Conclusion
Potential of carbon storage in soils

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...