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while the sun shines
commodity being grown and stockpiled on
Australian farms, but it’s already earning some
landholders huge revenues.
Australia, not only sequester and store a
lot of carbon in their vegetation and the
sediment on which they grow, they help
protect the coast from wild weather and
add to ocean productivity.
woodlands on Peter Yench’s Cobar
property might have looked
dry and parched through the recent
drought, but it was a valuable
store of carbon.
About a decade ago Peter entered into an agreement under the Carbon Farming Initiative, as the federal government began exploring innovative carbon capture options to reduce the nation’s total greenhouse gas emissions. He locked in a vegetation management plan for his property that avoided native vegetation clearing. And the big pay-offs began a few years later with the 2015 launch of the Emissions Reduction Fund (ERF), which provides financial incentives for greenhouse gas mitigation.
The ERF facilitates ways to measure and pay for either sequestering carbon – pulling carbon dioxide (CO₂) out of the atmosphere and locking away the carbon component – or preventing the release of CO₂ in the first place.
“A lot of farmers are getting into carbon because it’s allowing them to improve their country, carrying capacity and finances,” Peter explains. Named Carbon Cocky of the Year at the 2019 National Carbon Cocky awards, which recognise carbon farming excellence, Peter is among the most enthusiastic advocates for this very 21st-century agricultural style. “It’s better management, that’s what it is – better for the land, for the environment, for the planet – a win-win all round. And the government wins too because it increases tax revenue.” ►
AUSTRALIAN GEOGRAPHIC. THIS PAGE: BRENDAN ESPOSITO/FAIRFAX
“So they can hold up to 40 times more than terrestrial forests,” explains Dr Oscar Serrano, a marine ecologist with expertise in biogeochemical cycles at Edith Cowan University’s Centre for Marine Ecosystems Research in Western Australia. Australia is a blue carbon ecosystem hotspot, having about 10 per cent of the world’s total. Even so, up to 20 per cent of these habitats in Australia have been destroyed or badly degraded. Rehabilitating what has been lost would not only sequester and store carbon but also have other significant benefits. Mangroves, for example, protect coastlines from severe weather and are significant fish nurseries, contributing enormously to marine productivity.
Oscar was a lead author on a 2017 CSIRO report exploring the potentially huge opportunities for the ERF to tap into blue carbon.
“There are a large number of activities an industry, institution or NGO can do to restore these carbon ecosystems,” Oscar says. “It was concluded the activity with the largest potential is the reintroduction of tidal flow in coastal wetlands. Since 1900 there has been [much] construction in Australia of levees or walls to restrict tidal flow, [mostly] for agriculture and human settlements. If we removed these levees so tidal flow can re-enter and flood all these wetland areas, it’s expected mangroves and tidal marshes and seagrass will recolonise them.”
“Massive” is how Oscar describes the potential impact of recovering Australia’s blue carbon ecosystems. “We estimated that if just 10 per cent of the area that has been lost – roughly 1000sq.km – could be restored, it could reduce emissions from land-use change in Australia by 7–8 per cent,” he says. That’s carbon that many large companies in industries such as oil, mining and fishing would be interested in buying credits for to off set their carbon footprints.
At the heart of this market is the Australian Carbon Credit Unit (ACCU), which represents 1 tonne of At the heart of this market is the Australian Carbon Credit Unit (ACCU), which represents 1 tonne of CO₂ “stored or avoided”. ACCUs are like government-issued stocks, and the methods via which they can be generated are overseen by the federal Clean Energy Regulator. The federal government price being paid for an ACCU has increased during the COVID-19 crisis. It was about $16 at the time of going to press, but some farmers have decade-long contracts with an even higher locked-in rate. “stored or avoided”. ACCUs are like government-issued stocks, and the methods via which they can be generated are overseen by the federal Clean Energy Regulator. The federal government price being paid for an ACCU has increased during the COVID-19 crisis. It was about $16 at the time of going to press, but some farmers have decade-long contracts with an even higher locked-in rate.
