Understanding landholder participation in biodiverse carbon plantings

The management of biodiverse carbon forests on private land has emerged as a potentially significant conservation activity to tackle both climate change and biodiversity loss. Biodiverse forests can act as carbon sinks, improve biodiversity condition, tackle salinity and erosion and improve soil quality. They can also increase productivity rates for agriculture by acting as shelter belts and may increase climate change resilience in the local landscapes. In Australia, 70% of land is privately owned or leased, with 53% utilised for agriculture. These figures highlight the need to engage with farmers and land managers if we are to effectively pursue conservation activities across the landscape.

Despite the great potential for biodiverse carbon forests, global participation in bio-sequestration schemes has been limited. There is a lack of information regarding the perspectives of various actors in biodiversity management and bio-sequestration projects, both in the Australian context and internationally. Hence there is a need for research into the drivers and barriers for landholders to integrate biodiverse forests into agricultural landscapes. This thesis seeks to unpack the roles of socio-cultural drivers and how they relate to program design with the aim of improving participation rates in biodiverse carbon plantings.

Using a mixed-method research approach, I interviewed and surveyed 17 landholders who participated in a voluntary biodiverse carbon planting scheme in Victoria, Australia. I recruited the research participants through Greenfleet, a not-for-profit environmental organisation that plants biodiverse forests across Australia to offset greenhouse gas emissions (for companies and individuals). Drawing on adoption theory, I analysed interview and survey data at each stage of program adoption: awareness, non-trial evaluation, trial evaluation, adoption and post adoption. I have presented two groups of factors that impact landholders’ participation: landholder-related factors (e.g. cultural drivers) and external (e.g. political uncertainty). My results highlight the important role of social capital, trust and social networks in particular, in the success of biodiverse carbon plantings.

Furthermore, I explored the opinions of other stakeholders (policy makers and academics) in the field of carbon and biodiversity. In doing so, I examined different scenarios for bundling and stacking ecosystem services credits. These findings have important implications for the design and implementation of carbon and biodiversity-related programs, and indeed for any incentivising policies that look at bundling or stacking multiple ecosystem services credits. The synergies between ecosystem services driven by biodiverse carbon plantings make it appealing to both buyers and sellers. Hence, fostering the trade-offs and synergies in a careful policy design could reinforce achieving both biodiversity conservation and carbon sequestration objectives.

I also developed a Bayesian Belief Network model to represent landholder participation in biodiverse carbon planting schemes to determine factors most likely to influence program participation, based on financial incentives, program attractiveness and the value of co-benefits. I explored different policy scenarios that aim to provide more financial incentives to landholders, including stacking, bundling and payments for carbon credits. Results from the BBN model indicate that the rate of landholder participation is most sensitive to changes in program attractiveness (including administration procedure and committed time for participation).