Eric BARKER
NATIONALS senator Matt Canavan has taken the Federal Agriculture Department to task about a lack of detail on how much land will be taken out of production to meet Australia’s net-zero by 2050 target.
In a tense Senate Estimates hearing, Senator Canavan expressed his frustration at the agriculture department’s lack of curiosity in how the target will impact its industry, with no answers on how much land will be taken out of agricultural production for both reforestation and renewable energy projects.
The department last month released its Ag and Land Sector Plan, which was drawn up to detail what the country’s net zero target will mean for the agricultural industry.
Carbon sequestration on agricultural land is most likely to be the main contributor to the “net” part of the target, with “reforestation” accounting for the overwhelming majority of that sequestration.
Reforestation is defined as converting land that was once forest back to being a forest, with that mostly expected to happen on the more intensively farmed parts of Southern Australia.
With Department bosses fronting a Senate Estimates hearing, Senator Canavan expressed his frustration that the agricultural department could not detail how much land would be “reforested”.
“It seems to me that you are just trying to hide the detail from Australian farmers,” Senator Canavan told acting secretary Justine Saunders, who said that was not the case.
“You are happy to market the benefits, or the perceived benefits, of reforestation in terms of a carbon sink. But you are not willing to tell the Australian agricultural sector what the cost of that is – reduced agricultural land.
“This is why people are cynical about these targets because you are not being up front with them about it.”
Referring to modelling from the Federal Treasury department about how much sequestration was needed from reforestation and how much carbon can be sequestered/ha, Senator Canavan said it was likely to take up about 5 million hectares of land.
“I am not going to object to your arithmetic, Senator, but there is considerable uncertainty about the amount of carbon sequestration that can be delivered,” department deputy secretary Matt Lowe said.
“(The Treasury modelling) was a literature review, and there is more work that needs to be done on carbon sequestration potential.”
Senator Canavan labelled the Treasury modelling as some of the worst economic modelling he had ever seen. He cited two other reports that put figures on the amount of land needed for reforestation. One of them was the Net Zero Australia report, which was put together by the University of Melbourne, University of Queensland and Princeton University.
“They have a map of Australia and on the top it says, ‘Our modelling cites 5.1m ha of new trees on crop land and pastureland’. Then they understate it by saying ‘This will be very difficult, ‘” he said.
Senator Canavan then went on to cite some CSIRO modelling, which said the reforestation needed to happen in areas of land that have already been cleared.
“We are talking about 5m ha that covers the Murray Darling Basin, the food bowl of the Lockyer Valley, the Riverland, the wheat producing areas of Western Australia, “ he said.
“It just beggars belief to me that we would be seeking to destroy our food security in such a way, and there is almost no curiosity from the agriculture department about this.”
Both Mr Lowe and ABARES executive director, Jared Greenville, said the ag department was looking at sequestration options complementary to agriculture.
“We certainly acknowledge that reforestation or revegetation is an efficient form of carbon removal,” Mr Lowe said. “But we also acknowledge that there are other forms of carbon removal that are available, such as soil carbon, for example. There are also opportunities that exist for reforestation to occur in sympathy with farming.”
– Beef Central
