Wednesday 27 January 2016

What's all this Paris stuff?

Beef Herd Management


Last year COP21 occurred in Paris. The 196 Parties agree to the terms of an Agreement which is to be signed in New York in April this year. If it gets signed the parties to the Agreement will be required to action their goals that were set at the Paris conference. Australia promised to reduce GHG emissions by 26-28% below 2005 levels by 2030. We promised to do this using the Emissions Reduction Fund which purchases emission reduction credits and we also promised to increase our Renewable Energy Target to 23% by 2020. 

What this will mean for our agricultural clients is that there are new investments in reforestation projects and forestry offsets. Carbon projects could become tradable internationally and so projects through the Emissions Reduction Fund will become popular. Landowners can benefit from approved method projects like Beef Herd Management, sequestering carbon in soils in grazing, feeding nitrates to cattle, avoiding clearing of native regrowth and Savanna fire management projects just to name a few. Perform these in accordance with the rules and credits or money could be earnt.

The signals are that reliance on fossils fuels will reduce (these can still be offset using sinks, CCS etc) and there will be an accelerated growth in clean energy and renewables. ARENA for example funded over $22M towards the Barcaldine Community Solar Farm. Some projects like this could be located on private land and agreements reached with private companies who wish to construct these renewable projects.

Grazing may still be grazing, but what if you just grazed a little differently and were paid to reduce your GHG omissions or the GHG omissions of some other polluter in another country?”

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