How much are wood chips worth?

more sloppy journalism from the S&L. Greening Australia is far from the beginning. Landcare Australia has been doing things for several years, CO2 group was the first. Try looking into the detail and see what the deal realy means, $25-30 a tonne is what they charge consumers - how much do they give farmers and what happens if the price of carbon goes up to $50 a tonne, any increrase to the landholder? Also what happens when ag is a covered sector and you have sold all your carbon to GA? There is a lot of investigating that needs to be done and simply repeating the GA propaganda is not a good service to the landholders of Aus.

Capturing carbon in trees is a great plan - we certainly need more activites of this nature. However, it is important that we continue to seek opportunites that beenfit the environmental, social and financial elements requried by the community. Let's ensure that planning is a key element of these activites and that revegetation activites are consitent with broader farming goals.

I thought tree plantings made dodgy offsets.

How will this work once emissions trading begins?

Sounds like double counting to me.

There is great concern over the deals being offered to landholders for revegetation. There is a practice of misleading landholders and purchasers through not providing full disclosure of information.

If the landholders or purchasers do not ask the question, then the information will not be provided. But how do landholders know what to ask? Australian Carbon Traders has been operating in the sequestration field since 2004. It has seen the development of the industry, with an increasing number of companies aiming to cash in on the market, most of which have little understanding of the fundamentals of forestry, revegetation or resource management.

They are accountants, salesmen and investors form the cities - they do not understand the fundamentals of the market or the Australian agricultural environment.

Australian Carbon Traders urges all farmers to take great care when entering into any revegetation contract, especially now the rules are changing under the CPRS.

There are some fundamental changes to the calculation, liability and reporting of carbon sinks in Australia that may well expose many landholders to a liability beyond their expectations.

These liabilities may extend beyond the landholder and affect the purchaser as well.

We know the ACCC has this on the radar. Whether the ACCC does anything or not is yet to be seen. Australian Carbon Traders urges all landholders to be very careful when entering carbon contracts especially as agriculture is likely to be covered from 2015, meaning landholders will need to account for emissions and may well need their tree plantations for their own accounting.

The price of carbon is also expected to rise, so accepting an up-front payment for planting essentially locks in your price.

Under the CPRS model, if a landholder wants to opt out or loses a forest sink, they will be required to replant the forest or pay back the carbon at the market rate at the time of loss - which could be a big problem if the price of carbon has doubled or tripled since the landholder planted.

Critics of forest sinks correctly raise issues of accountability and transparency and reversibility. The ratification of the Kyoto Protocol has created an international obligation to report on the extent of our forests, and the extent of our forests is defined by the National Forest Extent that includes the criteria described below.

There are numerous standards that are derived from the Kyoto Protocol that spell out the correct approach to establishing, measuring and reporting of forest sinks.

These include how projects must address the long-term maintenance of the project and how the project meets the Kyoto Protocol definition of a forest.

The KP definition of a forest is that the forest must have been planted on land that was predominantly clear of vegetation, less than 20pc crown cover, on December 31, 1989, was reafforested by human means after January 1, 1990, will achieve an minimum height of ovestory greater than 2 metres, with a crown cover greater than 20pc.

The forest must be in patches greater than 0.2 of a hectare, and remain in situ for 80 to 100 years from the date the carbon was sequestered...not the date it was planted.

The rules for forest sinks also include specific requirement on how to measure and monitor the growth and capture of carbon in the various forest carbon pools, such as trees, grasses and soil.

Only forests that meet these criteria and can be proven will be accepted.

The standards for accounting for carbon are also very specific that carbon can only be claimed retrospectively, that is after it has been sequestered in the forest, not before.

Further conditions are placed on forest sinks by schemes such as Greenhouse Friendly and the NSW GGAS.

These schemes require the calculation of forest carbon to be accepted by the scheme and to include complex statistical measures to calculate the uncertainty of the project, long-term risk management arrangements and complex monitoring regimes on forest sinks.

Schemes require stringent details on make-good policies, security of ownership and regulate how carbon credits are made and transferred to avoid double dipping or reselling of the same tonne of carbon.

