Australia
Thursday, 29 March 2007
 
It was champagne all round when Carbon for Life founder, Christine Jones, launched the Australian Soil Carbon Accreditation Scheme in Katanning, WA, last week. The scheme enables WA farmers to be paid when they increase their soil carbon. The pilot program is the first of its kind in the Southern Hemisphere. It will allow WA Northern Agricultural region and south coastal region farmers to register up to four 20ha so-called Defined Sequestration Areas (DSA) on any portion of their properties. The area will be soil tested each year for an initial three-year period. Farmers will be paid $90/tonne annually and retrospectively for the increase in their soil carbon.

The soil test involves taking 110cm cores for testing and a 0.15pc increase in soil carbon would be equivalent to adding 23.1t/ha of carbon, earning a healthy $21.19/ha per year. Farmers are well aware from soil tests that a good organic carbon measure is a sign of healthy soil. So any measure to increase soil carbon would have two beneficial effects.

The concept of using soil as a carbon sink has not been accepted on an official level, even though it is potentially the largest sink in the world that can be easily accessed by direct human action. Many traditional forms of agriculture result in a loss of soil carbon, and it would seem that an acceptance of soil as a carbon sink would also require the carbon loss to be included in Australia's greenhouse calculations. The scheme is the result of a private arrangement between Carbon for Life and Rio Tinto Coal, which will provide funding for the initial three years of the trial.

Christine Jones said under the current pilot project, one landholder can have up to four DSAs on their property if they would like to experiment with different soil building techniques to a maximum of 80ha. "It would only require a 1pc increase in soil carbon on 15 million hectares of land to sequester 8GT of carbon dioxide in the soil, which is equivalent to the greenhouse emissions for the entire planet," Dr Jones said. "To pay farmers to sequester this carbon at the rate of $25/t of carbon dioxide would cost $200 billion. "That might sound like a lot of money but in the corporate world, it is peanuts. "With a mere $200b, we could reverse global warming in a matter of years and markedly improve soil productivity at the same time. "It's not about money - it's about managing money to manage the carbon cycle - for the future of us all."

* More information: www.amazingcarbon.com
SOURCE: Farm Weekly, WA, March 29.

SOURCE: Rural Press weekly agricultural papers March 8, updated daily on FarmOnline. 
By LUCY SKUTHORP - AustraliaThursday, 8 March 2007

Farmers could soon be paid 100pc of the cost of managing their own land for the environment under a new "stewardship" program which has just been given a tick by the Federal Government. 

This week's announcement comes after years of lobbying by the farm sector for government and public recognition that there is a high cost of managing farm land to a high environmental standard for "the public good". It represents a "fundamental shift" in environmental management in Australia, from a regulatory approach to an incentive-based regime.  

Federal Minister for Agriculture, Peter McGauran, told this week's ABARE Outlook conference in Canberra that Cabinet has approved the scheme.   It is now going through the final budget allocation process before being formally unveiled in May.
 

The NFF is welcoming the announcement, but is cautious, given a similar government endors ement for a stewardship scheme prior to last year's budget. Mr McGauran said it was essentially a "purchase of environmental services". He emphasised this stewardship program was not in the same vein as the European farm payment environment subsidy program. Nor would it be compensation for the productivity losses incurred by farmers due to State-imposed native vegetation or land clearing restrictions. It will be a scheme in addition to existing environmental programs and existing partnerships, such as Landcare, National Heritage Trust funding. Mr McGauran said, "This is the government and the community purchasing these environmental management services. It's not about the farmer deriving the benefit."  

Farmers would retain freehold title ownership of the land, as long as a contract existed between the government and the farmer for a specific portion of property set aside for conservation. "It's a fairly straight forward, simple payment for property that needs to be conserved but he or she can't afford to, or there are some practices needed on a property which can't be afforded, and the community will pay to do that."
 
NFF natural resources manager, Vanessa Findlay, said this was not a "lock up and leave it" concept. It would not mean erecting a fence and walking away to leave it to weeds and feral animals to take over. She also explained that while this was for public good, the conservation areas would not become public property, or national park.