[Editor's note: This article originally appeared at Ecosystem Marketplace and is reprinted with permission. This is a revised draft that reflects the current status of the Global Agriculture Climate Assessment.]

When Daniella Malin presents her plans for developing the Sustainable Food Lab's (SFL) Global Agriculture Climate Assessment (GACA) on Thursday at the International Conference on Agriculture, Food Security and Climate Change in the Hague, she'll be looking to do more than just share interesting ideas with like-minded people.

Malin is the SFL's  Agricultural Climate Stewardship Project director, and she'll be pitching her group's plan for measuring the greenhouse gas emissions of farms around the world to a roomful of potential investors. It's part of the conference's unique "Investment Fair," which brings together social entrepreneurs and social investors under the umbrella of the United Nations.

The GACA is a partnership of 17 companies sharing their knowledge on the ways to practically reduce farm emissions. It focuses on stewardship, transforming data into concrete action based on a partnership between companies and the farmers from which they source in an effort to calculate the carbon footprint of different farming systems and crops.  It then works directly with farmers "to reduce that footprint as rapidly and efficiently as possible."

It is a global partnership that began with the prompting of a global company.

Developing an Idea

The development of the Cool Farm Tool -- the calculator that started it all -- began with a prompting from Dutch agrobehemoth Unilever. The Cool Farm Tool measures the GHG emissions of agriculture practices and helps farmers decrease their carbon footprint with "what-if" scenarios.

The genesis of the Cool Farm Tool was the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's 2007 Mitigation of Climate Change Report. The report includes global agricultural emissions data and highlights the mitigation potential of different agricultural practices.

"A variety of options exists for mitigation of GHG emissions in agriculture," Chapter Eight's executive summary says. "Many mitigation opportunities use current technologies and can be implemented immediately, but technological development will be a key driver ensuring the efficacy of additional mitigation measures in the future."

For Unilever, this chapter highlighted the potential for agriculture mitigation within their own supply-chain; but the global statistics and strategies included in the chapter were essentially useless for local application. They needed to know the potential of different practices at field level, rather than simply the global statistics. Unilever decided to talk with the University of Aberdeen's Pete Smith, an author of the chapter.

"They approached the authors and asked them if they would be interested in reverse-engineering the data so that they would have something useful to take to growers all over the world," says Malin. "It would be sort of a tool to start the conversation with growers about what would be feasible in terms of reduction and a way to immediately show growers what different changes in practice could gain them in terms of reduction."

The Cool Farm Tool

Earlier this year, the Cool Farm Tool was born. As Unilever describes it, "The tool is ideal for farmers, supply chain managers and companies interested in quantifying their agricultural carbon footprint and finding practical ways of reducing it. It calculates the greenhouse gas balance of farming, including emissions from fields, inputs, livestock, land use and land use change and primary processing."

Pete Smith's team at the University of Aberdeen created a scientifically-based, free and online open-source Excel document that allows farmers to plug in all the information from their crops to understand the total carbon emissions -- and realize where they could effectively reduce emissions.

The open-source aspect was important for the developers. "In this way, we would not proscribe how anyone used it," says Dr. Jon Hillier of the University of Aberdeen, "We could use and develop it for our own research purposes and they could use it for theirs."

It is a farmer-friendly way of measuring carbon emissions according to Mark Pettigrew, the Pepsi Co. Agricultural Development Manager. "The first step on the road to reducing your carbon footprint is to measure what you are doing," says Pettigrew. "That is quite a challenge in farming -- there is more complexity in agricultural GHG emissions than in most other activities -- so finding a cheap and easy to use tool is a great step forward."

Beyond simply calculating the GHG emissions, the tool gives farmers the opportunity to input "what-if" scenarios to determine the areas that provide the greatest potential for carbon mitigation.

"We run these 'what-if' scenarios of, given that these are the current practices, what practice changes are actually interesting, what might you consider doing differently," says Malin. "Then we would plug that in and see what that gains them." The possibilities include things such as changing farming techniques or applying a different fertilizer.