By Marleen Buizer and Katinka Ruthrof
What does our Research Centre on “Climate Change Woodlands and Forest Health” have to do with the federal governments’ latest decisions on the abandonment of the newest version of an Australian Emissions Trading Scheme?
About a fortnight ago, PM Rudd put the plans for a national “Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme” (CPRS) into the deep freeze. Protests followed. Had the CPRS, the Australian version of an Emissions Trading Scheme, been the provisional last hope to show that signing the Kyoto protocol in 2007 had been more than a symbolic political act? In a recent analysis of Australian climate politics, Kyoto itself is presented as “a veil behind which inaction on climate change can be hidden” (Howarth and Foxall, 2010). Prior to Kyoto, Australia had contributed to the veil by negotiating the ‘Australia clause’, i.e. an inclusion of emissions from land clearing in the computation of emissions in the base year 1990, causing a situation where actual CO2 emissions, coming mainly from the industry, energy and transport sectors, have been able to grow drastically as compared with the 1990 baseline. In the meantime, Australia could report in Copenhagen that it was relatively ‘on track’ as regards its reduction target of 108% in 2012. And now even the main chosen mechanism to ‘cap and trade’ emissions in the future is in the deep freeze.
Let’s for a moment look at this latest development from a restoration ecology point of view. The decision could be perceived as bad news, for a pricing and trading system for carbon could have brought in more financial resources for revegetation. Have these resources now landed in the proverbial deep freeze as well? How bad is that? One serious risk of the CPRS was that ‘reveg monocultures’ for carbon sequestration would become more lucrative than revegetation for a combined set of objectives such as biodiversity, salinity control, wind erosion or providing connections for fauna in agricultural areas. So perhaps it is not all bad… And what does the decision mean for our research? Has it become less relevant to investigate how revegetation on degraded parts of private and public land, is most likely to succeed? We would say the answer is “no, on the contrary”. In our research on volunteering in ecological restoration, we have seen various private landowners (farmers and non farmers) interested and/or involved in establishing biodiverse plantings on their land – with or without a CPRS. Now that the national government has delayed renegotiations of new versions of trading mechanisms, local revegetation trials and activities should still progress, investigating how in altered climatic conditions, different objectives of revegetation, including carbon sequestration, can be successfully combined. While the national government will be temporarily absent on this, it is even more important that local and regional policy makers, landowners and researchers start working together more on finding ways to address these challenges. What do you think?
