- Title:
-
Accounting and Verification of Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Fire Management Programs in Northern Australia
- Date:
- September 2008
- Organisations
- AFAC 2008 Conference
- Authors:
Mick Meyer, Jeremy Russell-Smith, Brett Murphy, Garry Cook, Andrew Edwards,
Cameron Yates, Jon Schatz, Peter Brocklehurst, Ashok Luhar, Ross
Mitchell, Dave Parry- Location:
- Australia, Australia
Overview
The International Bushfire Research Conference 2008 - incorporating The 15th annual AFAC Conference, Adelaide, South Australia, Australia
The savanna woodlands and arid grasslands of Northern Australia is the largest bushfire source if greenhouse gas and particulate emissions in Australia. In 2005 this source contributed 2% of Australia's greenhouse gas emissions. While fire is an integral component of savanna ecosystems, the traditional management of fire regimes by Indigenous owners minimised emissions by concentrating fire activity to the early part of the fire season. With the depopulation of the savanna woodlands in the latter decades of the last century, these benign fire regimes were replaced by destructive, high-emitting regimes that are dominated by large intense fires in the late dry season.
Recently, a pilot pragramme was developed with the Indigenous communities of Western Arnhem Land to re-establish the traditional patterns of fire management under an agreement between the Northern Territory Government and Conoco Phillips (the WALFA project). In this agreement the emissions reduction achieved through traditional fire management is used to offset the greenhouse gas emissions from the natural gas industry developments in Darwin. An essential element of the programme is the greenhouse gas accounting methodology used to measure the emissions and to verify the impacts of changed fire regimes.
Global accounting methodologies required for National reporting under the obligations to the UNFCCC are not directly appropriate for project level accounting. Carbon offsets accounting requires methods that can distinguish the management impact from oter sourcs of variation including climatic change. In this paper we review the current carbon accounting methodologies appropriate for project level accounting and plannning, its verification and its application to greenhouse gas emissions accounting in northern Australia.
