Pig farms in the country could generate more than P25 million ($600,000) in additional revenues annually from carbon credits if they participated in World Bank’s Methane Recovery from Waste Management Project, where they would set up facilities that will convert methane into fuel.
The World Bank announced that the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) registered a Program of Activity (PoA) for piggeries under the Methane Recovery from Waste Management Project on July 26.
Through this program, piggeries that will invest in wastewater-treatment facilities so that methane gas will not be released to the atmosphere but is instead captured and converted into fuel to run generators of farms will generate carbon credits.
The program will be implemented through Land Bank of the Philippines, with the Spanish Carbon Fund administered by the World Bank buying the carbon credits.
“This is the first program of activities from the Philippines to be registered and it is the first registered biogas PoA in the animal-waste sector in Southeast Asia, a region home to a significant number of the world’s pigs. LandBank is paving the way for the scaling up of environmentally friendly technologies that reduce the negative impacts of livestock waste on water, air, human health and the climate in general, not just across the Philippines, but throughout the region,” according to Nick Bowden, carbon finance specialist at the World Bank.
Brudy Calado, a technical expert at LandBank, said the initial design for the program covers farms maintaining at least 3,000 heads at any given time.
He said based on their estimate, if about 15 medium-to-large farms joined the program, the farms would earn a cumulative 100,000 tons of carbon credits per year. The current market price for carbon credits is about $6 per ton.
LandBank, Calado said, can provide financing to piggeries that will set up their anaerobic wastewater- treatment systems, which will capture methane that could be used to generate renewable electricity in lieu of fossil fuel.
The bank will also make necessary documentations, guide the farms in monitoring the methane gas that they have captured, report to the World Bank and collect the payments for the carbon credits.
Carbon finance facilitates financial rewards through carbon credits for the reduction of greenhouse-gas emissions by emitters in developing countries, like the Philippines, through the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) of the Kyoto Protocol. “We are pleased to work with the World Bank on this project because we are hitting two goals at the same time: providing financial support to farmers in the countryside—which is our core mandate—while contributing to efforts at mitigating climate change,” Land Bank President and Chief Executive Officer Gilda E. Pico said.
World Bank Country Director Motoo Konishi said the PoA would contribute to global efforts to address climate change. “Climate change poses a serious threat to development, especially to the ability of the poor to move out of poverty. That’s why initiatives like these are very important.”
