Murdoch crunch carbon data for saltbush
Saltbush species have long been recognised for their tolerance to heavy grazing and capacity to be established in non-arable and salinity affected soils. Given that up to 2 million hectares of the 20 million hectares of agricultural land in Western Australia is salinity affected; saltbush has been widely planted to mitigate the problem.
The Western Australian Auditor General’s Report Management of Salinity report estimates that the opportunity cost of lost agricultural productivity due to dryland salinity is $519 million a year. Performing effective saline land restoration at a landscape scale throughout the wheatbelt would require mass reforestation of vast areas of land. Many saltbush species are considered important pioneers when countering the effects of salinity. However, funding for salinity monitoring and management has declined since 2008. This is not to say that the problem has gone away, more that there is reduced capacity to perform coordination of management and monitoring activities.
Global focus on sustainability and carbon emissions has been gathering momentum with the growing awareness of land degradation issues and climate change. The Australian Carbon Credit Unit Scheme (ACCU) methods have been established to help Australia keep pace with our carbon emissions accounting. A methodology determination (method) is a set of requirements and rules for running a project under the ACCU Scheme. Project methods are registered activities that reduce emissions or store carbon in soils and vegetation.
Funded by the Western Australian Carbon Farming and Land Restoration Program, the Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development (DPIRD) contracted Wheatbelt NRM, in partnership with Murdoch University, Corrigin Farm Improvement Group and Facey Group in 2022 to determine the feasibility of saltbush plantings being developed into an ACCU Scheme methodology.
The first major milestone of the project was reached in 2023 with the establishment of 6 new saltbush trial sites.
Murdoch researchers have been busy in the field collecting data for the next major milestone of the project; measuring actual biomass and carbon sequestration rates of mature saltbush across 30 sites. This requires the destruction and measurement of different ages and species of saltbush in the wheatbelt, and analysing the data collected. Thank you to all the willing landholders who volunteered their saltbushes to science.
The Murdoch team are currently crunching the data to bring the Saltbush time sequencing report on actual carbon sequestration rates to us before the end of 2024. Seeing as there is not currently a carbon methodology recognised for forage shrubs, this could be a gamechanger for saline land restoration and carbon accounting in Australia.
This project is supported by the Western Australian Carbon Farming and Land Restoration Program
Published eNews #397, December 2024