Abatement offset

Greening the Desert™ establishes forestry and soil carbon sinks to qualify for purposes of voluntary abatement offset as an integral part of its planting regime,

Testing and applying methods for both tree and soil carbon for offset accreditation purposes is conducted in collaboration with the sequestration consultants Australian Carbon Traders www.australiancarbontraders.com.

Essentially, soil carbon is the process of transforming CO2 into stored soil carbon (agricultural carbon sinks) as plants take up CO2 through photosynthesis and incorporate it into living plant matter either as surface or subterranean biomass.

This soil has the capacity to store twice as much CO2 as tree carbon (forestry carbon sinks).

Voluntary market

There is a viable voluntary market both in Australia and internationally for offset created from forestry and from agriculture.

The Australian Labor Government has deferred legislation for a compulsory scheme (the CPRS) until 2013 but new legislation is set to go before the Australian Parliament early in the new year of 2011.

This is to be called the Carbon Farming Initiative (CFI)

CFI

The CFI will provide landholders with a pathway to create carbon credits from land based activities to be sold either in the local voluntary market through the National Carbon Offset Standard (NCS) or through international markets.

It will cover activities such as soil carbon; forestry; agricultural emissions management; livestock methane and waste management and will provide a standard for the voluntary market and deliver access to international markets.

The global front

On a global scale the CFI will enable Australia to stay in touch with international developments as:

• California (USA) retains its emissions laws
• Korea and Japan set up an ETS
• China commences trials for an ETS designed to lower its emission intensity by 40%
• India has a carbon tax in place for selected fuels to reduce carbon intensity by 20%, and
• The EU looks to increase CPS targets