Identifying Cost-Effective & Beneficial Greenhouse Gas Abatement Opportunities for the Agricultural Sector in NSW

Date

Time

11:00am - 12:00pm AEDT

Venue

In person: in UNE Business School, W40 LT2 Or, via Zoom

Speakers

           
Professor Jeff Connor      Emeritus Professor Oscar Cacho

Description

The AARES New England Branch and the UNE Business School cordially invite you to this event.

ABSTRACT
This seminar is a progress report for an ARC Linkage Project with NSW Department of Primary Industries as the Industry partner. This project aims to identify innovations in carbon payment policy and brokerage business models to achieve agricultural greenhouse gas (GHG) abatement, while simultaneously improving agricultural sustainability and capturing biodiversity co-benefits. The project applies a combination of methods that involve GIS data and models combined with biophysical, climate and socioeconomic data. 
Carbon farming has gained traction in south-east Australian pastoral areas, largely driven by the Emission Reduction Fund (ERF). However, the ERF focuses solely on carbon storage and overlooks the additional co-benefits from carbon farming such as enhancing biodiversity and increasing resilience to land degradation.
The first part of the seminar explores the potential for optimising land use in carbon farming to maximise co-benefits while maintaining financial returns and carbon storage benefits. Different scenarios were analysed for the NSW Western Division. The scenarios represented different priorities in terms of profit, carbon storage, enhancing biodiversity, and increasing resilience to land degradation. Overall, the results illustrate considerable potential to improve co-beneficial outcomes without losses in carbon storage or landowner returns and lays the groundwork for including such benefits in carbon markets.
The second part of the seminar focuses on the whole farm, and explores how ERF methods may fit within existing farming systems in NSW. In this regard, the question is not whether a particular plot of land will benefit from carbon farming, but whether this land conversion is feasible at the whole-farm level given farmer preferences and farm resources available. This is work in progress using secondary data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) to characterise the different types of farming systems and their spatial variation in NSW. We will present preliminary findings and discuss plans for further analysis.
 
Jeff Connor is Professor at the University of South Australia, UniSA Business, Australia. He specialises in quantitative economic, environmental and social integrated systems modelling often working closely with governments at local, state, national and international levels to provide economic policy advice based on rigorous economics. Jeff worked as an economist and group leader at CSIRO from 2001-2016 where he provided research and advise to the Murray Darling Basin Authority, natural resource management boards and state departments for water, agriculture and natural resource management in South Australia, Victoria, and Western Australia and in Bangladesh, Indonesia, China and Laos. He has secured and/or managed over $6 million worth of externally funded research and published over 60 peer reviewed articles and book chapters in water resource and environmental economics. You can access his profile at here.
 
Oscar Cacho is Emeritus Professor of Agricultural and Resource Economics at UNE Business School, University of New England. He started his professional life as a marine biologist and later branched into economics. His research interests centre on the application of Bioeconomics to interesting problems in agriculture and natural resources. His recent work has been in two major areas: the economics of biosecurity to protect native ecosystems, and climate-change economics and policy with focus on land use change and forestry in tropical countries. He has been a regular consultant to the Food and Agricultural Organisation of the United Nations (FAO), and collaborates with other national and international agencies on these and other topics. You can access his profile here.