Australia leading Biodiversity efforts to include in official frameworks

This month GMA spoke to Professor Richard Eckard, from the University of Melbourne’s School of Agriculture, Food and Ecosystem Sciences who provided key information for the GMA Insights Report May edition. Richard is a regular speaker at agricultural events, and co-author of the Australian Agricultural Sustainability Framework.

Richard shares with GMA this month that he is convinced biodiversity is the next ESG (Environment, Social, Governance) headed industry’s way, which you can see in the Australian Agricultural Sustainability Framework quoted below which he was involved in curating. Currently the arrows are pointing through carbon and soils to biodiversity and water.

Many supply chain companies might well have most of these modules under control in their ESG framework, but they are likely to exclude biodiversity. There is therefore an urgent need for industry to develop an agreed framework by which biodiversity can be indexed on-farm, noting that this plays very strongly into the grazing industries who already have significant biodiversity resources that they manage.

Richard also shares with us that he feels post-2030 the supply chain will be balancing various year’s ESGs against each other e.g. extensive grazing, and that the future is likely to be a balancing act between these various criteria.

The wider Melbourne Biodiversity Institute have been uniting to address the urgent imperative to develop simplified accounting that can be implemented on-farm, that provides a biodiversity “critical species threshold index”. A commercial operator is already looking at acoustic sensors for farmers to place around their property, which they then analyse later and correlate critical species thresholds against pollen feeding birds, insect feeding birds, insects, frogs etc. Coupled with well-developed biodiversity analysis via satellite remote sensing, the data is uploaded on behalf of the farmer. It is this outcome and position Richard is keen for us get to quickly - but it also must align with accounting for nature as an emerging platform to which all the biodiversity researchers are aligned.

Obviously this must occur in parallel to mitigation options for livestock methane (the 3-NOP examples) and certainly the Australian red meat industry is heavily invested in the new Zero Net Emissions Cooperative Research Centres (CRC.) Having said that, the CRC may not be putting more money into seaweed and Bovair, as these have had plenty of investment already. The CRC will focus more methane-reducing legumes to improve productivity in extensive grazing systems, and novel breeding targets for reduced methane. While the reduction in methane from these technologies is more incremental, they are guaranteed to deliver more than the seaweed, which will never find its way into cows in the Kimberly.

The insights that do exist into how the supply chain can buy towards a lower scope 3 from farmers, include simple things like improved weaning rates, reduced mortality, improved nutrition and getting to market earlier - these have all been clearly shown to reduce the overall farm emissions intensity. We therefore already have a kickstart for our farmers at the head of the buying queue when supply chain businesses have to start buying the lowest emissions farms first in order to meet their targets - a position we are likely to get to in the not-too-distant future.