Carbon

POLITICIANS of all persuasions have had a hard time being nice to farmers in ways that don’t upset larger, more vociferous and vindictive sections of the voting public.

In this campaign, they seem to have discovered the key: carbon!

The Australian government is proposing to allow foresters and farmers to create carbon offset credits for international sale into foreign emissions trading markets. Prime Minister Julia Gillard launched the policy on the weekend, part of campaigning ahead of a federal election on August 21.

Foreign-owned "carbon foresters" have ambitions to turn a fifth of New Zealand sheep and beef farmland into forests and that will devastate many rural towns, the national farmers' lobby says.

Federated Farmers president Don Nicolson said the organisation strongly believed that farm forestry was integral to farms where suited. This made the government's axing of the Afforestation Grants Scheme (AGS) in preference to the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) "incredibly perplexing".

A PIONEERING attempt to provide landholders with a new income stream through forestry offsets, Landcare CarbonSmart, has fallen foul of the Canberra stalemate over emissions regulation.

Set up by Landcare Australia Limited, in part to help landholders put in smaller biodiverse plantings that could provide a carbon credits income stream, CarbonSmart has been killed off because the forestry offsets market and regulatory environment failed to mature as expected.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), as part of the UN Collaborative Programme on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries (UN-REDD Programme), is developing a project to systematically analyze literature on methods used to measure and assess terrestrial carbon stocks, using an evidence-based approach.