Costs and benefits of different options for West Australian farmers to mitigate greenhouse gases emissions
Tas Thamo, a first year PhD student from the University of Western Australia's School of Agricultural & Resource Economics, won the Three-Minute Thesis Competition at the PIARN Postgraduate Workshop. He presented his research on greenhouse gas mitigation on WA farms at the CCRSPI Conference, and was profiled in the April edition of the PIARN newsletter. Below is a summary of Tas’ PhD research.
Costs and benefits of different options for West Australian farmers to mitigate greenhouse gases emissions
Tas Thamo, University of Western Australia
Australia will almost certainly, at some stage, implement a policy aimed at reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Even if not a direct participant in such policies, agriculture will be affected through the price of farm inputs like fuel, fertiliser, etc. Farmers may able to recover some of these increased costs or even increase their profitability by mitigating their own GHG emissions. Options available to farmers include:
- Changing management to sequester and maintain more carbon (C) in their soils
- Sequestering C in vegetation by revegetating land with woody perennials
- Producing feedstock materials for conversion into biochar
- Using the same feedstock material to generate biomass energy
This study aims to weigh up the financial benefits and costs to farmers of each of these options and to identify farming responses that will be most beneficial to farmers. Likely annuities will be determined by modelling each of these options individually using applicable biophysical and economic coefficients. The annuities will then be incorporated into a whole-farm economic model for comparison. This will reveal the most financially attractive package of actions for farmers to mitigate GHG emissions, likely changes in enterprise mix and how the profit and net emissions for the whole farm may change for different prices of C, both with and without the inclusion of agriculture into policies aimed at reducing the emissions.
The study will also investigate the effect of different methods of monitoring, the inclusion of different sources of emissions in accounting and even payment based on direct measurement or the adoption of certain management practices. A feature of the study will be the comparison of sequestering C in vegetation or soil (options that require on-going management and measurement whilst also encumbering the farmer with liability and increased risk for potentially 100 plus years) with the more 'once-off' options of biochar and biomass energy production.