Community Event Brief from GreenCollar Carbon Farming in the Wet Tropics Atherton and Innisfail March 29 and 30 Purpose: How to help community groups to keep planting Carbon as an alternative commodity for farmers and graziers Working together to achieve meaningful landscape change in the Wet Tropics Discuss possible funding opportunities for small and large scale landscape rehabilitation, building on carbon – economic modelling will be provided on the night The need to aggregate many small projects to be both cost effective and achieve meaningful landscape change – say a whole of Wet Tropics Project Identify some eligible landowners willing to do a detailed carbon assessment Target land that is of low or marginal primary production value, e.g steep, boggy and riparian Prioritizing water quality and biodiversity benefits Outcomes: Understanding o how the carbon market works o how water quality and biodiversity benefits can build on the price of carbon o carbon as a commodity A pathway to landscape scale rehabilitation Find 20 or 30 landowners or community groups that will sign up for a detailed carbon assessment to test a variety of opportunities - wetlands and riparian zones, biodiversity corridors, farm forestry and carbon farming Opportunities: Natural regrowth, riparian and wetland rehabilitation, biodiversity planting in corridors and for critically endangered habitat plus other landscape rehabilitation activities. Follow-up: GreenCollar will return the aggregated results to the participants of the meeting within 1 month. This will provide some practical examples of the benefits and costs. Aggregation: GreenCollar will need to aggregate a sufficient area in the wet tropics to: make a project large enough to cover overheads of application, measurement, compliance, risk and audit offer a measurable load reduction of N, sediment and pesticide discharge to the Great Barrier Reef connect biodiversity remnants and create a more resilient landscape. Background: GreenCollar believes an aggregated product with a measurable benefit for the reef and biodiversity, in addition to providing Australian Carbon Credit Units, will attract a better price than straight carbon. The initiative will also provide landowners with an economic opportunity to change land use from traditional agricultural commodities to carbon storage. In
marginal or degraded agricultural land this may provide landowners with a more lucrative return than their current agricultural pursuit. Restoring wetlands, flood plains and waterways has been recognized as fundamental to improving water quality entering the reef lagoon but costs are big, government grants have made little impression on this huge task and volunteers are thin on the ground with few resources. Connecting protected areas with vegetated corridors is similarly seen as vital to protecting biodiversity in the face of climate change and other pressures. Using the Australian Government’s Emissions Reduction Fund, GreenCollar is contracted to abate 15 M tonnes of CO2e in the GBR Catchments through revegetation, natural regeneration and avoided clearing. It will spend over $200 M acquiring those credits. Through an MOU with the Queensland Government and the NRM regions it is intended to prioritize revegetation where it can improve water quality and safeguard biodiversity. Most of GreenCollar’s work has been in the rangelands where a carbon price alone is sufficient to drive land use change – now the company is broadening its established carbon abatement market to trial other ecosystem services in higher value, more contested coastal landscapes, starting in the Wet Tropics. By “stacking” benefits, such as carbon storage, water quality and biodiversity conservation in coastal catchments, GreenCollar is developing and marketing new methods to fund ecosystem repair, pay landowners for their ecosystem services, improve farm practice and support community groups focused on system repair.
Please RSVP to Hannah O’Kane at Terrain NRM: Email: hannah.okane@terrain.org.au Phone: 07 4043 8000