Thank you, Mr. Chair and committee members, for the invitation to speak with you today.
My name is Aldyen Donnelly and I'm joining you remotely from my home, which is in the traditional territory of the Squamish, Musqueam and Tsleil-Waututh nations.
I am the senior adviser, carbon markets, at Terramera, a B.C.-based ag-tech company. I am also a co-founder and major shareholder of Nori, Inc., a three and a half year old blockchain-based start-up that is building a transparent, credible and farmer-accessible carbon removal marketplace in the United States. Nori's head office is in Seattle, Washington.
Also, from the mid-1990s through 2000, I was the founder of the Greenhouse Emissions Management Consortium, or GEMCo. GEMCo's membership included, over time, 14 of Canada's then 20 largest corporate greenhouse gas emitters. In that capacity, I raised the private funding that spawned the launch of Canada's prairie soil carbon balance project, a private sector and public sector partnership under the AAFC's original matching investment initiative. In October 1999, acting on behalf of the Canadian large emitters, I signed the world's first agreement to purchase emission reduction credits from farmers. I guess that means I've been around this for a while.
Terramera's work centres on how to enable farmers to unlock the intelligence in nature to inform their land management decisions. We develop software and analytical tools to empower our food and fibre producers to increase soil health and nutrient productivity, mitigate climate change risk, realize more stable on-farm financial returns and build a more resilient soil layer for future generations. Building up soil organic carbon stocks is one of the very few measures that we can pursue that both mitigates the risks of climate change while building a natural system that will also be more resilient and productive in the event of climate change.
I wish to stress that it's essential for Canadian policy-makers and influencers to embrace this opportunity to show the rest of the world a new path forward to the realization of a true market for natural climate solutions. Canada led the world with the Montreal protocol. This is our next chance to lead the world to essential and workable climate risk mitigation and adaptation solutions.
According to the UN Food and Agricultural Organization, Canada ranks among the top five countries in the world, along with Russia, the U.S., China and Brazil, for potential to draw heat-trapping gases out of the atmosphere when the recovered carbon is stored in soils and root systems. Some assessments rank Canada number two.
A recently published analysis by leading Canadian scientists suggests that our croplands and grazing lands have the capacity to sequester an incremental 78 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent per year by 2030. That's 25% to 35% of the nationwide reduction we must achieve relative to actual 2019 emission levels to meet our 2030 Paris Agreement goals.
What's the reality? After 18 years of experiments, the voluntary and compliance offset credit market experiments that have been launched in other nations have failed to mobilize any significant investment in greenhouse gas reduction and sequestration. That's across all sectors, not just agriculture.
Since 2002, all existing voluntary and compliance offset initiatives have combined to issue and retire less than 2.5 billion credits. That sounds like a lot, but even if 100% of these credits had the true underlying value of one tonne carbon dioxide equivalent reduced or sequestered, those retired credits equate to only 10% to 15% of one year's worth of the greenhouse gas emissions discharged by the top 50 corporate emitters in the world, so this is a statistically insignificant experiment so far.
Canadian policy-makers and stakeholders must work together to show a new path forward. This can be Canada's next Montreal protocol moment. It is time for us to step up and show the world what getting this right looks like, as we did when it came to figuring out how to work out of our supply chains the use of substances the release of which were causing the hole in our ozone layer.
Canada is positioned to develop and demonstrate the world's first efficient and truly functional natural climate solutions voluntary and compliance markets. We are trying to foster new markets that reward ecosystem services, not more underfunded subsidy programs that dictate land management practices to farmers.
I do have in my opening remarks six specific recommendations on what we need to do, but I think I'll cut off here to save time and invite you to look at my documentation when it's available to you.