Existing rules around environmental planting carbon projects can make them unsuitable to achieve biodiversity outcomes, a project developer told a conference in Canberra.

Speaking at the Australian Land Conservation Alliance conference in Canberra, James McGregor, origination general manager at Greening Australia subsidiary Canopy NBS, told a panel discussion that planting projects that generate Australian Carbon Credit Units (ACCUs) would not always equate to improving biodiversity.

“When you’re doing an environmental planting project, you’re looking at an area that is just being incentivised to be as homogenously planted as possible,” he said.

“One of the problems we’ve found operating under this method is that a lot of uniformity is being incentivised by these rules being set up in the environmental plantings method.”

While voluntary biodiversity projects are cropping up at an increased rate, most experts expect carbon markets to remain the primary market-based mechanism to fund biodiversity outcomes through nature co-benefits for the foreseeable future.

There are currently 236 registered ACCU projects using the environmental plantings method, covering around 130,000 hectares, with a steady increase of new projects being registered in recent years.

Environmental planting projects are traded at a near 50% premium on the secondary market, not only because of what is considered to be its high carbon sequestration integrity, but also due to the presumed biodiversity co-benefits.

However, McGregor noted that the method requires projects to achieve a forest cover of up to 20% of the area with their canopy, or 0.2 of a hectare, which would be different to a forest that an ecologist might think of.

“Typically, environmental planting projects outside of the Emissions Reduction Fund is looking to have areas that are dense vegetation and open vegetation, whereas in carbon projects we’re being strongly incentivised for that to be homogenised through a range of aspects in terms of carbon yield monitoring, reporting, all those sorts of components,” he said.

Another issue McGregor raised with the 20% forest cover requirement was that a lot of vegetation systems do not achieve that level of coverage, including open woodlands, shrub, and grasslands.

“Trying to do restoration through a carbon market isn’t really possible using a forest cover requirement,” he said.

“The low vegetation as well, grasslands, is another example of vegetation that’s not going to be restored through carbon markets at the moment.”

BIG BOY PANTS

McGregor also noted that as the carbon market had matured, it was beginning to run into other regulatory issues outside of the carbon market compliance requirements.

He gave the example of South Australia, which classifies carbon planting projects as commercial forestry, which is required to go through a development approval process.

“Part of me looks at these things as part of a cottage industry maturing and growing, and maybe that’s fair enough that we need to start going through these additional thresholds – the industry getting its big boy pants on, growing up a bit,” he said.

He noted benefits from the process included the requirement of additional fire management planning, but also said it added a lot of time and expense to the work.

“We’re adding months of lead time developing up additional plans, submitting them, the backwards and forwards, and getting those things through,” he said.

He also noted that some of those development approvals were based around rules which were not fit-for-purpose for carbon projects.

“They’re designed for traditional forestry roles, so you’re looking at blue gums, pine plantations. That means a lot of the agencies and councils we’re putting these proposals in front of tasked with reviewing the applications are just not familiar with the concept of a carbon planting project for biodiversity,” he said.

“So we have to invest a lot more time in explaining all of these concepts to them, just to lay the ground work before they can effectively assess these things, otherwise they might be declined for reasons that don’t make sense.”

Another issue in South Australia, according to McGregor, was that commercial forestry had to comply with an arbitrary setback rule, and because carbon planting projects were treated the same, it meant biodiverse carbon projects could not be planted within 500 metres of state-significant native vegetation.

“When you’re trying to do carbon plantings as a fundamental to achieve connectivity across the landscape, it’ completely perverse and mind boggling,” he said.

He noted that commercial forestry rules as they currently stand not only apply to carbon credits, but also nature credits, and insetting – even when there’s not credits being generated or sold.

By Mark Tilly – mark@carbon-pulse.com