Christian Holzleitner is an economist by training who has spent his career studying one question: when does a market work, and when do you need regulation? That question took him through the EU’s Emissions Trading System, the Innovation Fund, the Modernization Fund, and finally to a unit at DG CLIMA that sits at the intersection of all of them — Land Economy and Carbon Removals. He is one of the architects of the EU’s Carbon Removal and Carbon Farming Regulation (CRCF), the framework designed to create a common certification standard that works for both public subsidies and private carbon credit buyers, and to stop farmers from having to report the same information five times for five different schemes.

Five years ago, many people in the regenerative agriculture space thought that paying farmers for soil carbon storage would rewire the agricultural system in a heartbeat. It has turned out to be considerably more difficult. The voluntary carbon market has not delivered the financing that was hoped for, and the soil carbon credit market in Europe has not scaled at the speed needed. The question this conversation addresses: is regulation part of the answer? The solar market suggests yes. Germany’s feed-in tariffs, later adopted in Spain and across the continent, created the demand certainty that turned a technology few had heard of into an industry. Carbon farming may need the same scaffolding.

In this episode — part of the podcast’s Carbon series, supported by the OGCR project — we get into why Christian sees a European-regulated market as fundamentally different from the international voluntary carbon market, how the Innovation Fund’s competitive call model could be adapted for carbon farming, what the EU ETS reform means for demand outside the agricultural value chain, why portfolios of small certified projects are the path to pension fund investment, why peatland rewetting in Finland is the landscape-scale intervention that excites him most, and what he would do if he could get a single line into the EU’s next seven-year budget.