2nd Biannual Science & Methods Committee Meeting - November 2020
The second joint biannual meeting of the Science & Method Committee took place beginning of November with an emphasis on strengthening the collaboration, communication and flow between the different governance layers science, methods and development operations for a smoother implementation process of changes and improvements to the Cool Farm Tool.
Highlights of past, ongoing and upcoming work
Richard Heathcote invited the committee members to look back at the successes of the past half year. He highlighted the creation of structured Trello boards for a more organized methods and science management, the beginning of updates to IPCC 2019, the perennials project now under way with Quantis and several CFA members, the completion of the soil road map and the introduction of the Mediterranean biome to the Cool Farm Tool Biodiversity Metric.
This review was followed by an overview of ongoing and upcoming activities. Graham Mullier presented the pipeline of technical developments including urgent topics such as automated testing, the update of the water module and the usage of the introduced versioning feature that allows to run different versions of methodologies simultaneously.
When turning to methods, Ben Kayatz updated the members on a set of topics:
- the status of approved methods soon to be introduced to the CFT, such as Nitrogen use efficiency (NUE),the ERA 5 as the new database for the water module, and the feed additives (GFLI database) that will be introduced beginning of 2021;
- the alignment with IPCC 2019 guidelines, for which key priority updates have been defined and links between the IPCC 20219 agroforestry piece and the Cool Farm Alliance perennials work are evaluated;
- an insight into the upcoming emission factor updates, including a) an extended machinery use list, b) irrigation values and c) pesticide values specific for regions (under discussion), d) Electricity and heat data that will be provided by either Ecoinvent or IEA and e) feed emission factors derived from the GFLI dataset instead of Feedprint;
- the intention to compare the Cool Farm Tool with leading product and company carbon accounting standards such as the GHG Protocol, ISO 14067, EU PEF, IDF etc., and possibly also to other offsetting standards and carbon accounting tools by conducting a gap analysis for selected standards.
Richard Heathcote called for action to extend scientific research beyond the internal team to all partner universities and beyond. After a preliminary check from the committee members, it is planned to ask the wider membership to take up science requests by facilitating or commissioning necessary MSc, PhD or Post-Doc studies. Finally, some tactical decisions such as a funding strategy to guarantee resources for science, including e.g. literature reviews, research bids and the need for working groups (e.g. biodiversity) have been discussed.
The meeting was a great next step to improve the efficiency of activities and incentivize joint efforts to design state-of-the-art Cool Farm science and methods.
-
Most popular related searches
Customer comments
No comments were found for 2nd Biannual Science & Methods Committee Meeting - November 2020. Be the first to comment!