To sort through carbon farming’s logistic and legislative requirements, most landholders employ a carbon project developer or carbon trading adviser. The range and number of operators appearing in this new space are changing rapidly. Presently, there are about three or four large players, each handling 10,000sq.km or more. Included in these is Sydney-based GreenCollar, which Peter uses. But there are many more smaller boutique operators, such as Carbon Farmers of Australia (CFA), a family business based in the Central West of NSW that has been involved with lobbying for and helping design carbon offset opportunities for farmers for as long as perhaps anyone in the world. “We’re a fairly small industry; everybody knows each other, and we call ourselves ‘copetitors’ because we’re both colleagues and competitors,” CFA director Louisa Kiely says of a profession that’s barely a decade old.
The primary market for ACCUs is the Commonwealth government. But to complicate matters further, and potentially make carbon farming even more profitable, there is a secondary market.
The most common method used by farmers to capture carbon is “human-induced regeneration of a permanent even-aged native forest”, or “natural regrowth HIR” for short. It involves allowing native forest to regenerate on a property. But to make decent money from it requires a large area. And so CFA lobbied for and helped develop the “soil method” of capturing carbon.
“Developing the soil carbon method was incredibly important and remains so because the soil is the largest carbon sink over which we [farmers and landholders] have control,” Louisa says. “If we didn’t have a soil carbon method, many smaller farmers would miss out, and so, in conjunction with others, we put it forward and after a number of iterations it was approved.”
A REPORT PUBLISHED early this year in the journal Nature Sustainability estimated that the world’s soil has the potential to sequester 5 billion tonnes of CO₂ , equivalent to the USA’s annual emissions.
In one respect, Australia is well ahead of the world in this, last year becoming the first country to issue soil carbon credits.
The project was developed for the ERF by carbon project developer AgriProve for Niels Olsen, whose family runs a beef farm in Victoria’s West Gippsland. Niels has invented the Soilkee Pasture Renovator system to improve his soils. So far, almost 2000 carbon credits have been generated on his 100ha property.
Soil is a good carbon storage option for farmers in mediumto high-rainfall areas. Australia has 300,000sq.km of land potentially suitable for building soil carbon,” he says. “This could deliver 130 million tonnes of abatement per year, achieving carbon drawdown via active rather than passive stewardship.” ►
“The number one thing is just growing plants,” Chris says, explaining that simply ploughing a crop back into the soil after it has been harvested isn’t enough to increase soil organic matter content as many farmers think. “It’s about collecting sunlight and the more sunlight you can collect, the more sugars plants produce and any excess the plants don’t need they pump into the soil where microbes use it as a food source, which helps them to build carbon.”
In between crops Chris keeps his soil covered with a diverse range of plants that he feeds with nutrients proven to increase photosynthesis, so they are collecting sunshine at an optimal level. This, of course, further feeds his soil microbes, which keep building his soil carbon. The process also naturally keeps out weeds, encourages the return of native pastures and increases his soil’s water-holding potential.
Because synthetic fertilisers, herbicides, fungicides and insecticides all damage soil microbes, these have all been phased out from Chris’s farming practices for more than two years. Good plant nutrition, which helps control pests and diseases, is his focus:
THE ERF first issued ACCUs in 2014–15 – 15.5 million of them, representing 15.4 million tonnes of carbon either kept from or pulled out of the air over Australia and worth at the very least $231 million paid to 278 projects, one of which, of course, was that of Peter Yench on Bulgoo. Last year 786 projects were issued 68.8 million ACCUs.
For landholders, the biggest opportunities to tap into this growing market have so far been in vegetation methods, such as the avoided clearing method used by Peter. Most of those have been in southern central Queensland and northern central NSW, and around the wheatbelt of WA. After that it’s projects in the savannah rangelands across the top third of the county, where landholders have been doing most of the heavy lifting to try to offset Australia’s carbon emissions and help it meet its 2030 Paris Agreement requirements.
One of the biggest facilitators of carbon projects in northern Australia is the Aboriginal Carbon Foundation (AbCF),
The AbCF, however, sells its ACCUs, not to the federal government as most farmers do, but at a premium, with environmental, social and cultural co-benefits, for which mostly corporate Australia is keen to pay in the secondary carbon market.
