How the Coalition changed the rules to create dodgy carbon credits
- Media Manager
- Sep 25, 2023
- 1 min read
Microsoft Start - Crikey
Written By: Bernard Keane
Published: September 26th, 2023
When human-induced regeneration (HIR) first became part of the process of producing carbon credits, the Coalition wasn’t in power: it was the Gillard government in 2011 that created the framework for producing carbon credits from revegetation that drew down and stored carbon in trees.
That was via the Carbon Credits (Carbon Farming Initiative) Act 2011, which established the carbon farming initiative (CFI). The act required carbon storage methods to comply with eight integrity standards, including that they be “supported by relevant scientific results published in peer-reviewed literature”, account for “significant cyclical variations that are likely to occur in the amount of carbon sequestered in the relevant carbon pool”, and the calculations about the amount of carbon sequestered should be “conservative”.
Barely 2 million carbon credits were issued before the Abbott government was elected in 2013, and the first HIR project under the CFI wasn’t approved until December of that year. At the time, it seemed that the Clean Energy Regulator was only interested in projects that met the scientific consensus about HIR — that land needed to have been cleared beforehand if a regeneration project was going to genuinely and additionally draw down and store carbon, in contrast to land that hadn’t been cleared but where proponents were simply reducing grazing pressure. There is broad scientific agreement that carbon storage on the latter projects is driven by rainfall and drought, not human decisions.
