Blue Carbon in Australia: understanding the opportunity for Indigenous People (2024)

Overview

Australia’s extensive coastline harbors a valuable natural asset: blue carbon ecosystems. These mangroves, salt marshes, and seagrass meadows not only provide vital habitat for diverse marine life, but they also act as powerful carbon sinks, capturing and storing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. As the world grapples with climate change, blue carbon has emerged as a promising tool for mitigation, and Indigenous people, with their deep connection to these lands and waters, hold the key to unlocking its full potential.

While Australia is lauded as a ‘blue carbon hotspot’, having a healthy blue carbon ecosystem does not necessarily equate to an opportunity to do a blue carbon project. Similar to land-based carbon projects, blue carbon projects (which are simply carbon projects that occur in coastal and marine ecosystems) usually require an activity to restore or protect a degraded or threatened ecosystem, i.e., they require some level of damage or threat rather than an already healthy ecosystem.

In Australia, there is currently one ACCU Scheme Method available for blue carbon, involving the reintroduction of tidal flows into coastal wetlands. Other blue carbon activities/methods may become available in the future (i.e. research is currently being undertaken investigating the carbon potential from the management of seagrass, and the removal of ungulates from coastal wetlands). Beyond the ACCU Scheme, landholders also have the option to look at voluntary market programs, such as Verra and Gold Standard, that are investing significantly in the development of new blue carbon methods.

Outside of the carbon market, the biodiversity or ‘nature repair’ market is rapidly gaining shape, presenting opportunities in areas where carbon methods do not apply, including the potential to ‘steward’ existing healthy ecosystems.

This report delves into the possibilities that blue carbon presents for Indigenous People. It explores the various carbon markets and emerging nature repair markets where blue carbon projects can generate income through carbon credits, biodiversity offsets, and other mechanisms. However, financial viability is just one piece of the puzzle. At the heart of this opportunity lies the fundamental question of rights.

Indigenous people have stewarded these coastal ecosystems for millennia, and their rights must be central to any blue carbon development. Our analysis, captured in the following Map, reveals that Indigenous people hold legal or consent rights, recognised under the ACCU scheme, along 66% of the Australia’s coastline (Classes 1, 2 and 3). However, there is limited overlap between these strong rights and the applicable ACCU Scheme Blue Carbon Method. Indigenous people are also responsible for managing significant areas of Sea Country, but these
management responsibilities do not always equate to rights which are recognised under the ACCU Scheme.