Carbon farming for resilient rangelands: people, paddocks and policy

Abstract

Carbon farming is a new land use option over extensive areas of the Australian rangelands. This land use change has been promoted by government incentives to mitigate climate change, with the vast majority of Australia's land sector abatement to date being delivered in rangelands. Aside from these mitigation benefits, carbon farming has also demonstrated potential co-benefits that enhance socio-ecological resilience by diversifying land uses and Accepted version-final version at: https://www.publish.csiro.au/rj/RJ20034 income streams, providing opportunities for sustainable land management to enhance soil and vegetation and creating opportunities for self-organisation and collaboration. However, factors such as policy uncertainty, perceived loss of future land use flexibility and the potential for carbon farming eligibility to create social divisions have the potential to negatively impact on resilience. In this paper, we weigh up these risks, opportunities and cobenefits and propose indicators for measuring the impact of carbon farming on the resilience of rangeland systems. A set of land policy principles for enhancing resilience through carbon farming are also identified. Summary text for the Table of Contents online Carbon farming is expanding in Australia's rangelands, driven by government incentives aimed at managing land to promote the regeneration or maintenance of tree cover. While carbon sequestration is the primary objective, other co-benefits for biodiversity, soils and landholder income may enhance socio-ecological resilience of rangeland Australia. This paper analyses these opportunities along with potential risks to resilience that could arise from policy uncertainty, social divisions and perceived loss of future land use flexibility.

Opportunities to build resilience of beef cattle properties in the mulga lands of south-western Queensland, Australia

“…beef production in this analysis), the opportunity costs of investing in carbon farming are low and provide a greater incentive for carbon farming. It appears likely that the widespread adoption of carbon farming in the rangelands (Baumber et al 2020) has been predominately due to the extended droughts and low commodity prices of the past decade. These circumstances have reduced the opportunity costs, and/or increased the discount rates, of some landholders to the point that carbon farming became attractive.…”

“…However, decline in the economic competitiveness of the wool industry caused a decline in sheep numbers over the past six decades, and beef cattle largely replaced wool sheep (ABS 2021;Chudleigh 2021). Livestock producers have also diversified into (1) rangeland goats through either harvesting (capture of wild/feral animals) or managed production (Heywood et al 2000); and (2) carbon farming through carbon sequestration (Baumber et al 2020). Few farm-level studies have been conducted during the past three decades to assess options available to mulga lands beef cattle producers to improve profitability and overall property resilience.…”

Understanding the Social Licence of Carbon Farming in the Australian Rangelands

“…Carbon farming has strong potential to enhance the socioecological resilience of Australia's rangelands [22], but in order to do so, it must first obtain a social licence that is itself resilient to the social controversies, economic disruptions, policy shifts, and environmental changes that are inherent to rangeland systems. This requires national-scale policy mechanisms, such as the ERF, encompassing local-scale factors related to trust, equity, values, and norms.…”

“…Amongst these "co-benefits" are biodiversity conservation, erosion control, water-quality improvements, productivity increases, and cultural benefits for Indigenous and other local communities [21]. It has been argued that, by capitalising on such a diverse range of benefits, and by enhancing the adaptive ca-pacity of land managers to deal with future disturbances, carbon farming has the potential to enhance the broader socioecological resilience of Australia's rangelands [5,22]. However, most co-benefit studies have based their forecasts on modelling [23,24] or stakeholder perceptions [25,26], and the hypothesised co-benefits are yet to be monitored, reported, or incentivised in a manner that takes into account contextual differences around individual methods and locations [21].…”

Transforming landscapes and mindscapes through regenerative agriculture

“…Given the negative impacts of industrial–productivist agriculture, there is an urgent need to explore alternative agricultural approaches that can support transformations (Van der Ploeg 2020 ; Bene 2020 ). Many alternatives have been documented, such as agroecology (Gliessman 1990 , 2001 , 2007 ; Altieri 1995 ; Iles 2020 ; Conway 1985 , 1987 ), permaculture (Mollison 1988 ; Holmgren 2007 ), carbon farming (Baumber et al 2019 , 2020 ; Toensmeier 2016 ; Ridinger 2016 ), natural farming (Fukuoka 1978 ), keyline farming (Yeomans 1993 ), organic agriculture (Howard 2013 , 1940 ; Leu 2020 ), biodynamic agriculture (Steiner 1993 ), Indigenous land stewardship (Gammage 2011 ; Pascoe 2014 ; Romero-Briones et al 2020 ), climate smart agriculture (Codur and Watson 2018 ) and holistic management (Savory and Butterfield 2016 , 1999 ; Savory 1988 ; Gosnell et al 2020b ) or adaptive management (Hodbod et al 2016 ; Teague and Barnes 2017 ; Teague and Kreuter 2020 ). These alternatives have developed their own discourses, communities of practice and underlying philosophies that challenge extractive food systems.…”