Tim Flannery supports soil carbon credits

ABC TV LANDLINE
Interview with Professor Tim Flannery
Reporter: Sally Sara
First Published: 11/02/2007

SALLY SARA: we've had a lot of talk in the past week about carbon trading, what sort of opportunities do you see there for farmers in Australia?



PROFESSOR TIM FLANNERY: Carbon trading represents one of the great opportunities for farmers in Australia. But what we really need in order to maximise that opportunity is some good government policy. We also need a proper accounting system for carbon. One of the great opportunities in Australia is sequestering or storing carbon in the soil, and unfortunately that carbon is not so readily visible and measurable. It would be a great help if the Federal Government put some effort into trying to develop a proper accountable scheme for measuring that carbon so we could take an opportunity for trade, because without that accountability no-one's going to pay to have their carbon sequestered.



SALLY SARA: Using the bush for carbon credits, does that mean locking up land? Some people fear that’s what it will mean.



PROFESSOR TIM FLANNERY: Not at all. What it means is a creation of a carbon bank on your farm, and that carbon bank may be in the soil. You may decide to sequester it through better management practice that enhances the fertility of your soil and the carbon that is locked up within it. You may decide to grow perennial vegetation rather than annual grasses that again sequester carbon in the longer term. But as the land owner you're in charge of that carbon bank and if you decide you want to fell some trees and sell the timber, that's fine you can do that but there will be less money in your carbon bank.



SALLY SARA: How do you go about storing the carbon underground?



PROFESSOR TIM FLANNERY: There's a number of ways that this can be done but essentially it's all to do with good management of your soil. If you're practising zero till or something like that where you're not disturbing the soil and now allowing any oxygen in get in to release the carbon, you’re storing carbon in the soil. Having deep-rooted plants helps restore carbon in the soil. If you're dealing with a forested situation, the leaf fall and then rots away again stores carbon in the soil. There is a number of ways of doing this, but the big problem is quantifying that. If I'm someone who wants to sequester my carbon in your soil, I want to know how much is being sequestered per hectare before I pay, and we need some basic research work done around that to enable us to quantify that and to make the whole system fully accountable, and that really is a role for Government.



SALLY SARA: Could that be a serious mainstream industry or part of industry?



PROFESSOR TIM FLANNERY: I think it will be a major industry world wide in future and whoever has access to broad acres will be very advantaged in that. The broad figures are that we can store enough carbon in the living biosphere, particularly in the tropics of our planet, to offset all of the carbon emissions since the beginning of the industrial revolution. So that's a significant opportunity. It's very clear that we already have too much carbon in the air for climate stability, so I think in the future people will be looking increasingly to carbon storage in the biosphere and in our soils in order to deal with this emerging problem.



SALLY SARA: Professor Tim Flannery and Australian of the Year, thank you very much for joining us on Landline.



PROFESSOR TIM FLANNERY: Thank you.