LAND degradation and declining productivity is “pulling the plug” on many rural communities, Mark Alchin says. Why not use carbon trading to rebuild them?
Dr Alchin, a rangelands ecologist with the WA Department of Agriculture and Food (DAFWA), told the RCS 20th Anniversary Conference in Brisbane this week that since white settlement, Australians have drawn down on “natural capital” to create the food and fibre that underpins the nation’s prosperity.
He argues that “carbon capital” is a historic opportunity to complete the loop, by providing a financial incentive to restore the ecological health of degraded rangelands and so re-establish the basis for profitable agriculture.
Dr Alchin earned his doctorate studying grazing systems in outback WA. About 30 per cent of the State’s rangelands - more than 20 million hectares - he describes as “commercially and ecologically bankrupt”.
These degraded zones can either be locked up - currently the preferred strategy for government land managers - or be subject to management that has the aim of lifting soil carbon levels.
That can mean time-controlled grazing management or, in the north, cutting back on savannah burning.
Locking land up often doesn’t work, in Dr Alchin’s opinion, unless the ecological community is already relatively intact.
Otherwise, “degradation is cancerous”: locking up badly degraded land only allows the cancer to take a firmer grip.
But Dr Alchin believes that carbon trading provides a historic opportunity for landholders to get hold of the capital they need to reverse the rundown of the past century or so.
His statement is supported by the results of the Carbon Capture Project, a joint effort between DAFWA and the Federal Government to assess the carbon sequestration potential of rangelands (see Cheela Plains Station breakout).
The project considered not only soil carbon, but all the carbon under management: in trees and shrubs, grasses, dead timber and plant litter.
On 188,000ha Cheela Plains Station in the west Pilbara, the project looked at the effects of fully destocking the property or using rest-based grazing, compared with a scenario of ongoing set stocking at 30 per cent pasture utilisation.
Destocked, the property would lose carbon, the project’s researchers decided, because it would be vulnerable to more frequent and hotter fires.
Under rest-based grazing management, the property would gain 1.1t CO2-e compared to set stocking - a modest amount, but this could be lifted substantially if the landholder chose to focus on the most profitable areas instead of the entire property.
For instance, total carbon stocks on a floodplain were less than half those found in mulga shrubland and river plains.
The survey also found that the difference in soil carbon levels between an area around a watering point and one distant from a watering point was about 61 tonnes CO2-e.
At a conservative $10 a tonne for carbon, that difference translates to about $40 per hectare per year greater carbon returns over 15 years in the degraded area, because the undegraded area is already near its carbon storage capacity.
Gross margins on cattle on this station are around $3 per hectare per year.
The message to would-be carbon farmers, Dr Alchin said, is to carefully pick the areas you want to do your sequestering in for optimum carbon returns, and for the benefits that will accrue if the area is restored to ecological health.
Even though the only market currently available is voluntary, Dr Alchin said it it provides adequate incentives to start.
If the intention of carbon sequestration is rangelands restoration, it also develops greater market appeal as “charismatic carbon”: carbon that has a further ecological benefit as well as lessening the greenhouse effect.
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