“That market has collapsed over the last two or three months, but up until COVID-19 we were selling at between $21 and $25 a tonne,” says the AbCF’s CEO Rowan Foley, explaining that in the last two years alone this has produced millions of dollars for Aboriginal communities. The AbCF sells carbon credits to organisations such as NAB, KPMG and even the Sydney Opera House. The Queensland government may also be a major buyer through its Land Restoration Fund.
“Some people think this is a bit of a greenie thing – you know carbon farming and climate change abatement and environmental values,” Rowan says. “But we’re working with AgForce [a member organisation of the National Farmer’s Federation], who are pretty conservative and they love our work. We have a memorandum of understanding with them.”
WHEN IT COMES to balancing the books on CO₂ emissions, it’s widely agreed Australia certainly fails on the energy production side, but there’s much evidence to show it’s doing well on the other side of the equation.
“Australia might not be a superpower in clean energy but it certainly is in terms of carbon drawdown,” agrees John Connor, CEO of the Carbon Market Institute, an independent peak industry body for business and climate in Australia, which sees carbon farming as a valuable and growing part of the Australian economy.
“What’s exciting about this is that, as complicated as it may be, these carbon markets are actually supporting new generation restoration and repair efforts of our country,” John says.
Getting landholders to do the right thing by the country inevitably requires a combination of “sticks” (penalties) and “carrots” (incentives), John says: “Carbon is turning out to be a good carrot for a number of reasons.”
All this success in the carbon abatement area, which also undeniably brings with it rewards in terms of environmental, social and cultural gains, comes with a profound caveat.
“Yes, this is a big continent and there are huge opportunities for carbon sequestration,” says Dr Pep Canadell, a senior scientist with the CSIRO Climate Science Centre and executive director of the Global Carbon Project, an international consortium of scientists that advises the United Nations’ IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change).
“Australia’s biological carbon sink is certainly part of the portfolio of mitigations we have available,” Pep says. “But it’s just one of many.”
The “big elephant in the room, by many times”, he says, is the non-renewable energy sector that’s responsible for so much of the world’s total CO₂ emissions. It’s important, he adds, that Australia doesn’t see its success in biological carbon sequestration and abatement as a panacea for reducing or stopping CO₂ emissions that come from burning fossil fuels.
While Pep agrees that ascribing a financial value to CO₂ is a valuable aspect of the carbon sequestration and abatement sector, he says it needs to go further. There are models being put forward within the IPCC that value a tonne of atmospheric CO₂ far higher than Australia’s ERF, or even Australia's secondary carbon market, does. “Some models are calling for a value of several thousand dollars a tonne to be placed on CO₂ ,” Pep says. “And that would provide the sort of financial incentive to do all of the things we need to do in terms of technology, in order to stabilise the planet’s climate.”
And that might just be the sort of carrot that the world’s biggest producers of CO₂ need to ramp up their adoption of renewable energy options.
THE LAST GREAT WILDERNESS
Indigenous rangers, scientists, conservationists and pastoralists are working together to ensure the Kimberley remains one of the world’s great wildlife havens.
Ultimate survivor
The short-beaked echidna is found from deserts to mountain peaks; from Tasmania, across the Australian mainland to southern New Guinea. Its unique backwards-pointing feet give it an advantage when digging. Echidnas also use extended claws on the second toes of the hind feet to scratch and groom between the spines.
WALKING WITH FIRE
Linton Burgess performs a traditional dance during patrula, a return of important cultural fire practices to farmland on the midland plains of Tasmania for the first time in 200 years.
Running Man Rock
IT WAS ABOUT SIX YEARS ago that I first discovered him, purely by chance. At an hour and a half out of Sydney, my commercial flight turned north-west towards Darwin. And there he was in all his rampant majesty. Running Man Rock, I call him.
Travel with us
It’s one of Earth’s most complex natural systems, home to countless animals. And to the rest of the world it’s one of the most identifiably Australian places. We all know what it is – the Great Barrier Reef (GBR)– and that it’s under pressure. But how can we frame its intricate natural architecture in a new way that inspires people to love it enough to care about its future?