Biodiversity wins from 'high-integrity' carbon farming

Government policies to date have favoured projects that support lower-cost emissions abatement, rather than high-biodiversity value projects that can involve relatively higher financial costs. 

Co-authored by a peak body for the nation's 54 natural resource management (NRM) bodies and the member-led Carbon Market Institute (CMI), the report calls for a "step-change" to encourage the scale of investment required to support nature.

There was untapped potential in the carbon market for solving the "twin crises" of climate and biodiversity, CMI chief executive John Connor said.

The report found carbon projects can, and do, contribute to nature outcomes, but Australia lacked clear regulatory or commercial drivers for carbon credit buyers to invest in nature.

"Nature outcomes are a key reason regional NRM organisations are involved in carbon farming," NRM Regions Australia chief executive Kate Andrews said.

"To us, biodiversity and landscape health outcomes are the core benefits, but we wanted to explore if that was the case generally – we wanted to find out how carbon farming projects are benefiting nature – and how they might do more," Dr Andrews said.

Providing a framework to better support transparency, pricing and verification would direct investment to high-integrity carbon farming projects that achieve additional outcomes for nature, she said.

Buyers are paying a premium for carbon credits that can deliver additional environmental or social benefits but the scale of demand and long-term outlook for such investment is unclear, the report found.

"Carbon for nature" means explicitly planning, and enabling carbon farming projects that improve outcomes for nature, where those outcomes are prioritised alongside carbon abatement.

Ecologists, developers, Indigenous carbon market participants and business leaders were among the contributors to the study.