The co-benefits of carbon management on country

On 1 July 2012, Australia became the latest country to introduce a carbon tax to reduce its greenhouse-gas pollution. Even more than the European Union’s emissions trading scheme, Australia’s target of cutting emissions to 5% below 2000 levels by 2020 is heavily reliant on carbon offsetting, with plans to allow industry to buy carbon credits to offset up to half of their required emissions cuts. As Kevin Anderson of the UK’s Tyndall Centre warned in Nature Climate Change recently1, and as we have previously argued2, it is risky to rely on carbon offsetting to reduce emissions because for the most part it is being used to avoid fundamental changes in industrial practice and individual behaviour. And we share Professor Anderson’s concern that if people buy offsets as a way to reduce their guilt about consuming, travelling and polluting as before, the net result is likely to be higher, not lower, global emissions. But given the reality that carbon offsetting is deeply ingrained in most carbon-pricing mechanisms worldwide, we argue that not all carbon offsets are the same — and where money is being spent on offsets, priority should be given to projects that do more than just mitigate emissions, but also achieve economic, social and cultural co-benefits. A small number of such ‘quadruple bottom-line’ projects are already operating in Australia. One of the success stories has been the Western Arnhem Land Fire Abatement (WALFA) project, which has dramatically reduced greenhouse-gas emissions from bushfires in Arnhem Land, covering an area in northern Australia about the size of Belgium. Developed collaboratively between indigenous elders, rangers and non-indigenous scientists, WALFA applies traditional land-management practices that have been used since 38,000 years bp3. Each wet season, lush vegetation grows quickly across Arnhem Land. As the dry season sets in, the grasses and low-lying shrubs dry out and die back, creating a vast tinderbox primed for uncontrollable, hightemperature bushfires, which can be ignited by a lightning strike. By deliberately lighting early dry-season fires, indigenous rangers are able to reduce the occurrence of these unplanned and uncontrollable late-season fires, which if unchecked generate on average 52% more greenhouse-gas emissions4. The WALFA project began in 2006 with an annual reduction target of 100,000 tonnes of greenhouse-gas emissions. The work is being carried out under a 17-year agreement with ConocoPhillips, which pays AUD$1 million per year for the carbon credits generated by WALFA to offset emissions from its Darwin liquid natural gas plant. The original abatement target has been easily surpassed; in its first five years, 707,000 tonnes of emissions were avoided. Simultaneously, the controlled fires have helped to preserve biodiversity in the region and created 40 jobs, while demonstrating the relevance and value of traditional indigenous land-management practices. That list of achievements has helped the WALFA project win Australia’s two most prestigious environment awards, the Eureka prize and a Banksia award. However, its greatest impact is likely to be in inspiring other fireand land-management projects, as well as setting an international example for scientifically sound, genuinely collaborative carbon-management projects using indigenous knowledge. One of the fast-growing indigenous organizations in Australia is Aak Puul Ngantam Ltd, which trades as APN Cape York, a not-for-profit enterprise created in 2011 by the Aboriginal people of the area to the south of the community of Aurukun on the west Cape York Peninsula. In the lingua franca spoken in Aurukun, Wik mungkan, aak puul ngantam means ‘Our father’s father’s country’. Its name reflects APN’s vision of helping Aboriginal people to return to, and continue to care for, their ancestral homelands, and to maintain their traditional knowledge to pass on to future generations. That knowledge includes a long history of fighting fire with fire, just as other indigenous D O N N A G RE EN