Claudine FOUCHEROT
Program Director – Agriculture and ForestryClaudine oversees the Agriculture and Forestry program, which aims to support agricultural and forestry stakeholders to understand, anticipate and contribute to the development of economic instruments and climate policies to trigger the low-carbon transition for these sectors.
She joined the team in 2012 and was project manager in the think tank until 2020. Her research areas are the economic and policy instruments mitigating agricultural emissions (carbon certification, CAP, EU ETS, etc.) and sector adaptation to climate change.
Claudine is an agricultural engineer and a graduate of AgroParisTech and holds a Master in economics of sustainable development, energy and environment
Last contributions
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17/03/2023
Foreword of the week
Net Zero Industry Act: Europe in the race for cleantech
The European Union still has a lot of work to do. Yesterday the European Commission published its Net Zero Industry Act, a piece of its response to the American Inflation Reduction Act, a necessary but still insufficient building block to keep the European Union in global cleantech race. It will also have to complete a number of directives and regulations to deliver its Green Deal. The EU election in 2024 is fast approaching, time is of the essence. -
21/02/2023
Climate Report
Livestock farming transition: managing past investments and rethinking future ones
Accompanying the decline in livestock numbers. All transition scenarios rely on a decline in livestock numbers to meet climate targets. Yet in France, most livestock populations are already declining. The challenge is not only to continue this trend, but also to support it, to ensure a fair and acceptable transition for livestock farmers and other players in the livestock industry. This is particularly true for the dairy sector. -
02/12/2022
Foreword of the week
European Carbon Certification must be demanding… and appealing
How can we differentiate between projects that really enable carbon to be stored and those that only claim to do so? This is a complicated question when dealing with projects in agriculture and forestry, where quantifying carbon storage is complex, and where other environmental challenges, like the preservation of biodiversity, must also be taken into account. A complicated question, therefore, but one that needs an answer! Private actors and public authorities want to ensure that the agricultural and forestry projects financed in the name of the climate have a real environmental benefit. -
01/12/2022
Blog post
Carbon certification: the Commission publishes a stringent certification framework that should also be appealing
Yesterday, 30 november 2022, the European Commission adopted a proposal for a first EU-wide voluntary framework to reliably certify high-quality carbon removals. This proposal provides a framework, broad guiding principles, and the details will be specified in 2023 supported by an expert group on Carbon Removals. “The devil may be in the detail”, but the framing is no less important. Claudine Foucherot of [i4ce] has analysed it and identified four points on which we must be vigilant. Overall, it can be said that the Commission is submitting an ambitious proposal, which nevertheless presents a risk: not being sufficient incentives to ensure a massive deployment of certified projects.
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08/07/2022
Climate Report
Recommendations for the European Carbon Certification Framework
To achieve the climate goals of the UE, The European Commission wants to create a carbon certification framework to encourage carbon storage in the land sector. The challenge is to develop a common and harmonised framework at the European level by better relying on the expertise acquired through existing certification frameworks. With this study, I4CE propose 7 recommendations, inspired by both our concrete experience with the French Label Bas-Carbone to which we have contributed, and by 15 years of research on carbon certification. -
11/02/2022
Climate Report
Carbon sinks: is France’s ambition realistic?
The French National Low-Carbon Strategy (SNBC) aims at doubling the volume of CO2 removals thanks to the contribution of the forest-based sector, the agricultural sector and the geological carbon capture and storage technologies. The projections concerning these compartments and the underlying technical assumptions have been explored and compared to the existing literature in an in-depth analysis, with the goal of clarifying the challenges and conditions for this massive increase in carbon removals. The conclusions are that far-reaching changes are required in the different sectors and that some objectives for the forest-based sector may be impossible to achieve. -
27/01/2022
Climate Brief
Design principles of a carbon farming scheme in support of the Farm2Fork & FitFor55 objectives
In order to reach the objectives of the recently approved EU Climate Law, the agricultural sector has to simultaneously reduce significantly its level of emission, increase the amount of carbon it sequesters, and augment the production of biomass in substitution of fossil fuel – which are to be phased out in the short term. In […] -
27/01/2022
Blog post
Remunerating farmers for their stored carbon, Europe’s good idea?
On December 15, 2021, as part of its communication on carbon sinks, the European Commission made public its proposals to strengthen carbon storage in agricultural soils. Its objective: to remunerate farmers to encourage them to store more carbon. To achieve this, it is first necessary to build a European carbon certification framework to guarantee the […] -
09/11/2021
Climate Report
Promoting and reporting on climate action carried out within the framework of the Low-Carbon Standard
In the context of the development of the Low Carbon Label, one of the recurring questions from potential financiers is: "What am I allowed to say and do when financing certified low carbon projects? With this publication, I4CE provides operational and pragmatic answers. -
14/10/2021
Climate Brief
Does more sustainable food increase consumer budgets?
