Avoided Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Agricultural Conservation Easements

American Farmland Trust and The Conservation Fund will summarize a new report that estimates the greenhouse gas (GHG) benefits of an agricultural conservation easement on a 103-acre farm in East Peoria, Illinois. The work demonstrates an important benefit of farmland protection and lays the groundwork for AFT’s development of a national calculator tool in 2023, which will be a tool for quantifying the climate benefit of certain existing and future ag conservation easements. In the webinar we will explain how we estimated that the easement on the farm in Illinois potentially avoids over 19,000 metric tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalents in its first 30 years, the equivalent of avoiding over 100 railcars’ worth of coal burned.