Presentation short abstract

Carbon farming is significant in rural-remote Australia, where settler pastoralism, First Nations’ custodianship, and corporate land sector investments collide. After extensive uptake over a decade, carbon farming is leading to new land dynamics: power, property and nature are all being reworked.

Presentation long abstract

A land-use revolution has been unfolding over the last decade in parts of rural and remote Australia, where projects under the Australian Carbon Credit Unit (ACCU) scheme or “carbon farming” have been extensively implemented. The ACCU scheme deploys various methods to generate carbon credits through land-use change. The most popular method to date has been Human Induced Regeneration (HIR), which involves the reduction of activities that supress vegetation growth - like livestock grazing, fodder harvesting, and other forms of land clearing - to allow landscape recovery. Projects using this method now cover over 40 million hectares of remote rangelands, and in some areas 30% of land has been contracted for carbon farming. Recent fieldwork in one of these “high uptake” areas shows diverse land dynamics: a significant proportion of early projects involved new corporate or absentee landowners, who acquired land for carbon farming under a “lock up and leave” model. More recent projects, however, demonstrate more liberatory and regenerative potentials: indeed, carbon farming can support local landholders to care for land, and First Nations people to return to country. Carbon farming should be better regulated to achieve these more desirable outcomes.