With the attention focused on the budget, the government slipped through an arcane but important announcement on Wednesday that might make it much easier to reach our emissions reduction targets without even lifting a finger.
It involves a change to the way Australia’s emissions are accounted for, whereby cropland management, grazing land management and revegetation effects on carbon stores will now be counted toward Australia’s national emissions target. This is essentially the land-based carbon upon which the Coalition’s Direct Action budget costings are built.
In the past Australia chose to not include this land-based carbon because of concerns that these activities could deliver significant increases in emissions as a result of natural events like bushfire and drought. But changes to the Kyoto Protocol Mark II covering the 2013 to 2020 period have been recently agreed, which mean emissions that are the result of natural causes are no longer counted towards countries’ Kyoto targets.
In addition, the government has recently implemented a series of improvements to the way it estimates emissions from land activities. This will reduce the risk of emissions from fire and vegetation loss due to natural causes being counted for the second Kyoto target.
The Australian government has not released any data as yet that details how these carbon accounting changes would affect Australia’s emissions inventory. But Andrew MacIntosh, associate director of the Australian National University’s Centre for Climate Law and Policy, believes they would noticeably reduce Australia’s emissions relative to our 1990 emissions baseline.
For those not aware, the government’s (and opposition’s) emission reduction target of reducing emissions relative to 2000 level emissions has been subsequently translated to a target that is relative to 1990 emissions under our Kyoto MkII treaty obligations.
MacIntosh believes there have been a series of changes to Australian agricultural practices since 1990 that have acted to significantly increase the amount of carbon stored in crop and grazing land. As one example, “controlled traffic farming and minimum tillage practices have been widely adopted across Australia since 1990”. According to MacIntosh, changes to the Kyoto Protocol’s rules (for which Australia was a principal lobbyist) plus the accounting change “will ensure we get a significant quantity of credits for doing something we were already doing”.
In the end it seems doubtful the government would have changed its accounting rules unless it was confident it would improve our emissions performance relative to 1990 levels. The issue is more about just how big a change it delivers.
Of course, there is nothing sinister about improving the comprehensiveness of our carbon accounting methods. But there is a real problem if the current Labor government, or future Coalition government, intends to keep with their existing 5% reduction target, but achieve it through accounting sleights of hand and fortunate accidents (like Europe’s recession) which make no real difference.
For that reason it’s important the government reveals the implications on the emissions inventory of this accounting change as soon as possible.
*This article was originally published at Climate Spectator
Interesting, thanks. Farmers should be on this like a rash, claiming appropriate credit for actions already taken. The takeup of min. till & controlled traffic are a credit to their ability and willingness to adapt.
Good old Australia, always ready to come up with another reverse double back-flip LULUCF (land use, land use change & forestry) wheeze to ease its minimal emissions ‘targets’.
After eight years of Europe’s EU ETS shill game, our naughty planet doesn’t seem to be listening, and atmospheric C02 is at its highest levels for three million years.
If Qld’s Newtman lets graziers into national parks that’ll do wonders for our land use credentials – having had an off-set for NOT land clearing since Kyoto.
Yes, the bureaucratic compromise of not counting ‘natural’ emissions is big in Australia, but one can imagine negotiators from the UK or Iceland saying ‘yes, whatever’ because it may not be of much relevance to them.
But anyone who is serious about emission reductions in ‘carbon farming’ in Australia needs to account for the huge risk of drought and/or fire either removing carbon stores or reducing the potential for future carbon storage.
The Liberal’s “Direct Action” approach can’t be considered serious, despite Greg Hunt’s repeatedly commitments to their target, so they presumably are not too worried.
As Tristan suggests, an out will be that they might even still count a tonnage of stored CO2 even if it ends up back in the atmosphere because a plantation burns or because the grass cover on a paddock withers and the soil carbon oxidises during drought.
It can be pretty well guaranteed they will take the dishonest, but bureaucratically acceptable, way.
Let’s talk about Abbott’s real free kick. Pro -bono legal representation by McCullogh Robertson to defend a charge brought by David Etteridge. What, they don’t expect anything in return? In that case perhaps they could shower their largesse on some disadvantaged single parent from Logan being harassed by Centrelink or their landlord? This should be front page news – obviously not in Rupert’s publications.