Scaling Grassland Preservation: High-integrity carbon credits from Avoided Grassland Conversion

Canada's prairie grasslands are one of our most overlooked natural resources. Rich in biodiversity, these open landscapes have co-evolved over centuries with grazing animals and the humans that manage them – a relationship that drives deep root growth and locks carbon into the soil below. While these landscapes provide critical biodiversity conservation, water management and flood mitigation, and importantly, store significantly more soil organic carbon than cropland, they are rapidly disappearing: roughly 80% of Canadian native grasslands have been lost.

Once disturbed, centuries of accumulated carbon are released back into the atmosphere, and even converting the land back to grassland doesn't undo that loss. Recovering soil carbon can take decades, and some of what's lost may never fully return. Despite this, there is currently no dedicated avoided-grassland-conversion protocol in Canada, and no methodology proven to appropriately establish additionality for grassland preservation at scale.

What

In response, Food Water Wellness Foundation (FWWF) developed the Scaling Grasslands Preservation Project (SGP): a high-integrity ecological services initiative that pays ranchers to conserve their grasslands–rather than convert them–generating measurable, verifiable Avoided Conversion Credits (ACCs) in the process.

We've currently quantified roughly 700,000 tonnes of avoided emissions, quantified using our soil carbon measurement technology, and are now in the process of third-party verification.

How (quality)

Unlike most existing grassland carbon initiatives, our approach is measurement-based, combining field-collected soil data, predictive soil mapping, and carbon-cycle simulation to quantify and predict what grazed grassland actually stores.

• Rigorous MRV: satellite imagery and remote sensing provide continuous monitoring, integrated with a robust Measurement, Reporting, and Verification system

Permanence by design: Payment for generations

Rather than a one-time payout, SGP is backed by an endowment fund: revenue from credit sales is reinvested, and the returns are paid out to ranchers indefinitely — giving them a lasting financial incentive to keep the land as grassland for successive generations, addressing the financing gap that limits most conservation easements over time.