Insights from the AAAC Outlook 2023 ESG panel

By SHANNON BEATTIE

A panel discussion held as part of the 2023 Australian Association of Agricultural Consultant’s WA Outlook Conference spotlighted key themes around decarbonising primary industries, and implications for managing climate change and natural capital in Western Australia’s food systems.

Chaired by AgZero2030 working group member and Savoir Consulting director Larissa Taylor, the ESG Trends – Primary Industries Towards Net Zero panel included Rabobank’s Crawford Taylor, Living Farm’s John Foss, InterGrain’s Tress Walmsley, and Curtin University’s Heidi Mippy.

Held on Friday, November 17 in Perth, the panel moved through a discussion and answered questions from the audience, with four key issues emerging:

• The issue of energy transition competition for land.
• The urgent need to increase the percentage of farms voluntarily measuring greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) as one indicator of natural capital.
• How to collaborate on breakthrough innovations for climate mitigation, adaptation, and resilience.
• The opportunity to improve co-ordinated engagement between WA’s primary industries and food producers.

• Chaired by AgZero2030 working group member and Savoir Consulting director Larissa Taylor (right), the panel included Curtin University’s Heidi Mippy, Living Farm’s John Foss, InterGrain’s Tress Walmsley, and Rabobank’s Crawford Taylor.

Ms Taylor said there was currently significant competition for land in the South West Land Division of Western Australia which is used to produce WA’s premium exportable food surplus.

“Land use change is occurring rapidly, faster than government regulation or land use planning can keep up with, and land prices have risen aggressively in the past five to ten years,” Ms Taylor said.

“Farmers considering alternative land uses to food production such as carbon farming, environmental services, renewable energy generation, critical minerals mining and allied services are benefitting from increased land values, and alternative land use transactions.”

Land is in demand for the conservation and restoration economy, solar and wind renewables projects, critical minerals exploration and mining, and carbon farming, population expansion, as well as many other uses.

The second theme was around measuring GHG emissions, as farms are unique circular assets in their own right – both sources and sinks of carbon.

Currently it is not mandatory for farmers to report or share their annual GHG emissions.

However, to limit global warming, it is rapidly becoming an expectation from regulators, the finance sector and downstream customers that they should be doing so, and then managing emissions down.

“The challenge here is to understand the relationships between farming systems management practices which lower emissions, while maintaining or increasing farm productivity and profitability,” Ms Taylor said.

WA’s primary industries are already in a fantastic position to achieve globally significant breakthrough innovations for agricultural climate mitigation, adaptation, and resilience.

The panel discussed in detail the next generation of genetics, including the blue-sky possibility of nitrogen fixing wheat for a drying, warming world.

The consensus was the need to allocate funding to high-risk research, not just safe-systems incremental research.

The final theme was the lack of coordinated cross-sectoral engagement between WA’s primary industries, food producers, and the minerals and resources sectors regarding land use change and sequestration.

“In an ideal world if we had started earlier with more ambition, say in 1997 when the Kyoto protocol was signed, we could have limited global warming to 1.5 degrees and achieved a smooth energy transition away from fossil fuels towards renewable energy systems,” Ms Taylor said.

“That scenario is no longer achievable, so now we are in damage control towards exceeding 1.5 degrees in a fragmenting geostrategic environment with inflationary pressures which are headwinds for renewable energy investments and green capital flows”.

For the panel and Ms Taylor, that begged a major question – have these competing demands for land use change been engaging strategically and consulting sufficiently with each other?

Only time will tell as the agricultural sector contemplates what trade-offs it is willing to make to facilitate carbon farming sequestration from heavy emitting sectors outside primary industries, or facilitate renewables infrastructure or carbon capture and storage in the South West Land Division.