According to a study commissioned by The Nature Conservancy and the Pew Environment Group, Australia could cut its greenhouse emissions by 5% by better management of the outback.

The study found that 9.7 billion tonnes of carbon is stored in the forests, grasslands and woodlands of Australia’s outback but if those environments were improved, 1.3 billion tonnes more carbon could be stored – the equivalent of taking 300 million cars off the road – over the next 40 years.

Feral animals, particularly camels and water buffalo, are a major contributor to greenhouse gas emission. According to Dr Barry Traill, a spokesman for the Pew Group, "When feral animals belch they release methane, a particularly noxious greenhouse gas, and every single camel or water buffalo releases the equivalent of around one ton of carbon dioxide each year. When you’ve got hundreds of thousands, in some cases millions, of these feral animals, it’s a very large amount of pollution each year."

Unlike many feral animals, native animals do not produce much methane becasue they are not ruminants which regurgitate their food as cud in order to slowly break it down for digestion -  a process which produces a lot of methane.

The study also advocates better fire and grazing management, reducing land clearing and regrowing native vegetation.

Camels near Uluru (Image by Schomynv via Wikimedia Commons)

Brian Walsh, director of winemaking at Yalumba, has told business leaders in Adelaide that a rise in temperatures could prevent the growth of some cooler grape varieties, such as shiraz and riesling, for which South Australia’s Barossa Valley is famous. ”Basically, the Barossa will disappear,” he said.

A similar observation has been made by viticulturist, Frank van de Loo, at the Mt Majura vineyard near Canberra. 

Mr van de Loo has recorded grape harvest days each year. "Over the last 20 vintages, this is our 21st vintage, we’ve been coming in at an average of 2.4 days earlier each year," he says. "Of course the curve bounces around a lot from year to year depending on the individual season, but it has a very clear trend. Before long, we’ll have to quit growing chardonnays."

Mr Walsh pointed out that regions in Italy and France grow wine in hot arid conditions similar to Australia, and peolple there choose wine from a particular region. But Australians choose wine based on the grape varieties, like shiraz, reisling or chardonnay and in the future it may not be possible to grow these varieties in regions like the Barossa.

He said that winemakers need to start looking at varieties for hot, dry climates now and not wait 30 years and say ”I wish I’d done something”.

”It’s a risk strategy and out of some of those times we might just stumble across something which is a fantastic idea we haven’t thought of yet," he said.

A Canadian farmer, Gary Lewis, has developed a system that pipes tractor exhaust emissions through a condenser and into the pneumatic system of air seeders, which then injects the carbon and nitrogen-rich emissions into the ground along with the seed. The exhaust gases stimulate microbial activity and root growth, allowing the plants to more efficiently extract nutrient and moisture from the soil.

Mr Lewis says that tractor exhaust has allowed him and other farmers working with his technology to grow excellent crops without using conventional fertilisers. He says that he has not used fertiliser on his 250-hectare irrigation farm for at least six years, yet he had seen no loss of production, his soils had moved from pH 8.0 (the same as his irrigation water) to a pH of about 7.0 and soil organic matter levels are now at about 10 per cent.

In addition to the savings in fertilizer, he sees potential income from carbon offsets through the process.

About 150 farmers around the world, including in Australia, Britain, South Africa and recently China, are trialling the technique.

Ian Linklater, who grows wheat on a 3,845 hectare property near the Murray River north of Mildura, was the first Australian farmer to test the system. He spent $20,000 customising equipment that cools his tractor’s exhaust fumes and injects them into the soil as he sows his crop. He says that he has saved around $500,000 in nitrogen and phosphorus fertilizers in the two years that he has been using the system.

The journal Science has published a paper in Boris Worm of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada on a two-year study of fisheries by scientists in North and South America, Africa, Australia and New Zealand, which reports progress towards recovery of fish stocks in several regions.

In 2006, Dr Worm predicted total global collapse of fish and seafood populations by 2048. "I am somewhat more hopeful that we will be in a better state … than what we originally predicted, simply because I see that we have the management tools that are proven to work," he said.

These tools include: restrictions on gear like nets so that smaller, younger fish can escape; limits on the total allowable catch; closing some areas to fishing; certifying fisheries as sustainable; offering shares of the total allowable catch to each person who fishes in a specified area.

