PAYING farmers and investors to preserve native forests, plant vast areas of trees, stop land clearing and improve soil could help Australia make big cuts to its greenhouse gas emissions and boost the chances of threatened native animals and plants, a group of leading Australian scientists argues.
A report by the Wentworth Group is calling on the Rudd Government to expand its emissions trading scheme to include more so-called "green carbon", allowing forests and agriculture to play a greater role in cutting greenhouse emissions.
It also wants the Rudd Government to promote the ideas at the Copenhagen climate talks in December along with a voluntary green carbon trade in developing countries.
World efforts to combat dangerous climate change will not succeed, the report argues, by cutting emissions from industry and households alone.
Countries like Australia will need to use the landscape to absorb emissions already in the atmosphere by storing carbon in new forests, grasslands, farms and enriched soils.
The Opposition has called for agriculture to be excluded from the emissions trading scheme but the report argues that if there was a price for "green carbon", farmers and regional communities could reap financial benefits from the emissions trading scheme.
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