Conclusion

The ability of soils to store organic carbon is well known, and the idea of intentionally increasing SOC stocks in an effort to mitigate climate change has received a great deal of attention over the years. Indeed, as far back as 2002, the French Ministry of Ecology commissioned INRA to write a report on “storing C in French soils”, and the 2015 launch of the “4 per 1,000” initiative spurred and amplified this interest. Work in this field has generated a variety of estimates at different scales, which can vary greatly depending on the methods used and the way stocks are defined (absolute or relative to the tendential evolution of a stock). Regardless of the exact values obtained, it is clear that the storage of organic carbon in soils can compensate for only a part of anthropic CO ₂ emissions and only over a period of several decades. While...