Last week, local farmers, investors and Western Murray Land Improvement Group (WMLIG) celebrated the next step in their Murray Inland Delta Landscape Impact Project.
With the financial world falling over themselves to get a piece of the carbon trading arena, an ambitious project has been initiated to ensure that meaningful, tangible environmental benefits can be achieved while delivering financial benefits to landholders.
“It was a pretty simple premise,” said Jacqueline McArthur, Western Murray Land Improvement Group Environmental Markets Project Officer, addressing the large crowd.
“The participants of the Murray Inland Delta Landscape Impact Project wanted to discover the largest environmental impact that farmers in the region can create individually and collectively, and be financially rewarded for it.
“Our extraordinary biodiversity hotspot is ringed by wetlands of international importance.
“Within a hundred kilometres of Caldwell, we have the highest concentration of individual internationally-protected RAMSAR-listed wetlands.
“When you add that up, that is about 14 per cent of the million-hectare inland delta, which is the same size as the Coorong and Lower Lakes, around 142,000 hectares.”
The land of the delta has an amazing environmental significance. Unlike Japan, where rice paddies are RAMSAR-listed due to their environmental significance, the Australian Government has seen no benefit to our privately-owned landscape and has actively worked to dry out the delta through the water reform process.
To champion the project’s groundbreaking idea, farmers worked with WMLIG, The Mulloon Institute, Regen Farmers Mutual, the Murray-Darling Wetlands Working Group, ecologists and traditional owners to design a premium product concept in the form of a valuable carbon sink and biolink connecting the Wakool and Murray rivers through farmland, rehydrating the landscape and improving the biodiversity.
Now the Murray Inland Delta Landscape Impact Project’s ten farmers and working team have expanded on the initial concept by investigating projects that in the near term could reduce risk and reward farmers by leveraging the benefits of aggregation. Further work is underway in assessing the feasibility for landscape-scale carbon projects that are complementary to growing food and fibre.
Global changes in accounting for impacts on the climate and the natural world has seen international businesses and banks ramp up a forensic look at their supply chain carbon and biodiversity impacts. This project aims to help farmers understand their own natural capital assets, potentially trade carbon credits, provide ecological restoration services at an appropriate price, avoid supply chain imposts and achieve a premium on their produce in the marketplace.
Andrew Ward from REGEN Farmers Mutual outlined some of the impacts that these new global markets may have on producers.
“There are requirements in value chains, whether Coles or Woolworths, or international export markets, where these large organisations now need to report, not just the carbon emissions of running a burger joint, or not just the carbon emissions of the transport that brought stuff to the burger joint, they actually have to record all the carbon emissions and the ingredients that go into the burger.
“So, that means the potatoes, the meat in the burger, the wheat in the bread and buns.
“What they do in their shop is called Scope 1 emissions, what they do in transporting their ingredients to the shop is called Scope 2; they’re basically 10 per cent of the emissions of a large organisation like McDonald’s. 90 per cent of their emissions comes from their Scope 3 emissions, which is all the ingredients that go into the burger they sell.
“So, as these large organisations with directors, who are now responsible for reducing carbon emissions, they are looking at 90 per cent of their carbon coming from farmers; they’re all turning around, they’re moving down the supply chain.
“That whole process is referred to as (carbon) insetting. It’s where a supply chain can reduce carbon emissions from their farmer suppliers, which reduces carbon emissions for everybody else up the supply chain, because a farmer’s Scope 1 emissions, emissions predominantly from livestock and embedded fertiliser, etc, they’re everybody else’s Scope 3 emissions.
“So, if you reduce your problem, in their eyes, that reduces their problem.
“Farmers will be faced with their supply chain asking them to enter into agreements to reduce their carbon, and possibly that will be for financial reward, or possibly it will be for premiums on the products that we produce that are low carbon, or it might become just a market access issue. You need to reduce your carbon and enter their program to still sell your beef; whatever it is, it’s so unclear because it’s so early.”
While farmers improving their biodiversity and carbon credentials may help market access, another opportunity exists within carbon offsets and biodiversity credits. This could include regenerating remnant vegetation areas of the farm to either sell carbon offsets or use them to inset their own production emissions.
Through the Murray Inland Delta Landscape Impact Project, farmers can work collectively to create a premium product in the carbon and the emerging biodiversity credits market, one which also provides real and meaningful environmental improvement.
The day culminated with the first release of the Murray Inland Delta video as part of the program.
The video can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fi2-lHZzfSg.
For further information on the project, contact the WMLIG office on (03) 5453 1577.
This article appeared in The Koondrook and Barham Bridge Newspaper, 20 June 2024.