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BioCarbon Offsets
Degree Celsius is a joint venture between Terrain Natural Resource Management, the designated regional body responsible for managing the Wet Tropics community’s natural resources, and environmental services company BIOCARBON.
Under the Degree Celsius initiative, the Wet Tropics Regional NRM Plan provides the basis for regional carbon aggregation with consequent biodiversity, sustainable agriculture, water quality and community benefits. The region's NRM activities are comprehensively laid out in the Sustaining the Wet Tropics Regional Plan series. It is the natural resource management activities of the many landholders across the 2.2 million hectare region of the Far North Queensland that is pivotal to the survival of the region’s important natural assets.
We estimate that hundreds of thousands of tonnes of carbon are being sequestered in natural resource management activities in Far North Queensland over and above business as usual: from revegetating and restoring the health of tropical rivers that run into the climate-stressed Great Barrier Reef, to restoring ecological connectivity between extensive areas of rainforest allowing wildlife to move as climate changes. This is not to mention the extensive shift to sustainable management practices of the sugar cane industry that, at once, both sequester carbon and reduce nitrogen runoff to the reef; the shift to improving the health of pastures so the vast rangelands can grow cattle and carbon in the soils and native pastures; and the facilitation of new farm forestry initiatives.
These NRM activities not only sequester carbon but also conserve biodiversity and help build the resilience of the Wet Tropics rainforests and the Great Barrier Reef, two environments particularly threatened by climate change. Payment for ecosystem services on this regional scale provides the first time in Australia that the activities of hundreds of small holders in the region can be recognised and rewarded. We believe that the impact of this recognition will spur vigorous interest in landholder NRM activities which will in turn build measureable resilience into this global hotspot.
The project is using a suite of rigorous International Panel for Climate Change methodologies and the National Carbon Accounting Toolbox to cover a range of carbon sequestration NRM activities including afforestation and reforestation, farm forestry, assisted natural regeneration, avoided deforestation, grazing land management, and sustainable agriculture.
Securing a National Approach to Progressing the Terrestrial Carbon Agenda
In April this year the 56 Regions that comprise Australia's landscape endorsed the Degree Celsius Wet Tropics model and agreed to support the initiative. This is the first national co-operative programme ever undertaken and it represents a common purpose across the countryside, a sentiment not dampened by the shelving of the CPRS. Please read our first quarter newsletter for more details of what we have been up to.
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