Land use, land-use change and forestry
Australia has a huge land area—some 7.7 million square kilometres—with diverse landscapes, ranging from the tropical north to the temperate south and from the high-rainfall coastal zone to the inland deserts. This diversity of landscapes is reflected in a wide range of land uses.
The land sector—agriculture and forestry—has an important role to play in reducing concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The sector is distinct because it can remove carbon from the atmosphere through the growth of plants. How much carbon can be removed depends on a number of factors, including the type of land use, the plants that are growing, the season and location.
The Kyoto Protocol contains specific rules for how greenhouse gas emissions to, and removals from, the atmosphere for the land sector should count towards a country’s annual emissions target. These accounting rules are applied to the activities listed in the Protocol, such as deforestation, afforestation, forest management and cropland management.
Some of the land sector activities are compulsory, which means all countries must include them in calculating their annual greenhouse gas emissions and removals. The rest are voluntary, meaning countries can decide if they will elect to take on additional commitments for the sector.
Most countries agree the existing rules for the land sector are very complex and do not deal adequately with some issues. Nor do they allow the mitigation potential of the sector to be fully realised.
An important issue for the land sector in some countries, including Australia, is the high level of emissions from natural events, such as bushfires and drought.
Because it can be difficult to separate emissions caused by human activity—anthropogenic emissions—and those from natural events, the current rules assume that emissions from land that has any type of human activity on it are a result of human activity alone. So countries that take on additional activities can face a large risk in meeting their annual emissions target. Alternatively, if they don’t elect additional activities, they effectively forgo the mitigation potential on that land.
For Australia, emissions from natural events can overwhelm our national accounts. For example, greenhouse gas emissions from the January 2003 bushfires represented more than one-third of Australia’s total emissions for that year. Because of the risk these events pose to meeting our emissions targets, Australia has not taken on voluntary accounting commitments for the land sector. This means we also cannot count mitigation actions undertaken on this land, such as from improvements in soil carbon and tillage practices.
The figure below illustrates the strong potential variability of emissions in the national accounts that would result from full inclusion of elective land management activities.
Ensuring we are only required to account for anthropogenic sources of emissions in our national accounts is a priority for Australia in the negotiations. We are also seeking to make the most of the mitigation opportunities available from the land sector. This may include reduced rates of vegetation clearance, encouraging planting of trees and improving management of forests and agricultural soils.
Because the nature of the land sector varies greatly across the globe, reaching consensus on certain issues is difficult. Australia is advocating that the land sector is comprehensively and appropriately included in the post-2012 agreement.
There has been interest in the role soils could play in reducing atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations. Increasing the soil carbon pool through technologies such as biochar, produced from agricultural and forestry waste, could assist in delaying release of emissions from harvesting trees and crops.
Technology and improved management systems could assist in reducing land sector emissions, and we need a better understanding of the nature of the contribution they could make, especially when measured against the unique circumstances of the land sector in each country. There is no single solution that will be effective in reducing emissions and improving the mitigation potential of the land sector. It will require a broad range of mechanisms, including an improved approach to the international accounting rules.
More information can be found in Australia’s submissions on land use, land-use change and forestry made to the UNFCCC:
