Developing a Blue Carbon Economy in the Northern Territory - Phase 2

Continuation of phase 1 - "Investigating Blue Carbon Opportunities in the NT" (PURE#58598877)

This research is a collaboration between Charles Darwin University (CDU), the University of Queensland (UQ) and the Northern Australia Indigenous Land and Sea Management Alliance (NAILSMA).Our cross-institutional team brings diverse skills and current research capacity to ensure a coordinated, impactful, and regionally relevant approach to research to support development of blue carbon and other carbon project opportunities in northern Australia. Our team can leverage existing research opportunities in northern Australia to ensure this proposal represents a sustainable return on investment.

The Blue Carbon market in Australia is currently limited to the Tidal Restoration Method under the Commonwealth government’s Emissions Reduction Fund (ERF). Driven by an urgency to abate greenhouse gas emissions, the Commonwealth government has identified the need to expand the methods available to the Australian carbon market, including those relevant to Indigenous organisations. This has focused on alternative blue carbon emissions reduction methods for the Australian Carbon Credit Unit Scheme. Subsequently, research in northern Australia, supported by the National Environmental Science Program of the Commonwealth government, was initiated to address this need. A new method would add to the existing approved ERF Tidal Restoration Method, which enables carbon credit generation following the re-introduction of tidal flows to coastal wetland ecosystems where removing or modifying a tidal restriction mechanism has impacted them. The method includes abatement to rehabilitate ecosystems like supratidal forests, mangroves, salt marshes, and seagrass. A blue carbon project achieves carbon abatement by increasing the carbon stored in soil and restored vegetation and avoids emissions from the transition of freshwater wetlands to saline wetlands following project interventions. The sequestration of carbon and avoidance of emissions earn Australian carbon credit units (ACCUs). This method can only be used where tidal flows have been excluded, limiting its application to land where this has occurred.

Research under the INPEX-funded blue carbon investigations in the NT has to date considered opportunities under the Tidal Restoration ERF method only, and a potential new method, the ‘Ungulate Management Method’, is now under consideration. The Ungulate Management Method proposes that removing feral ungulates (e.g., pigs, buffalo, horses, donkeys, deer, and other hooved animals) avoids damage to wetland soils and vegetation and thus avoids greenhouse gas emissions. Such a method would provide a significant opportunity to benefit coastal Aboriginal communities and regional biodiversity values by restoring and protecting coastal floodplains affected by feral ungulates.

This proposal addresses the development of the Ungulate Management Method: Carbon abatement and sequestration through the restoration of coastal ecosystems degraded by large invasive herbivores, e.g., pigs, buffalo, horses, deer, and donkeys.

A pilot region will be established in NE Arnhem Land for the Ungulate Management Method Development so that an area of high priority to Aboriginal communities can be the focus of an intensive investigation, providing a test case that could be scaled regionally and nationally.

We have developed a 2-year program that operates collaboratively and complements current research projects underway in the NT. The estimated cost is $700,000 ex. GST.