Professor Ross Garnaut in his final climate change report does see a silver lining for farmers and rural communities. The potential revenue for biosequestration for farmers at a carbon price of $20 a tonne is $5 billion dollars a year.
Opposition climate change spokesperson Greg Hunt [ pictured] is a biosequestration enthusiast:
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“We have been talking of a conservative target of 60 to 80 million tonnes a year of natural sequestration, he says.
Garnaut has gone for a bolder figure of 250 million tonnes from a combination of soils, pastures, woodlands and forests.
I don’t think that is outrageous or unreasonable in terms of its potential for Australia. At a carbon price of $10 a tonne, that is $2.5 billion going to rural Australia each year.”
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One of the major stumbling blocks for Australian farmers to realize this potential is that the Kyoto protocol does not recognize carbon sequestration from soils, pasture, woodland or forests established pre- 1990.
The second impediment is a globally accepted accounting method for sequestration by soils and pasture.
Moving forward, it incumbent upon Kevin Rudd and Penny Wong address these issues as a matter of urgency . Biosequestraion is happening as we speak on every farm in Australia. Farmers under the ETS will be financially penalized for their emissions, whilst in fact most would be net sequesters of carbon or at worst neutral.
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Arid and semi-arid rangelands cover 5.5 million square kilometres and make up 70 per cent of Australia’s landmass. The report [ garnaut report] quotes estimates that these lands alone could absorb at least half of Australia’s present annual emissions, about 250 million tonnes. A carbon price of $20 a tonne would increase income to property holders in these regions by up to 10 times.
Garnaut argues that the potential gains are so large that work should proceed on them before there are final decisions on what emissions and offsets should be counted under national or international agreements.
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The federal government has committed $100m a year to a carbon capture institute. It must commit at a minimum an equal amount to develop world leading science in the area of measuring and counting net farm carbon sequestration.
The federal government is also currently spending upwards of $30 million to securing a seat on the UN security council. The government should be committing at least this amount to lobbying the UN to accept carbon sequestration from soils, pastured, woodlands and all trees based on our world leading science in this area.
For the government to do any less would be a gross dereliction of its duty of care not only to rural & regional Australia, but the Australian nation as a whole.
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