Carbon trading promises grief of some kind for most businesses, but for Greening Australia it is a natural fit with the organisation's brief of revegetating degraded landscapes.
GA's new national president, Rob Gell, said carbon trading offers the organisation a revenue stream to fund revegetation activities "on a large scale".
When it thinks on a large scale, GA thinks big.
The GA project Gondwana Link, in south-west Western Australia, will string vegetation corridors across 146,000 square kilometres of farmland and national park.
Another project on GA's books is to link Broken Hill, NSW, and the coastal town of Portland, Victoria, with vegetation corridors—another enterprise rich with carbon offset potential.
To businesses that purchase its premium carbon credits, GA will offer not only the practical return of secure long-term carbon offsets, but the less tangible value of having contributed to the restoration of damaged ecosystems.
The organisation is offering two classes of carbon credit.
"Breathe Easy" is its voluntary market offering, which is available online for individuals or small businesses wanting a "feel good" offset to counter a particular carbon-emitting activity.
GA's premium product has already been classed "Kyoto-compliant", and is selling at the currently premium price of about $27 per tonne.
Purchasers buy a guarantee that the vegetation planted as an offset will be around for the next century.
The Federal Government’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme kicks off in 2010, and by 2011-2012, if carbon prices travel as some are projecting, Mr Gell hopes that GA’s carbon offsets will be trading at around $45 per tonne—a rate that he says will make GA’s revegetation self-sustaining.
For landholders worried about farm forestry monocultures and the carbon liabilities incurred if trees are logged for wood or chips, GA offers an alternative.
"We don't want bluegum forests for woodchips to become the default option for plantation forestry," Mr Gell said.
"We see this as a real opportunity to work with rural landholders to do the revegetation they want to do because of their understanding of the value of carbon in the landscape, the management of water systems, and all those benefits that come with biodiverse vegetation.
"There's the potential, depending on the landscape and rainfall, for properties to plant up to 30pc of their area with native vegetation with very little or no loss of production—and to build on the capacity of the property to adapt to climate change through water management, cooling of the land surface, restoring the water cycle."
Mr Gell pointed out that a percentage of the warming pattern recorded in south-eastern Australia can be attributed to the removal of tree cover.
"It's hard to measure, but we believe that by putting green corridors across less productive land we can cool landscapes," he said.
Mr Gell, best known in his home State of Victoria as a television weather presenter, is an environmental campaigner and head of his own environmental consultancy, Access Environmental.
He replaces Jim McKnoulty as national chairman of Greening Australia.
Email a friend