions: environmental benefits deserve to be evaluated in their entirety, not reduced to a single indicator. Regenerative agriculture perfectly illustrates this principle.

Two trajectories for 2035-2040

The sequestration plateau, recognized by IPCC assessments as a saturation concern, draws two paths for agricultural and climate policies of the next decade.

In the first, governments adopt regenerative agriculture for what it does well: restore degraded soils, improve food resilience to climate shocks, reduce dependence on synthetic inputs. The sequestration plateau is a scientifically recognized phenomenon that should be factored into planning. Mechanisms include monitoring requirements and, in some cases, baseline revision; an expiration clause triggered by a sequestration plateau is not an established general rule. Direct emission reductions must accompany CO2 removals, whose storage in soils can be reversible.

In the second, national climate policies inscribe volumes of agricultural sequestration without anticipating that the plateau can occur at shorter horizons than expected, depending on soils, climates, and practices involved. Agricultural carbon credits are used notably to offset emissions. Under the assumption of ten to fifteen years to reach a plateau, it would arrive around 2030-2035 for conversions undertaken in the early 2020s. Climate accounting then reveals gaps between expected volumes and those actually measured in the field. Margins for maneuver to close the gap are reduced.

These two trajectories are not forecasts. They describe two deployment logics whose warning signals are already visible. The voluntary market for agricultural carbon credits has seen variations between 2020 and 2024 according to Ecosystem Marketplace. Verification meta-studies raise questions about gaps between credited and measured volumes. These gaps may reflect methodological differences between estimates and field measurements.

What is missing to decide between the two trajectories: a global mapping of degraded soils eligible for regeneration, by region and soil type, that would make it possible to calculate real rather than theoretical potential. And standardized metrics of the saturation plateau by soil type—clay, silt, sand, wet tropical soil, arid soil—that would make it possible to date, region by region, when carbon gains slow. These two tools exist in fragmentary form. Their consolidation at the international level is the prerequisite for honest climate accounting.

Concrete risks for farmers adopting these practices

Regenerative agriculture requires real investment, often borne solely by the operator in the early years. The transition to no-till seeding requires less capital for fuel and soil work, but it demands an overhaul of equipment, a soil adaptation period during which yields can drop, and increased agronomic skill in managing cover crops and rotations.

In France, where approximately 8% of agricultural surfaces are reportedly engaged in practices akin to conservation agriculture according to figures from the Permanent Assembly of Agricultural Chambers, documented field experience shows a transition period of two to five years with reduced profitability before stabilization. Operators with access to carbon credits or environmental service payments under the Common Agricultural Policy can amortize this cost. Others absorb the risk alone.

This is a real brake on mass adoption. Studies in Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems 2025 identify income security during the transition as the leading limiting factor, ahead of lack of local technical references. Public schemes that decouple soil regeneration financing from carbon accounting alone, also valuing water resilience, biodiversity, and input reduction, would make the transition economically viable for a greater number of operators.

Co-benefits financing is a concrete avenue. Several pilot programs in Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom have begun paying farmers for water retention and soil biodiversity, independently of carbon credits. Preliminary results suggest an adoption rate higher than carbon-only programs, probably because co-benefits are perceived as more durable and less likely to be questioned by methodological revision.

Agriculture’s place in global climate strategy

According to the FAO, agrifood systems represent 32% of global emissions in 2023; on-farm emissions and those linked to land-use change represent 8.1 and 3.2 GtCO2e respectively, including deforestation, methane emissions from livestock, and nitrous oxide from fertilizers. Reducing these direct emissions is a priority distinct from carbon sequestration in soils: sequestration can contribute to the net balance, but cannot substitute for rapid and deep emission reductions.

A field converted to regenerative agriculture that continues to raise ruminants at high intensity, use high doses of synthetic nitrogen, and contribute to deforestation in its watershed does not produce a positive carbon balance, regardless of its organic carbon gains in soil. Coherence of agricultural climate strategy requires both levers simultaneously: direct emission reduction and soil restoration.

Regenerative agriculture finds its true place within this broader framework. It contributes to sequestration with duration and intensity variable according to soils and practices. It contributes to co-benefits in a durable way. And it prepares soils to support less-emitting food systems by reducing reliance on inputs whose production is itself carbon-intensive. It is one lever among others, neither marginal nor sufficient alone.

The question that will remain open until 2035 is that of agricultural carbon credit governance. Some protocols do not explicitly use the term “plateau,” but their quantification rules can already limit credits to variations in stock actually measured or modeled. Some projects have long credit horizons; however, Verra rules require SOC measurements every five years and a baseline reassessment every ten years for agricultural projects. If the first large-scale agricultural carbon credit programs reach their plateau without buyers having anticipated the decline, trust in these instruments will take a hit, at a time when the energy transition needs it most to connect new projects to available financing.

What the coming years can produce most usefully: certification standards that incorporate actual storage duration, public financing that compensates measurable co-benefits, and national climate accounting that distinguishes what lasts from what plateaus. Regenerative agriculture deserves to be deployed for what it does, and that is already a great deal.

Sources

  1. 2025 Springer meta-analysis, Organic Carbon Gains in Agricultural Soils: Temporal Dynamics and Global Potential (k > 200 studies)
  2. FAO, Global Report on the Status of Land and Soil Resources, 2023
  3. Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, 2025 studies on hydrological resilience and factors in regenerative agriculture adoption
  4. Nature Food, 2023-2025 studies on soil microbial biodiversity in regenerative agriculture
  5. Ecosystem Marketplace, data on voluntary agricultural carbon credit market growth, 2020-2024