THE CSIRO has downplayed reports suggesting large sections of Australia’s prime food bowl, the Murray Darling Basin, could potentially be converted from food production farming into trees planed for carbon sequestration purposes, under a $36 a tonne carbon price.
CSIRO’s Sustainable Agriculture Flagship is heading up an ongoing program of study exploring the potential opportunities and threats attached to a carbon trading scheme, including land use factors, market influences and government policy making.
Commenting on the research and suggestion that a potentially radical shift in farming methods could occur under a carbon trading scheme, CSIRO’s Dr Michael Battaglia, said ultimately, the move to planting trees would be the individual decisions of large numbers of landholders who had to decide whether a carbon forest option fitted with their farming and business strategy.
Dr Battaglia said many factors, not just carbon price, would influence the feasibility of carbon forests for landholders including; the land, soil and climate suitability; the alternative agricultural opportunities; the long time frames involved in recouping a return on investment; and the complex social factors that shape land-use decisions.
“At CSIRO our ongoing research demonstrates a place for forest based carbon offsets in the wider mix of greenhouse gas abatement strategies,” he said.
“Our research indicates that the extent of land-use change out of agriculture and into carbon forests is likely to be modest during the next 10 years.”
Media reports this week said the CSIRO study raised the possibility of a dramatic change in land use from agriculture to ''carbon sinks'', starting at an $11 a tonne carbon price.
But Dr Battaglia said that was only one “high end” aspect of the full study, which looked at a range of assumptions around the reasoning and factors that would potentially influence farmers switching from food production to carbon trading.
He said a small section of a current study to be released in the next month, raised the prospect of an opportunity for farm land to be converted to carbon forest projects under a $36 a tonne carbon price, but it was not in the Murray-Darling.
He said the land area referred to was along the greater green triangle, near the border of SA and Victoria, south of Mildura and across to Swan Hill, but not in NSW.
Dr Battaglia said the CSIRO work looked at a whole series of scenarios and assumptions, not just carbon price.
He said tree planting establishment cost was another key factor influencing farmers’ decisions for moving their land use to a carbon scheme.
“This whole area is a work in progress and the report under review is just one aspect of it, that will probably be available in a month’s time,” he said.
A 2010 CSIRO report, looking at the opportunities and threats a carbon trading market presented for South Australian agriculture, said its introduction could result in strong demand for widespread conversion of land in agricultural regions to permanent tree plantings, but only if the actual carbon price was sufficiently high.
It said many areas of South Australia’s dryland agricultural landscapes could be economically viable for conversion to permanent forestry for carbon sequestration.
But it said the amount of land shifted into forestry would depend on several factors including; carbon price, food production needs, water availability, seed availability, biodiversity incentives and related government policies.
“South Australia’s annual carbon emissions could potentially be offset by reforestation of less than 20 percent of existing agricultural lands under a carbon price of $20 a tonne,” the CSIRO report said.
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