There are divisions about which is the best accreditation but the fundamentals apply to each and the incoming emissions trading scheme will bring some consistency to the industry and as consumers The incoming ETS will also be a watershed for many tree planters, especially those that can not reach accreditation standards.

Forestry will be able to opt in and create permits over and above the cap. This may raise a new level of exploitation form companies trying to get existing plantations established through donations and purchasers form the public into the ETS to “resell” the carbon.

There will be little scope for non-accredited organisations and we will see how many survive to nurture the trees you paid for.

With these conditions placed on forest sinks, it is not surprising so many organisations either cannot or chose not to meet these requirements.

However, they still operate and take your money. More frightening is the apparent lack of disclosure form organisations that claim to be accredited but on investigation the accreditation does not cover all of their projects or in some cases the organisation only and not the projects.

....Ben Keogh managing director, Australian Carbon Traders.

200 tonnes of Carbon is equal to 733 tonnes of CO2 equivalents per hectare.

There is no way malees get that much - certainly not using the default FullCAM program that is used by the Federal Government to report on our progress to the Kyoto Targets.

If the feds have to report using FullCAM, we can expect that farmers will as well.

So these figures seem extraordianary. Who will bear the cost of non-delivery when reality does not meet GA's prediction?

Farmers seek independent advice.

People need to look up David Archibald who gives a true story of the benefits of Carbon to the trees. Carbon Traders reminds one of the Tulip Industry in Holland.

David Archibald - from the laviosier group? Are you serious len? This group is more belligernent than the Al Gores of the world. I saw his presentaion and it is riddled with assumptions and innacuracies and missed information. Continually claiming that levels of CO2 have varied and had no effect on global tempreatures is using the same causal link that the AGW proponents use and the very argument that the Laviouser group denies. It is true that CO2 levels have been 16 times higher than present day at a time when tempretures where also lower than today, however no one points out that the oxygen levels were at 15% of current levels, it is not just the amount of a gas in the atmosphere it is the mix of ALL gasses in the atmosphere. The claim that the sun is driving everything is hard to maintain when the main drivers are changing, the moon which drives our tides and a large component of the movement of energy around the planet through oceans is slowly getting further away, our orbit around the sun is changing as does the intensity of the sun's radiation. My belief is that the real drivers of climate change are all these things, some we can control and some, like emissions we can control. Archibald and his mates at the Lavosier group are no different form the AGW crowd, they believe they are 100% right. Only a fool is sure, a wise man is full of doubts (Einstien). We are all fools if we do not act on what we can control, understand what we cant and prepare to adapt to the inevitable - cooling and warming.

It’s great to see so much interest and discussion being generated by the opportunities provided by carbon- especially the focus on how carbon can be integrated into our rural communities. The first thing to say about the carbon debate is that it is complex, and it is ever changing. The recent article about Greening Australia’s carbon business and the model that underpins it, has raised a number of issues that are currently discussed in this online forum. We would like to clarify as there does appear to be some confusion.

What we had hoped to communicate in the article (and perhaps we used an inappropriate shorthand) was that $25 to $30 per tonne of carbon abatement was indicative of the price we are selling to carbon buyers. That $25 to $30 covers a whole range of costs including: land preparation, revegetation, management and of course access to the land for revegetation purposes. In our model a percentage of the price of each tonne of carbon abatement is accessible by the landholder. Given the selling price on the market is likely to be around $20 to $25, and land access is just one cost in producing a tonne of carbon, we are not in a position to offer the $25 to $30 as we incorrectly stated in the article. The return to landholders from carbon is dependant on a whole range of factors to do with the productive capacity of the land, and the opportunity costs of foregoing other agricultural activities such as grazing or cropping.

Greening Australia sees carbon as providing a whole range of benefits to rural communities including as alternative revenue streams for landholders. In Greening Australia’s eyes our carbon business provides us with an unprecedented opportunity to ‘turbo-charge’ our vision of transforming our landscapes and making measurable improvements in our water quality, biodiversity and sustainable livelihoods. Massive biodiverse plantings at the level we are talking about also help to provide a resiliance in our landscapes to the climate change challenge that confronts us. Surely a win/win all round.