Eating less animal products and wasting less reduces the budget, but increasing consumption of organic products increases it. In total, does adopting a sustainable diet increase or decrease consumer spending? -
14/10/2021
Climate Report
Assessing the sustainability of the French food system: methodological issues and results
To learn more about the methodology used by I4CE to assess the contribution of financing flows to the emergence of a sustainable food system, this technical paper introduces it and identifies its limitations and key methodological challenges for the future. -
19/06/2020
Climate Report
Will the obligation of environmental results green the CAP?
One of the main elements of the reform of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) for the 2021-2027 exercise is the shift of part of the funding towards an obligation to achieve environmental results. Is that an expensive development? Environmentally effective? In order to answer these questions, this I4CE study analyses numerous mechanisms, more or less oriented towards performance obligation. -
11/06/2020
Op-ed
CAP and climate: let’s not be afraid of obligations to achieve results
In spite of its "greening" during the previous programming period, the Common Agricultural Policy has had very little impact on greenhouse gas emissions from the agricultural sector, even though they must be halved by 2050. And the CAP's two flagship instruments on environmental issues - green payments under the first pillar, and agri-environmental and climate measures (AECM) under the second - have come in for strong criticism. -
25/02/2019
Climate Report
Food policies and climate: a literature review
Food consumption is responsible for around 28% of total greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions (see I4CE study on the issue) Which dietary practices have the largest potential for reducing food-related GHG emissions? Is it possible to reduce food-related emissions while also targeting public health and environmental goals such as the preservation of soils or water quality? […] -
25/02/2019
Climate Report
Estimating greenhouse gas emissions from food consumption: methods and results
A large share of global greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions comes from food production and consumption. Measuring the total footprint of world diets remains however a challenge. The main reason is the lack of harmonization on consumption based emission accounting methods. While a few estimates are available, their results are often hardly comparable, may be rather […] -
29/10/2015
Special issues
Note: contribution from I4CE on how to address double counting within voluntary projects in Annex B countries
Double counting of emission reductions is one of the main issues concerning the development carbon offset projects. This question is crucial for JI projects (Joint Implementation- Kyoto Protocol) but stakes are different for voluntary offsetting. This note aims to explain the issue of double counting and more specifically, the issue of double monetization and double […] -
17/06/2015
The accounting of GHG emissions (MRV)
Heading towards the 2015 Paris international Climate Conference (COP21), I4CE, in partnership with ADEME, the French Environment and Energy Management Agency, publishes a ClimasCOPe # 3 aiming to shed some light on the challenges of international climate negotiations. ClimasCOPe # 3 is focused on the challenge of Monitoring, Reporting and Verification (MRV) of GHG emissions. After […] -
10/04/2015
Climate Report
The previous Common Agricultural Policy (2003-2013) reduced french agricultural emissions
In September 2013, European institutions ratified the reform of the Common Agricultural Policy for 2014-2020 with new targets for combating climate change, making these an official goal for the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). However the CAP’s impact on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions did not begin in 2014, even if it was previously ancillary to measures […] -
25/02/2015
Climate Report
DEVELOPMENT AND OUTLOOK FOR AGRICULTURE IN INTERNATIONAL CLIMATE NEGOCIATIONS
By Clothilde TRONQUET, Claudine FOUCHEROT Agriculture has a specific role to play in current and future climate change. This carbon-intensive sector, which is responsible for 13.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions, is also highly exposed to the impacts of climate change, including a downward trend and increasing variability in yields. Yet agriculture’s capacity to adapt […] -
18/03/2013
Climate Report
More than 800 agricultural and agri-food sites affected by the eu ets
By Claudine Foucherot and Valentin Bellassen … counting only emissions of methane and nitrous oxide from cattle, crops and pasture. These emissions have two characteristics making their inclusion in the European Emission Trading Scheme (EU ETS) difficult: they are diffuse and depend on a range of fairly complex pedoclimatic factors. Taking into consideration the whole […] -
28/12/2011
Climate Report
CARBON OFFSET PROJECTS IN THE AGRICULTURAL SECTOR
By Claudine FOUCHEROT et Valentin BELLASSEN The agricultural sector accounts for 14% of global anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. If we also take into account carbon emissions and sequestration from upstream – production of fertilisers, deforestation, etc. – and downstream – bio-energies, etc. – the share rises to 30%. Many practices and technologies enable agriculture’s impact […]