There’s a climate solution that’s been hiding in plain sight. It doesn’t involve billion-dollar machines, deep-sea pipes, or direct air capture units the size of football stadiums.
It’s right beneath your feet, covers about a third of the earth’s land surface, and has been doing carbon capture waaayyyy back, long before venture capitalists discovered the term.
Meet soil.
The world’s most underrated carbon sink
Here’s a number worth sitting with: the world’s soils hold an estimated 1,500 to 2,400 petagrams of carbon. That’s more than all the carbon stored in the atmosphere and all terrestrial vegetation combined, by a significant margin.
Soil isn’t just supporting life, it is one of the planet’s primary life-support systems for the climate.
Problem is, we’ve spent about 200 years systematically draining it.
Intensive agriculture — ploughing, monocropping, synthetic inputs, leaving fields bare over winter — has stripped somewhere between 30% and 60% of the original organic carbon from cultivated soils globally. Every time you turn over a field and expose that dark, rich earth to the air, you’re not just farming. You’re releasing carbon.
The good news is that what we have depleted in such a short time, we can — at least partially — restore, thanks to practices like regenerative agriculture.
How soil actually captures carbon (and why it’s more interesting than it sounds)
Soil carbon sequestration isn’t magic, but it does involve a cast of characters that would make a good nature documentary. Plants pull CO₂ from the atmosphere through photosynthesis. Some of that carbon stays in the roots, feeding a teeming underground ecosystem of bacteria, fungi, and invertebrates. When those organisms die, organic matter accumulates. That organic matter — soil organic carbon, or SOC — is effectively atmospheric CO₂ locked away in the ground.
The tools for encouraging this process already exist:
Cover cropping, growing plants over winter to keep the soil alive and covered, rather than leaving it bare and oxidising. This keeps carbon cycling through living matter rather than escaping to the atmosphere.
Reduced or no-till farming keeps soil structure intact. Every pass of a plough is a carbon release event. Minimising tillage minimises that loss.
Agroforestry integrates trees into farmland, adding deep-rooted, long-lived carbon stores and massively improving soil biodiversity.
Compost and biochar applications add organic matter and, in biochar’s case, create a form of carbon that’s remarkably stable and resistant to decomposition.
None of these are new. What’s new is the serious scientific and financial attention being paid to measuring, verifying, and monetising what they do.
The dirt on dirt
Any article on soil carbon that doesn’t flag the uncertainties is selling you something.
The science is clear that soil can sequester significant amounts of carbon under the right conditions. What’s less settled is how much, for how long, and in what contexts. A 2024 study in Earth’s Future found that the feasible potential of cover cropping for carbon sequestration in US croplands was about one-fifth of previous estimates, with costs potentially an order of magnitude higher than thought. A Yale-led research team published findings in 2025 cautioning that enthusiasm for soil carbon as a climate solution has outpaced the evidence base.
That’s not a reason to dismiss it. It’s a reason to be rigorous about it.
There’s a difference between practices that slow carbon loss relative to business-as-usual, and practices that actively draw down atmospheric CO₂. Both are valuable. But conflating them is where greenwashing risk enters the picture, and where corporate nature claims start to unravel under scrutiny.
Permanence is also a genuine challenge. Carbon stored in soil can be released again if land management practices change, if temperatures rise and microbial activity accelerates, or if a drought hits. Robust Monitoring, Reporting and Verification (MRV), increasingly satellite-assisted and sensor-based, is what separates credible soil carbon credits from wishful thinking.
Why investors are paying attention now
The voluntary carbon market is maturing, and nature-based solutions are its bright spot. In 2024, offtake agreements for nature-based projects more than doubled, with over 20 million tons of credits secured at average prices exceeding $20 per ton, well above the market average. The voluntary agriculture carbon credit market, while still small (valued at around $36 million in 2024), is projected to grow at a CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate) of nearly 32% through 2034.
Companies are increasingly requesting soil carbon specifically, alongside methane management and other high-integrity removal approaches. Scope 3 emissions, those generated upstream and downstream of a company’s own operations, are putting agri-food supply chains squarely in the crosshairs, and soil health is emerging as both a liability to manage and an asset to develop.
The EU’s Carbon Farming framework is beginning to embed soil carbon into policy. Digital MRV tools are making it cheaper and faster to measure what’s happening below ground. And a generation of agri-tech startups, from soil sensing companies to carbon farming platforms like Agreena and Boomitra, is building the infrastructure to make soil carbon credits credible at scale.
What this means beyond the farm
The case for soil carbon isn’t just about agriculture. It’s about rethinking where climate solutions live.
For too long, the conversation about carbon removal has been dominated by high-tech approaches that don’t yet exist at meaningful scale, and forestry credits that have had a very rough few years on the integrity front. Soil — unglamorous, ever-present, already managed by billions of farmers worldwide — offers a genuinely distributed, nature-based intervention that can deliver co-benefits most CDR technologies simply can’t.
Healthier soils grow more food with fewer inputs. They retain more water, reducing drought vulnerability. They support biodiversity. They reduce runoff and filter pollutants. The carbon sequestration is almost a bonus.
Almost.
For organisations navigating nature markets, agri-supply chain sustainability, or the evolving landscape of carbon claims, the soil story is one worth understanding properly. It rewards nuance — and punishes oversimplification.
We help sustainability communicators and impact-focused brands find the rigorous, honest version of these narratives. Get in touch with the Amandla team to find out how.
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