The report pointed particularly to successes in the New Zealand and Alaskan fisheries as the basis for the increased optism but pointed out that two-thirds of the world’s fisheries still need to be rebuilt and that the situation off Africa was deteriorating as fishing fleets supplying richer countries compete with local fishermen..

The Australian Government has announced $1.4 million in funding for research into  biochar – a form of charcoal that can store carbon in the soil for an average of 5,000 years.

The three-year programme, to be co-ordinated by the CSIRO, will be one of the largest such investigations in the world.

Agriculture Minister Tony Burke, said that biochar has the potential to significantly reduce Australia’s carbon emissions. "You can find places where particular biochars have had a fantastic outcome for the soil, impacts on salinity, impacts on water retention, as well as impacts on keeping carbon underground," he said. "But at the same time, there’s a lot of complexity in trying to match the right biochar to the right soil."

See this article at GreenBiz Cafe for more information about the potential of biochar.

The Australian Government has announced that it will invest more than $20 million in research and development aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions caused by livestock.

According to a United Nations report, cattle are "responsible for 18% of greenhouse gases, more than cars, planes and all other forms of transport put together." The reasons why are cattle so bad, and whether other sources of meat are better, has been discussed on our sister site, GreenBiz Cafe.

The Minister for Agriculture, Tony Burke, said that the research will look at breeding options and improving feed to reducing methane levels. Farmers in the UK are altready trialling a diet for cows that promises to reduce methane emissions. (See GreenBiz Cafe).

UPDATE: 3 March 2009

The Federal Agriculture Minister, Tony Burke. announced today that there will be nine research programs across the country which will begin looking at effective ways to store carbon in soil in a bid to reduce emissions. A further nine programs will monitor nitrous oxide emissions of various farming systems, at a total cost of $32 million.

The CSIRO will oversee the management of all programs and analyse the potential for soils to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Australian Federal Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull has unveiled a three-part climate change policy which aims to achieve annual reductions of carbon pollution of equivalent of at least 150 million tonnes by 2020.

Launching the new policy at a Young Liberals convention on Saturday, Mr Turnbull said that the Liberal Party’s plan would include measures to encourage improved energy efficiency in buildings, where he says 23 per cent of greenhouse gases originate.

The plan would also increase investment in new technologies. "We have to invest in industrial scale carbon capture and storage, industrial scale solar, industrial scale geothermal energy," Mr Turnbull said.

But the main thrust of the policy would be biosequestration of carbon which could deliver ”large gains in agricultural productivity, environmental quality and energy security”.

Leading environmental scientists, including 2007 Australian of the Year Tim Flannery and author of the Gaia hypothesis James Lovelock, also advocate biosequestration in the form of "biochar" or "agrichar", as the best way of limiting global warming.

A new study by the University of New South Wales has found that farming kangaroos instead of sheep and cattle in Australia could cut the greenhouse gases produced by grazing livestock by almost a quarter. 

Methane from the foregut of cattle and sheep constitutes 11 percent of Australia’s total greenhouse emissions but kangaroos produce negligible amounts of methane. Removing 7 million cattle and 36 million sheep and replacing them with 175 million kangaroos, which would produce the same amount of meat, could lower the total national greenhouse gas emissions by 3 percent a year.

Methane’s warming potential over a 100-year time frame is 21 times higher than that of carbon dioxide but its chemical lifetime in the atmosphere is only 8 to 12 years compared with carbon dioxide’s 100 years. Therefore, reducing methane production is an attractive way of quickly mitigating global warming. 

Jim Salinger, a climate scientist at New Zealand’s National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research, has warned that Australia and New Zealand may face shortages of beer because of climate change.

He said that climate change likely will cause a decline in the production of malting barley in parts of New Zealand and particularly in Australia. Malting barley is a key ingredient of beer. "It will mean either there will be pubs without beer or the cost of beer will go up," Salinger told the Institute of Brewing and Distilling convention.

New Zealand and Australian brewer Lion Nathan’s corporate affairs director Liz Read said climate change already was forcing up the price of malted barley, aluminum and sugar.