World Bank promotes pig farm incentives

MANILA, Philippines - Good news for pig farmers in the Philippines: they now have a significant incentive to clean up their business while helping the country address climate change.

On July 26, 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 which allows farms across the Philippines to generate carbon credits. This is an added financial incentive for piggeries to invest in wastewater treatment facilities that better dispose of pig manure and capture methane to generate electricity.

The Spanish Carbon Fund administered by the World Bank is buying these carbon credits, thus providing the piggeries with an additional revenue stream.

Implemented by the Land Bank of the Philippines and supported by the World Bank’s Carbon Finance Unit, the project provides carbon finance to operators of piggeries to encourage them to install proper waste management systems and reduce the emission of methane, a potent greenhouse gas.

 “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,” said Nick Bowden, carbon finance specialist at the World Bank.

 “Land Bank 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,” Bowden said.

Under this project, Landbank, through its carbon finance facility, is helping pig farmers manage animal manure by financing the installation of anaerobic wastewater treatment systems that capture methane which could be used to generate renewable electricity replacing fossil fuel derived electricity.

For this voluntary action, the pig farmers earn carbon credits for each ton of methane captured. When fully implemented, the program is expected to produce over 100,000 tons of carbon credits per year from dozens of pig farms across the country. This is the equivalent to a reduction of 100,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

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.

The CDM allows industrialized countries and companies to fulfill some of their greenhouse gas reduction commitments through the purchase of carbon credits in clean-and-green projects in developing countries. Investments in climate friendly projects displace more carbon-intense technologies, resulting in measurable reductions in GHG, yielding Certified Emission Reductions (CERs) or “carbon credits.” (Each unit of CER is equivalent to a metric ton of carbon dioxide.)