Associate Professor Matthew Harrison, Tasmanian Institute of Agriculture, University of Tasmania, June 2023

This presentation on the costs associated with transitioning farming systems to net-zero emissions under future climates includes discussion of:

1. The nexus between productivity, profitability, greenhouse gas emissions, and social license to operate under increasingly variable climates.

2. The modest, or even beneficial, implications of climate change on Tasmanian agriculture to 2050, including improvement in pasture growth in winter, and reduce lamb mortality in winter/early spring.

3. Trade-offs between emissions mitigation, livestock production, and extent of mitigation elicited by multiple systemic and transformational adaptation-mitigation bundles.

4. Effects of livestock feed supplement (red algae – Asparagopsis – and biochar) on greenhouse gas emissions mitigation.

5. The potential for improvement in genetic feed-conversion efficiency on abatement and production.

6. Implications of income and climate diversification on farm enterprise profit and greenhouse gas emissions.

7. The strong and positive coupling between productivity and greenhouse gas emissions, and the need for new technologies to break this coupling.

8. The serendipitous result in which costs of offsetting farm emissions are often greater than costs associated with insetting (disincentive to offset, incentive to inset).

9. The most profitable pathways to net zero emissions arise from ‘stacking’ combinations of interventions that (1) reduce enteric methane, (2) sequester carbon in vegetation and (3) are conducive to productivity co-benefits.

10. The climate-change induced decline in soil carbon sequestration and, in some cases, soil carbon stocks.

11. Greater ability to reduce farm greenhouse gas emissions associated with carbon sequestration in woody vegetation, as opposed to carbon in soils.

12. Effects of feeding biochar as a feed supplement to calves, including potential implications for enteric methane, liveweight gain, soil carbon, as well as stakeholder propensity to adopt livestock feed supplements to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

13. Further details are provided in: Costs of transitioning to net-zero emissions under future climates  and Carbon, cash, cattle and the climate crisis